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Rajneesh Quotes

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Famous Rajneesh Quotes

“There is no possibility of relaxation if you have a mind and an ego; the ego is the center of the mind. You will be tense, you will remain tense. How to relax? Is there any way to relax? There is no way unless understanding is there. If you understand the nature of the world, the nature of the very existence, then who are you to worry, and why be in a worried state continuously?”

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“If you become too sceptical, you become scientists. If you become too childlike, you become religious. Science exists with doubt. Religion exists with wonder. If you want to be religious then create more wonder, discover more wonder. Allow your eyes to be more filled with wonder than anything else. Be surprised by everything that is happening. Everything is so tremendously wonderful that it is simply unbelievable how you go on living without dancing, how you go on living without becoming ecstatic. You must not be seeing what is happening all around.”

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“Religion is a valid inquiry; whether society accepts it or rejects it, it doesn't matter. Man is a religious animal and is going to remain that way. Religion is something natural. To ask from where you come is relevant; to ask, 'Who am I?' is going to remain relevant always. But the modern mind has created a climate of atheism so you cannot ask such questions. If you ask, people laugh. If you talk about such things, people feel bored If you start inquiring in these ways, people think you are slipping out of your sanity. Religion is no longer a welcome inquiry.”

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“Life consists of sadness too. And sadness is also beautiful; it has its own depth, its own delicacy, its own deliciousness, its own taste. A man is poorer if he has not known sadness; he is impoverished, very much impoverished. His laughter will be shallow, his laughter will not have depth, because depth comes only through sadness. A man who knows sadness, if he laughs, his laughter will have depth. His laughter will have something of his sadness too, his laughter will be more colorful.”

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“Take a good look at your mind. Examine it closely. The first thing you will come to know is that the mind has become the master - not you and not your soul! The mind says: Do this! And you do it! If you don't the mind creates problems. It become sad, and the sadness of the mind becomes your sadness. If you do as it says you get nowhere, for the mind is blind. Where can you reach by obeying the mind! The is unconsciousness. If you listen to it you reach nowhere.”

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“Sadness, seriousness are parts of a psychologically sick man - they need causes. So when you are feeling happy, don't start asking, "Why am I happy?" When you are feeling sad ask why you are sad. But strangely, it has become conventional to our minds that when we are sad we accept it as if it is our nature. And when we are joyous even we are surprised; deep inside we even start worrying: "What is happening to me?"”

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“If you are seeking for security, certainty, your eyes will become closed. And you will be less and less surprised and you will lose the capacity to wonder. Once you lose the capacity to wonder, you have lost religion. Religion is the opening of your wondering heart. Religion is a receptivity for the mysterious that surrounds us. Don't seek security; don't seek advice on how to live your life.”

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“Reality has no security and that is its beauty. Life has no security and that is its beauty. Because there is no security, there is adventure. Because the future is unknown, nobody knows what is going to happen the next moment. That's why there is challenge, growth, adventure. If you miss adventure, you miss all. If your life is not that of an adventure, of a search into the unknown, then you are living in vain.”

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“The richer you are, the more worries you have - problems of security, future. Whatsoever you have, you have to hold it. You have to hold it against others because they are constantly watching for a right opportunity to take it back. Whatsoever you hold, you hold out of violence. And of course, if you have been violent then others can be violent to you. They are just waiting for the right moment. The richer you get, the more worries, more problems, more fears you have. Who bothers, if one is happy?”

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“God has a tremendous sense of humor! Religion remains something dead without a sense of humor as a foundation to it. God would not have been able to create the world if he had no sense of humor. God is not serious at all. Seriousness is a state of disease; humor is health. Love, laughter, life, they are aspects of the same energy.”

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“The ego can exist only if you take yourself and everything seriously. Nothing kills the ego like playfulness, like laughter. When you start taking life as fun, the ego has to die, it cannot exist anymore. Ego is illness; it needs an atmosphere of sadness to exist. Seriousness creates the sadness in you. Sadness is a necessary soil for the ego. Hence your saints are so serious, for the simple reason that they are the most egoistic people on the earth. They may be trying to be humble, but they are very proud of their humbleness. They take their humbleness very seriously.”

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“A man of knowing attains to a sense of humour. Let this always be remembered. If you see someone who has no sense of humour, know well that that man has not known at all. If you come across a serious man, then you can be certain that he is a pretender. Knowing brings sincerity but all seriousness disappears. Knowing brings a playfulness; knowing brings a sense of humour. The sense of humour is a must.”

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“Any action coming out of unconsciousness is sin. The action may look virtuous, but it cannot be. You may create a beautiful facade, a character, a certain virtuousness; you may speak the truth, you may avoid lies; you may try to be moral, and so on and so forth. But if all this is coming from unconsciousness, it is all sin.”

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“I cannot say to you what is right or wrong. I can say only one thing to you: be conscious - that is right. Don't be unconscious because that is wrong. And then whatsoever you do in consciousness is right. But people are living in unconsciousness. And let me tell you: in unconsciousness you may think you are doing something right, but it can't be right. Out of unconsciousness, virtue cannot flower; it may appear virtuous but it can't be. Deep down it will still be something wrong. If you are unconscious and you give money to a poor man, watch: your ego is strengthened. This is sin.”

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“According to great masters, there is no sin and there is no virtue. There is only one thing: that is awareness. If you are aware, you can do anything you want and it is not sin. If you are not aware, you may do so-called virtuous acts, but there is no virtue in them. Out of unconsciousness virtue cannot blossom. It blossoms only when you are full of light, full of love, full of consciousness.”

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“Man ordinarily is a robot. He lives apparently awake, but not really. He walks, he talks, he acts, but it is all as if in sleep - not conscious of what he is doing, not conscious of what he is saying, not conscious of all that surrounds him. He moves surrounded in a dark cloud of unawareness. According to Gautama the Buddha, this is the original sin: to live unconsciously, to act out of unconsciousness. In fact, the word 'sin' comes from a root which means forgetfulness. Sin simply means that we are not conscious, aware, alert, that we don't have any inner light to guide us.”

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“As your consciousness becomes more settled, all your life patterns change. What religions have called sin will disappear from your life, and what they have called virtue will automatically flow from your being, from your actions. But they have been doing just vice versa: first change the acts... It is as if you are in a dark house, and you are stumbling over furniture and over things, and you are told that unless you stop stumbling, light is not possible.”

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“The individual has totally different interests from the society, because the society has no soul. The society is soulless. And if you become too much a part of the society, it will reduce your soul also to a non-entity. Beware, before you have lost your whole opportunity. Don't be a slave. Follow society to the point you feel is needed, but always remain master of your own destiny.”

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“The more you become a part of society, the less and less you are an individual, the less and less you are spontaneous - because the very membership in the society will not allow you to be spontaneous. You will have to follow the rules of the game. If you enter a society, you accept to follow those rules that the society is playing, or has decided to play.”

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“Spirituality is not a question of morality, it is a question of vision. Spirituality is not the practising of virtues - because if you practise a virtue it is no longer a virtue. A practised virtue is a dead thing, a dead weight. Virtue is virtue only when it is spontaneous; virtue is virtue only when it is natural, unpractised - when it comes out of your vision, out of your awareness, out of your understanding.”

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“To accept yourself wherever. you are.... And don't think in terms of competition! You need not be anywhere else. Wherever you are, if you can be happy there, you have become religious, you have become spiritual. Spirituality knows no competition, spirituality knows no greed, spirituality knows no ambition - because spirituality means desirelessness.”

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Book:The Discipline of Transcendence: Discourses on the Forty-two Sutras of Buddha
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“The reality is just the opposite: the master does nothing. It is in your becoming a disciple that the whole mystery lies. It is in your surrender of the ego that the whole search comes to an authentic point. It is in putting your mind aside. That is what sannyas is: an authentic discipleship. It means putting your mind aside. You have lived according to your mind up to now. If that is fulfilling, then there is no need for anybody to become a sannyasin.”

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“Buddha has said to his disciples: Whenever you meditate, after each meditation, surrender all that you have earned out of meditation, surrender it to the universe. If you are blissful, pour it back into the universe - don't carry it as a treasure. If you are feeling very happy, share it immediately - don't become attached to it, otherwise your meditation itself will become a new process of the self. And the ultimate meditation is not a process of self. The ultimate meditation is a process of getting more and more into un-self, into non-self - it is a disappearance of the self.”

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“Out of your awareness you cannot become soldiers in a war because you will be able to see, with clear eyes, that you are going to kill people - people who have done no harm to you personally, people just like you. They have their children, their wives, their mothers, their old fathers to take care of - and you are killing the person just to get a gold medal. Your gun will slip out of your hand, and that will be an act of awareness. And you will feel tremendously blissful that it happened; even if you are being shot your death will be a glory, a peace, an adventure, a journey into a new world.”

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“First become alone. First start enjoying yourself. First love yourself. First become so authentically happy that if nobody comes it doesn't matter; you are full, overflowing. If nobody knocks at your door it is perfectly okay; you are not missing. You are not waiting for someone to come and knock at the door. You are at home. If somebody comes: good-beautiful. If nobody comes that too is beautiful and good.”

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“You cannot stop smoking directly because it has many related things, implications. You are tense, and if you stop smoking you will start something else and the other may be more harmful. Don't go on escaping problems, face them. The problem is that you are tense, so the goal should be how to be non-tense, not, smoking or not smoking. Meditate. Relax your tensions without any object into the sky, allow catharsis to happen. When you are non-tense these things will become absurd, foolish, and they will drop. Food will change, your styles of living will change.”

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“This is the way of meditation: encountering the present in all its tremendous beauty, just being in the present. Inside, the mind stops. Outside, the world changes totally. It is no more the ordinary world you have known before. In fact, you have not known it at all. Your mind was distorting everything, your mind was creating fantasies. Your eyes were full of fantasies and you were looking though those fantasies. They never allowed you to see that which is. If the mind is gone, even for a moment, suddenly the whole existence explodes upon you.”

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“The teaching of the buddhas is: Find time and a place to remain unoccupied. That's what meditation is all about. Find at least one hour every day to sit silently doing nothing, utterly unoccupied, just watching whatsoever passes by inside. In the beginning you will be very sad, looking at things inside you; you will feel only darkness and nothing else, and ugly things and all kinds of black holes appearing. You will feel agony, no ecstasy at all. But if you persist, persevere, the day comes when all these agonies disappear, and behind the agonies is the ecstasy.”

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“Mind is elusive, you cannot hold it in your hand. You cannot force it into a test-tube. The only way to know it is to know it from within, from your witnessing self. The more you become aware, the more you can watch your mind - its subtle functioning. The functioning is tremendously complex and beautiful. Mind is the most complex phenomenon on the earth, the most subtle flowering of consciousness. If you want to really understand what the mind is, then you will have to detach yourself from your mind, and you will have to learn how to be just a witness. That's what meditation is all about.”

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“There is a difference. You watch television, you don't witness it. But, while watching television, if you start witnessing yourself watching television, then there are two processes going on: you are watching television, and something within you is witnessing the process of watching television. Witnessing is deeper, far deeper. It is not equivalent to watching. Watching is superficial. So remember that meditation is witnessing.”

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“Meditation simply means a discipline that makes you capable of being aloof and detached from your mind. So even if the mind is sick, your consciousness is never sick. Even if your mind is going crazy, you are just witnessing it. Mind is only a machine. You are not. Meditation is the experience: "I am not my body, not my mind - I am the witness of it all." This experience, this transcendental experience, immensely transforms the whole situation. Many things which were driving you crazy simply drop away.”

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“For that, one has to drop all the masks, one has to risk many things, particularly respectability. That is a bribe by the society. It will give you a Nobel prize and it will give you many honours; it will do everything to make you feel great, if you can fulfil one condition: if you are obedient, obedient like a robot, then all respect is for you. Then the society will make you a great hero, but there will be no grace, no beauty, no freedom, no truth, no being; you have committed a real suicide.”

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“If you were dealing with the accumulated repressions of only one lifetime, it would be different. But these are the repressions of numerous lives. Nobody knows how many times you have been born, and how many societies have crushed you. And each time a different society, and all these societies destroying you in different ways... this is why you carry so many inner contradictions.”

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“If you meditate, meditation is so beautiful, who bothers about the result? And if you bother about the result, meditation is not possible. This result oriented mind is the only barrier, the only block. There are not many blocks, the only block is that of the result oriented mind: never here-now, always somewhere else thinking of the result; while making love, thinking about the result.”

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“Use the head, use the heart, and if you can use both a tremendous revolution will happen. If you can use both you will become aware that you are the third force - neither; you are neither head nor heart; because if you can move so easily from one to another you cannot be either; you must be separate from both - then the witnessing arises; then the identification is broken. And that witnessing is what meditation is all about.”

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“Meditation is to attain to a no-mindness, to a state of no-thought. In that opening of no-thought, in that kind of space, suddenly you become pure, innocent, uncorrupted. You have never been like that before nobody has ever been like that before nobody is going to be like that again. Unique. And to know that is to realize one's self. To know that is to know all. If you have not known that, whatsoever else you know is just rubbish, garbage.”

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“My meditation techniques ARE dangerous. In fact there cannot be any meditation techniques which are not dangerous. If they are not dangerous, they are not meditation techniques, they are tricks. Just like Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They are mental tricks. Just consolatory. No danger. At the most they can give you good sleep, that's all. If you miss, you don't miss anything, you remain the same. If you attain, you attain to good sleep, that's all. No danger involved.”

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“One man has discovered that by running there is no need to meditate, just by running meditation happens. He must be absolutely body oriented. Nobody has ever thought that by running meditation is possible - but I know, I used to love running myself. It happens. If you go on running, if you run fast, thinking stops, because thinking cannot possibly continue when you are running very fast. For thinking an easy chair is needed, that's why we call thinkers armchair philosophers; they sit and relax in a chair, the body completely relaxed, then the whole energy moves into the mind.”

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