Best 1992 quotes of Rajneesh on MyQuotes

Your enlightenment is perfect only when silence has come to be a celebration. Hence my insistence that after you meditate you must celebrate. After you have been silent you must enjoy it, you must have a thanksgiving. A deep gratitude must be shown towards the whole just for the opportunity that you are, that you can meditate, that you can be silent, that you can laugh.

Your freedom is a supreme value. Nothing is higher than that. But your freedom is possible only if you are not encaged in your habits, unconscious patterns of living. Change your gestalt from unconsciousness to consciousness.

Your honesty, Your love, Your compassion should come from your inner being, not from teachings and scriptures.

Your innermost core has always been pure. Purity is intrinsic to you, it cannot be taken away.

Your life sparks fires from within your innermost temple. No one can reach there but you, it is your inner sanctum. You are your own master there, only you can reach and ignite the fire.

Your love will deepen as your meditation deepens, and vice-versa: as your meditation blossoms, your love will also blossom.

Your mind is a constant traffic of thoughts, and it is always rush hour, day in, day out. Meditation means to watch the movement of thoughts in the mind.

You will not become dependent on the people you love. You will share - and sharing is beautiful.

Your politicians, priests, parents, they all are guilt-creators, because that is the only way that you can be controlled and manipulated. A very simple, but very cunning trick to manipulate you. They have condemned you, because if you are accepted, not condemned - loved, appreciated, and if it is relayed to you from everywhere that you are okay - then it will be difficult to control you. How to control a person who is absolutely okay? The very problem doesn`t arise.

Your real being only flowers with unconditional love. Ambition is against love. Anything that is against love is against you and your real life.

Your question makes it clear that you have not understood what I mean when I say, 'Don't surrender to a person, surrender to love.' And love is never a relationship; this is your problem. Relationship is bound to be a bondage. In relationship either you have to surrender or the other has to surrender.

Your religions are boring you, your philosophies are boring you, your scriptures are boring you. Thousands of years of the past are the cause of your boredom. You cannot dance - you are chained to the past, you are imprisoned in the past.

Your seed has been covered with so many layers of culture, etiquitte, education, religion, country, that you have completely forgotten that you are here to grow, that you have become a lush green bush full of flowers, fragrance, dancing in the wind and in the rain and in the sun.

Your so-called religions have made you very tense. Because they have created guilt in you. My effort here is to help you get rid of all guilt and all fear. I would like to tell you: there is no hell and no heaven. So don't be afraid of hell and don't be greedy for heaven. All that exists is this moment. You can make this moment a hell or a heaven - that certainly is possible - but there is no heaven or hell somewhere else. Hell is when you are all tense, and heaven is when you are all relaxed. Total relaxation is paradise.

Your torch of consciousness should be burning continuously; then there will not be any darkness.

Your whole idea about yourself is borrowed-- borrowed from those who have no idea of who they are themselves.

Your whole past hangs around you with nothing completed - because nothing has been lived really, everything somehow bypassed, partially lived, only so-so, in a lukewarm way. There has been no intensity, no passion. You have been moving like a somnambulist, a sleepwalker. So that past hangs, and the future creates fear. And between the past and the future is crushed your present, the only reality.

You say that in heaven there is eternal beauty. The eternal beauty is here and now, not in heaven.

You seem to be absolutely unaware of the phenomenon of marriage - which is destructive to both man and woman. Love is creative, marriage is destructive. But love is not dependable: this moment it may be there and the next moment gone. And man wants permanent things; he is obsessed with permanent things. He wants security, safety, he wants to cling. Hence love is not reliable, so he created marriage.

You shout and the valleys shout, or you sing and the valleys sing. Each heart is a valley. If you pour love into it, it will respond. The first lesson of love is not to ask for love, but just to give. Become a giver. And people are doing just the opposite. Even when they give, they give only with the idea that love should come back. It is a bargain. They don't share, they don't share freely. They share with a condition. They go on watching out of the corner of their eye whether it is coming back or not. Very poor people... they don't know the natural functioning of love.

You simply pour, it will come. And if it is not coming, nothing to be worried about - because a lover knows that to love is to be happy. If it comes, good; then the happiness is multiplied. But even if it never comes back, in the very act of loving you become so happy, so ecstatic, who bothers whether it comes or not? Love has its own intrinsic happiness. It happens when you love. There is no need to wait for the result. Just start loving. By and by you will see much more love is coming back to you. One loves and comes to know what love is only by loving.

You want a love which is born out of meditation, not born out of the mind.

You will come closer and closer to perfection, but you will never be perfect. Perfection is not the way of existence. Growth is the way.

You will find a blissfulness which contains in it sadness also, because that sadness gives it depth. Watch Buddha's statue - blissful, but still sad. The very word sad gives you wrong connotations - that something is wrong. This is your interpretation. To me, life in its totality is good.

You will have to go deep into man. From where comes this violence? From where comes this exploitation? From where come all these ego-trips? From where? They all come from unconsciousness. Man lives asleep, man lives mechanically. That mechanism has to be broken, man has to be re-done. That is the religious revolution that has not been tried.

You will have to learn ways of relaxing in the present. Enlightenment is not an effort to achieve something. It is a state of effortlessness. It is a state of no-action. It is a state of tremendous passivity, receptivity. You are not doing anything, you are not thinking anything, you are not planning for anything, you are not doing yoga exercises, and you are not doing any technique, any method - you are simply existing, just existing. And in that very moment... the sudden realization that all is as it should be. That`s what enlightenment is!

You will have to relax from the circumference. The first step in relaxing is the body. Remember as many times as possible to look in the body, whether you are carrying some tension in the body somewhere - at the neck, in the head, in the legs. Relax it consciously. Just go to that part of the body, and persuade that part, say to it lovingly "Relax!

Zen brings creativity. And remember, if you want to be one with the creator, you will have to learn some ways of creativity. The only way to be one with the creator is to be in some moment of creativity, when you are lost. The potter is lost in making his pottery; the potter is lost while working on the wheel. The painter is lost while painting. The dancer is lost; there is no dancer, only the dance remains. Those are the peak moments, where you touch God, where God touches you.

Zen has no theory. It is a non-theoretical approach into reality. It has no doctrine and no dogma - hence it has no church, no priest, no pope.

Zen is all-inclusive. It never denies, it never says no to anything; it accepts everything and transforms it into a higher reality.

Zen is a totally different kind of religion. It brings humanness to religion. It is not bothered about anything superhuman; its whole concern is how to make ordinary life a blessing.

Zen is non-serious. Zen has a tremendous sense of humor. No other religion has evolved so much that it can have that sense of humor.

Zen is not a philosophy, it is poetry. It does not propose, it simply persuades. It does not argue, it simply sings its own song.

Zen is not effort. Effort is tension, effort is work, effort is to achieve something. Zen is not something to achieve. You are already that. Just relax, relax so deeply that you become a revelation to yourself.

Zen is not morality, it is aesthetics. It does not impose a code of morality. it does not give you any commandments: do this, don't do that.

Zen is the most scientific method to inquire into your consciousness. It takes you beyond mind into a space called no-mind. No self, but pure awareness, and you have a taste of eternity and immortality.

Zen is the only religion in the world that teaches sudden enlightenment. It says that enlightenment takes no time, it can happen in a single, split second.

Zen lives in the present. The Whole teaching is: how to be in the present; how to get out of the past which is no more and how not to get involved in the future which is not yet, and just to be rooted, centered, in that which is.

Zen people love Buddha so tremendously that they can even play jokes upon him. It is out of great love; they are not afraid.

Zen says: be empty. Look without any idea. Look into the nature of things but with no idea, with no prejudice, with no presupposition.

Zen says that if you drop knowledge - and within knowledge everything is included; your name, your identity, everything, because this has been given to you by others - if you drop all that has been given by others, you will have a totally different quality to your being: innocence. This will be a crucifixion of the persona, the personality, and there will be a resurrection of your innocence. You will become a child again, reborn.

Zen's greatest contribution is to give you an alternative to the serious man. The serious man has made the world, the serious man has made all the religions. He has created all the philosophies, all the cultures, all the moralities; everything that exists around you is a creation of the serious man. Zen has dropped out of the serious world. It has created a world of its own which is very playful, full of laughter, where even great masters behave like children.