Rajneesh Taken Quotations

Everybody knows from his own experience that after laughter, good laughter, a belly laugh, you almost feel that you have taken an ice-cold shower; a peace, a silence, a freshness... The same is true about crying, but very few people know the secret of crying because it is more repressed than laughter.

Nobody asked you about being born, nobody is going to ask you when the time comes for you to be taken away. Then why be worried? Birth happened to you; death will happen to you; who are you to come in between?

And you can put your total energy for the inner eye. The outside eyes are wasting eighty percent of energy - it is the major part. Man has five senses, eighty per cent is taken away by the eyes and only twenty per cent is left for the other four senses. They are very poor people, those four. Eyes are very rich, they have monopolised the whole thing; hence it is good - eighty per cent energy is saved - and that can be immediately used for witnessing, for seeing your inner world. hence in the East we call a person who is blind 'pragyanshakshu' - this word is untranslatable.

If you become more sensitive to beauty, to poetry, that means your love has blossomed. And all the energy that has been left by fear, anger and hate, will be taken over by your love, your sensitivity, your compassion, your creativity. This is the whole alchemy of changing base metals into gold.

Life as such has to be taken as a cosmic joke - and then suddenly you relax because there is nothing to be tense about. And in that very relaxation something starts changing in you - a radical change, a transformation - and the small things of life starts having new meaning, new significance. One learns only one thing, how to rejoice in life.

Drop the fear. Fear was taken up by you in your childhood, unconsciously. Now consciously drop it and be mature. Then the life can be a light which goes on deepening as you go on growing.

Avoid such situations in which you are unnecessarily burdened with rubbish. You already have too much as it is, you need to be unburdened of it. And you go on collecting it as if it is something precious. Talk less, listen only to the essential, be telegraphic in talking and listening. If you talk less, if you listen less, slowly slowly you will see that a cleanliness, a feeling of purity, as if you have just taken a bath, will start arising within you. That becomes the necessary soil for meditation to arise. Don't go on reading all kinds of nonsense.

To remain attached to the temporal, to the changing is to remain within the world of misery because the temporal will be taken away. You have invested so much in it but one day everything is taken away. Then it is natural to feel miserable. Misery is rooted in attachment to the body and bliss is rooted in non-attachment to the body; hence all the great masters have been teaching methods and means of non-attachment, of getting disidentified with the body, with the mind, with everything surrounds you, and of just remaining a pure witness. That's what we are: pure witnessing, pure awareness.

Meditation is the technique of inner conquest - and that is the real challenge. Those who have any guts should accept the inner challenge. It is easy to reach the moon, it is easy to reach Everest; it is far more difficult to reach your own centre. But the moment you reach it all ecstasy is yours, and forever and forever. You attain to a bliss which cannot be taken away from you.

The fear that things may change tomorrow... Somebody may die, you may go bankrupt, your job may be taken away. There are a thousand and one things which may change. You are burdened with fears and fears, and none of them are valid - because yesterday also you were full of all these fears, unnecessarily. Things may have changed, but you are still alive. And man has an immense capacity to adjust himself in any situation.

That is again the same story played on a more subtle level. That's what the religious people have been doing down the ages - pious egoists they have been. They have made their ego even more decorated; it has taken the color of religion and holiness. Your ego is better than the ego of a saint; your ego is better, far better - because your ego is very gross, and the gross ego can be understood and dropped more easily than the subtle. The subtle ego goes on playing such games that it is very difficult. One will need absolute awareness to watch it.

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

Then the highest state of love is prayerfulness. In prayerfulness there is communion. In sex there is the I/it relationship, in love the I/thou relationship. Martin Buber stops there; his Judaic tradition won't allow him to go further. But one step more has to be taken that is neither 'I' nor 'thou' - a relationship where I and thou disappear, a relationship where two persons no longer function as two but function as one. A tremendous unity, a harmony, a deep accord - two bodies but one soul. That is the highest quality of love. I call it prayerfulness.

In fact, entertainment has taken the place of celebration in the present world. But entertainment is quite different from celebration; entertainment and celebration are never the same. In celebration you are a participant; in entertainment you are only a spectator. In entertainment you watch others playing for you. So while celebration is active, entertainment is passive. In celebration you dance, while in entertainment you watch someone dancing, for which you pay him.

Millions of people miss meditation because meditation has taken on a wrong connotation. It looks very serious, looks gloomy, has something of the church in it, looks as if it is only for people who are dead, or almost dead, who are gloomy, serious, have long faces, who have lost festivity, fun, playfulness, celebration.... A really meditative person is playful: life is fun for him.... He enjoys it tremendously. He is not serious. He is relaxed.

Because all the societies, all the nations, all the cultures, have taken it for granted that the individuals exist for them, not vice-versa. To me, just the opposite is the case: the society exists for the individual, the culture exists for the individual, the nation exists for the individual. Everything can be sacrificed, but the individual cannot be sacrificed for anything. Individuality is the very flowering of existence - nothing is higher than it. But no culture, no society, no civilization is ready to accept a simple truth.

Small children smoking, and the mother is not aware that it is because the breast has been taken away. In all primitive communities a seven-year-old child, or even an eight or nine-year-old child, will continue breast-feeding. Then there is a satisfaction and smoking will not be so necessary. That's why in primitive communities men are not so much interested in women's breasts; there is no problem that somebody will attack them. Nobody looks at the breasts.

Without Jesus they were the great priests of the temple; with Jesus suddenly they were nobodies. In the presence of Jesus there was God himself and all the priests felt their glory had been taken away.

All of our miseries are nothing but attachment. Our whole ignorance and darkness is a strange combination of a thousand and one attachments. And we are attached to things which will be taken away by the time of death, or even perhaps before. You may be very much attached to money but you can go bankrupt tomorrow. You may be very much attached to your power and position, your presidency, your prime ministership, but they are like soap bubbles. Today they are here, tomorrow not even a trace will be left.

Awareness means you come with an inner light, you move fully alert. Each step is taken in awareness - the walking, the coming, the sitting - everything is done in full awareness.

Have you ever thought about why, all over the world, in every culture, in every society, there are a few days in the year for celebration? These few days for celebration are just a compensation - because these societies have taken away all celebration in your life, and if nothing is given to you in compensation, your life can become a danger to the culture. Every culture has to give some compensation to you so that you don't feel completely lost in misery, in sadness. But these compensations are false.

If you get attached, then it becomes an obsession. If the person is not there, you are unhappy. If you miss the person, you are in misery. And attachment is such a disease that if the person is not there you are in misery, and if the person is there you are indifferent. Then it is okay; it is taken for granted. If the person is there it is okay - no more than that. If the person is not there, then you are in misery. This is attachment.

I would like you to accept only one prayer, and that is laughter, because when you are totally laughing you are in the present. You cannot laugh in the future and you cannot laugh in the past. All those people who have created this retarded humanity have taken away all juice, all laughter, all smiles, and dragged everybody into being inauthentic. And if you are inauthentic, insincere, you can never grow the seed that has been given to you by this great compassionate universe.

When two persons open up to each other just as they are, friendship grows. When two persons are ready to drop their masks, they have taken a tremendous step towards religiousness. So love, friendship, anything that helps you to drop the mask, is taking you towards religion. But the pseudo-religions have done just the opposite. They are against love. You can understand now, why they are against love: because love will destroy the personality, and the pseudo-religion depends on your personality.

Meditation means cleansing the mirror, dropping thoughts, letting thoughts disappear, attaining to moments when thinking ceases. And those are the most blissful moments in life. Once you have tasted a single moment of no-thought, you have taken a great leap into truth; then things will become more and more easy every day.

This mind is a prison. It cannot find any freedom anywhere. It must die before freedom comes to you. But we have taken the mind as us, we are identified with it. This death of mind never happens to us, it never occurs to us.