Rajneesh Teaching Quotations

What I am teaching is religiousness, a quality. Religion is a dead dogma, fixed principles, frozen fossils. What I am teaching to you is a living, flowing religiousness - an experience like love.

The playfulness that I talk about comes very slowly. You cannot just jump out of your seriousness which you have accumulated for lives. Now it has a force of its own. It is not a simple matter to relax; it is one of the most complex phenomena possible, because all that we are taught is tension, anxiety, anguish. Seriousness is the very core the society is built around. Playfulness is for small children, not for grown-up people. And I am teaching you to be children again, to be playful again. It is a quantum leap, a jump...but it takes time to understand.

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.

I have been teaching you all the methods of meditation. You can choose any method that suits you. There are only one hundred and twelve methods; there is no possibility of adding more. It is exhaustive. All the methods possible have been explored. The simplest is witnessing.

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.

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.

If you want to remain totally free, then don't choose. That's where the teaching of choiceless awareness comes in. Why the insistence of the great masters just to be aware and not to choose? Because the moment you choose, you have lost your total freedom, you are left with only a part. But if you remain choiceless, your freedom remains total. So there is only one thing which is totally free and that is choiceless awareness. Everything else is limited.

All the great artists of the world slowly slowly start growing a quality of feminineness, grace, elegance, exquisiteness. A certain flavor of softness, relaxedness, calmness and quietness surrounds them. They are no longer feverish. What I am teaching here is really to turn the whole world feminine.

Celibacy is one of the most unnatural things. It has destroyed so many human beings - millions - Catholic monks, Hindu monks, Buddhist monks, Jaina monks, nuns. For centuries they have been teaching celibacy; and the most amazing thing is, even in the twentieth century, not a single medical expert, physiologist, has stood up and said that celibacy is impossible, that in the very nature of things, it cannot happen.

My whole teaching consists of two words, meditation and love.

Advice is like food, and teaching is a menu.

Don't swim against the current. Stay in the river, become the river; and the river is already going to the sea. This is the great teaching.

I am teaching you to live simply. To live with an idea is a very complicated living, it is cunning. To live simply, just like trees and birds....

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.

It is because nobody has been teaching you about hate; hence, hate has remained pure, unadulterated. When a man hatesyou, you can trust that he hates you.

So I am not teaching you to be good, I am not teaching you to be bad; I am teaching you only to be whole. To be whole is to be healthy and to be healthy is to be holy.

The truest mark of being born with great qualities is being born without envy. Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld That awareness is my teaching. Never fight with greed, ego, anger, jealousy, hatred - all those enemies that the religions have been telling you, 'Fight with them, crush them, kill them. You cannot kill them, you cannot crush them, you cannot fight with them; all that you can do is just be aware of them.' And the moment you are aware, they are gone. In the light, the darkness simply disappears.

The real master is only a presence. He has no intentions of being a master. His presence is his teaching. His love is his message. Every gesture of his hand is pointing to the moon. And this whole thing is not being done, it is a happening. The master is not a doer. He has learned the greatest secret of life: let-go. The master has drowned his ego and the idea of separation from existence itself.