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Rajneesh Quotes

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Famous Rajneesh Quotes

“Be light-hearted, light-footed. Be of light step. Don't carry religion like a burden. And don't expect religion to be a teaching; it is not. It is certainly a discipline, but not a teaching at all. Teaching has to be imposed upon you from the outside and teaching can only reach to your mind, never to your heart, and never, never to the very center of your being. Teaching remains intellectual. It is an answer to human curiosity, and curiosity is not a true search.”

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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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“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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“All the great masters in the world have been saying only one thing down the centuries, "Have your own mind and have your own individuality. Don't be a part of the crowd; don't be a wheel in the whole mechanism of a vast society. Be individual, on your own. Live life with your own eyes; listen to music with your own ears." But we are not doing anything with our own ears, with our own eyes, with our own minds; everything is being taught, and we are following it.”

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“Meditation means a state of unconditioned mind. Meditation is the process of undoing the harm that every society goes on doing to every individual - communist or Catholic, Jaina or Jew, it does not matter. I am not talking about any particular conditioning that is wrong; I am saying conditioning AS SUCH is wrong.”

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“I call a man a sannyasin who breaks out of these institutions and lives spontaneously. To be a sannyasin is the most courageous act possible. To be a sannyasin means to live without the mind, and the moment you live without mind you live without society. The mind has created society, and society has created the mind; they are interdependent. To be a sannyasin means to renounce all that is false but not to renounce the world, to renounce all that is unauthentic, to renounce all the answers, to be responsive, spontaneously responsive, and not to think about the reasons, but to be real.”

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“Surrender is the quantum leap from mind to no-mind, from ego to egolessness. And in a single step the whole journey is contained. It is not a long journey from you to God, it is a single-step journey. It is not a gradual phenomenon; it is not that slowly slowly, gradually you come to the divine. It is a quantum leap! One moment you were in darkness and the next moment all is light. All that is needed is to put the ego aside.”

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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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“Everything that is of authentic value in life has arisen out of meditation. There is no other way. Meditation is the mother of art, music, poetry, dance, sculpture. All that is creative, all that is life-affirmative, is born out of meditation. All that is life-negative - hate, anger, jealousy, violence, war - is born out of the mind. Man has two possibilities: mind and meditation.”

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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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“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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“When your witnessing is ninety percent, your mind is reduced to ten percent. And when your witnessing is one hundred percent - total, absolute - the screen is empty, the film has disappeared. This is the state of meditation: when there are no thoughts, no feelings - nothing moves, everything stops. There is tremendous serenity. Out of this serenity, silence, peace, a new kind of experience arises, new flowers blossom.”

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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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“Any judgment is past oriented, and existence is always herenow, life is always herenow. All judgments are coming from your past experiences, your education, your religion, your parents - which may be dead, but their judgments are being carried by your mind and they will be given as a heritage to your children. Generation after generation, every disease is being transferred as a heritage. Only a non-judgmental mind has intelligence, because it is spontaneously responding to reality.”

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“In samadhi, in the highest form of meditation, the same thing happens: the mind stops functioning... but you are conscious. That is the only difference, but the difference that makes the difference. One is fully alert, luminous. One is there witnessing, watching, but there is no cloud of thought. The sky is utterly empty: as far as you can see you cannot see any content.”

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“Dhyan means meditation. Meditation means awareness, watchfulness, a silent witnessing of all the processes of the mind. And the magic of watching is that as your watchfulness deepens, the mind starts evaporating. When the watchfulness is absolute mind becomes nil, a zero. And the disappearance of the mind gives you clarity, absolute clarity, transparency; you can see through and through, you become a mirror. And then life is reflected as it is - not according to any doctrine, not according to the Bible or the Koran or the Gita but as it is. And to know life as it is, is to know god.”

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“It is only through meditation that purity comes. Meditation means jumping out of the mind. There is no need to purify the mind, it can be put aside. One can become disidentified with the mind. To know "I am not the mind," is real purity because then you are only consciousness, awareness, a witnessing. To live twenty-four hours a day as a witness is the way of the sannyasin.”

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“Meditation is basically the process of witnessing: looking from your centre all that is happening. Many things are happening on the outside - the noise of the train far away; something is happening in you body - your knees are hurting - right? Your mind is churning many thoughts, that 'What am I doing here?' Your heart is feeling many emotions, you have waited for this moment for so long. There is joy in the heart, a certain ecstasy, a mood, a receptivity. All those things have to be watched very minutely.”

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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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“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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“Meditation means how to be not a mind. How to be not a mind! Meditation means how to create the state of no-mindedness. It doesn't mean unconsciousness. It means conscious and still, without any disturbance in the consciousness; conscious with no ripples, with no waves, with no vibrations; conscious as a deep, calm, silent pool with no ripples on it, with no disturbances on the surface; just a calm silent pool with no breeze to disturb, just mirrorlike.”

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“This is what meditation means: how to be not identified with the mind - how to create a space between yourself and your own mind. It is difficult because we never make any separation. We go on thinking in terms that the mind means me: mind and me are totally identified. If they are totally identified, then you will never be at peace; then you will never be able to enter the divine, because the divine can be entered only when the social has been left behind.”

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“Objects must cease, mind must become just a pure mirror - a mirroring, not mirroring anything - just a mirror without any object in it, a pure mirror. By dhyan, this purity of the mind is indicated. So first, no object should be in the mind. Mind must remain alone without thinking about anything - with no thought, just a consciousness, just an awareness, just an alertness. This alertness without any object is meditation.”

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“Because of watching your breath and thoughts you have come to know now that you are neither thoughts nor your breath, you are the watcher, the witness. This is awareness. This is what I call meditation. Once you have known this awareness you are unidentified with your body, with your mind. Now you experience a vastness inside you, in one sense utterly empty and in another sense overflowingly full. Because of its emptiness you will remain calm and quiet. And because of its overflowing fullness you will be creative.”

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“Buddhas can take you to the boundary line of meditation and samadhi. That is the only difference between meditation and samadhi. If your mind has become utterly quiet and silent, but only the master is there, then it is meditation. If your mind has become so quiet that even the master has disappeared, it is samadhi. The last barrier is going to be the master. He will take you out of the world, but one day you will have to leave him too. And the real master will always keep you alert that you have to leave him one day, at the final stage.”

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“Except witnessing, I don't teach anything else. So just witness your mind and the meditation will be happening. And once you have got in tune with your being, you know the way, you know the how. Then it does not matter where you are. Alone or in the crowd, in the silences of the forest or in the noises of a marketplace, it is all the same. You can simply close your eyes and disappear inwards.”

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“Meditation is totally different. When you concentrate you close your mind to everything else. Meditation means just an openness, a relaxed openness. It is not concentration. While listening to me you are listening to the birds singing in the trees too. The wind passing through the trees singing its song - you are open to it too. The aeroplane passing by, or the train - you are open to it too. This is meditation - you are simply open, available, conscious, available, all doors are open.”

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“The more your meditation goes deep, the less and less you will feel the burden of the mind. The more and more meditation goes deep, the less and less you will be a mind. Thoughts will become rare, and ultimately they cease. That doesn't mean you become unthinking; it only means that your consciousness becomes clear, transparent, without thoughts moving continuously as clouds. Whenever you need to think you can think; but now thought becomes an instrument to you, not an obsession as it is presently. Thoughts are an obsession without meditation.”

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“All political power, all power as such, is stupid. Don't rush after it, don't be ambitious, because all ambition collects dust and only dust. If you are not disillusioned by dust, you will not be able to know what truth is. A man obsessed with ambition is not capable of knowing truth at all. Eyes full of ambition never see what is; they only see what they want to see. The ambitious mind is the wrong mind; the non-ambitious mind is the right mind.”

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