Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Quotes

98 Sourced Quotes

If you are not capable of being alone, your relationship is false. It is just a trick to avoid your loneliness, nothing else.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Attachment is not love. Where there is attachment there is exploitation.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Love is overflowing joy. Love is when you have seen who you are. Then there is nothing left except to share your being with others.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Each obsession is a knot in your being. Once it is opened, great energy is released

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
That's why real awareness always leads you beyond sex, and celibacy happens on its own accord. Because to be in sex you have either to be identified with the male or identified with the female. A real celibate is one who has gone beyond, who is neither.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Anger will come and go and the watcher abides. Sadness comes and passes by and the witness remains

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great surprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, a watcher. And this process of watching is the very alchemy of real religion. Because as you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty...

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Look for the mysterious in life. Wherever you look — in the white clouds, in the stars in the night, in the flowers, in a flowing river — wherever you look, look for the mystery. And whenever you find that a mystery is there, meditate on it. Meditation means: dissolve yourself before that mystery, annihilate yourself before that mystery, disperse yourself before that mystery. Be no more, and let the mystery be so total that you are absorbed in it. And suddenly a new door opens, a new perception is achieved.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
I love to disturb people, because only by disturbing them you can make them think. They have stopped thinking for centuries. Nobody has been there to disturb them. People have been consoling them. I am not going to console anybody... Because the more you console them, the more retarded they remain. Shog them, hit them hard, give them challenge. That challenge will bring their full capacities to the climax.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Only disciplined people become free, but their discipline is not obedience to others: their discipline is obedience to their own inner voice. And they are ready to risk anything for it.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
When you become a sannyasin, I initiate you into freedom, and into nothing else... I am destroying your ideologies, creeds, cults, dogmas, and I am not replacing them with anything else.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
There is no god, so how can I consider myself a god? God is the greatest lie invented by man.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Life in its infinite forms exists as one organic unity. We are part of it: the part should feel reverence for the whole. That is the idea of vegetarianism. It simply means: don't destroy life. It simply means: life is God - avoid destroying it, otherwise you will be destroying the very ecology.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Indifference looks like detachment, but it is not; indifference is simply no interest. Detachment is not absence of interest - detachment is absolute interest, tremendous interest, but still with the capacity of non-clinging. Enjoy the moment while it is there and when the moment starts disappearing, as everything is bound to disappear, let it go. That is detachment.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Meditation is the breath of your soul. Just as breathing is the life of the body, meditation is the life of the soul.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Vegetarianism is a conscious effort, a deliberate effort, to get out of the heaviness that keeps you tethered to the earth so that you can fly - so that the flight from the alone to the alone becomes possible.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Vegetarianism functioned as a purification. When you eat animals you are more under the law of necessity. You are heavy, you gravitate more towards the earth. When you are a vegetarian you are light and you are more under the law of grace, under the law of power, and you start gravitating towards the sky.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Because of the womb being a central phenomenon in the feminine body, the whole psychology of woman differs: she is non-aggressive, non-inquiring, non-questioning, non-doubting, because all of those things are part of aggression. She will not take the initiative; she simply waits - and she can wait infinitely.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
The whole day was strange, stunning, and it was a shattering experience. The past was disappearing, as if it had never belonged to me, as if I had read about it somewhere, as if I had dreamed about it, as if it was somebody else's story I have heard and somebody told it to me. I was becoming loose from my past, I was being uprooted from my history, I was losing my autobiography. I was becoming a non-being, what Buddha calls anatta. Boundaries were disappearing, distinctions were disappearing.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Love is the creative refinement of sex energy. And so, when love reaches perfection, the absence of sex automatically follows. A life of love, an abstinence from physical pleasures is called brahmacharya, and anyone who wishes to be free from sex must develop his capacity to love. Freedom from sex cannot be achieved through supersession. Liberation from sex is only possible through love.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
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.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
When I say this, I don't mean that if you can love more people you will not go into marriage. As far as I see, a person who can love more will not go into marriage only for love. He will go into marriage for deeper things. Please understand me: if a person loves many people, then there is no reason to marry someone only because of love - because he can love many people without marriage, so there is no reason.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Only a ripe fruit falls to the ground. Ripeness is all. An unripe ego cannot be thrown, cannot be destroyed. And if you struggle with an unripe ego to destroy and dissolve it, the whole effort is going to be a failure. Rather than destroying it, you will find it more strengthened in new subtle ways. This is something basic to be understood: the ego must come to a peak, it must be strong, it must have attained an integrity — only then can you dissolve it. A weak ego cannot be dissolved.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Repentance can become a very, very deep phenomenon in you if you understand the responsibility. Then even a small thing, if it becomes a repentance— not just verbal, not just on the surface; if it goes deep to the roots, if you repent from the roots; if your whole being shakes and trembles and cries, and tears come out; not only out of your eyes but out of every cell of your body, then repentance can become a transfiguration.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Jealousy is comparison. And we have been taught to compare, we have been conditioned to compare, always compare. Somebody else has a better house, somebody else has a more beautiful body, somebody else has more money, somebody else has a more charismatic personality. Compare, go on comparing yourself with everybody else you pass by, and great jealousy will be the outcome; it is the by-product of the conditioning for comparison.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Nature has come to a point where now, unless you take individual responsibility, you cannot grow. More than this nature cannot do. It has done enough. It has given you life, it has given you opportunity; now how to use it, it has left up to you. Meditation is your freedom, not a biological necessity. You can learn in a certain period of time every day to strengthen meditation, to make it stronger — but carry the flavor of it the whole day.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Unless a man learns how to create, he never becomes a part of existence, which is constantly creative. By being creative one becomes divine; creativity is the only prayer.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Enlightenment is always through surrender, but surrender is achieved through intelligence. Only idiots cannot surrender. To surrender you need great intelligence. To see the point of surrender is the climax of insight; to see the point that you are not separate from existence is the highest that intelligence can give to you.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Ecstasy is our very nature, not to be ecstatic is simply unnecessary. To be ecstatic is natural, spontaneous. It needs no effort to be ecstatic, it needs great effort to be miserable. That's why you look so tired, because misery is real hard work; to maintain it is really difficult, because you are doing something against the nature. You are going upstream — that's what misery is.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
There are a few activities which are immensely valuable: laughter is one of these activities. Singing, dancing, are also of the same quality, but laughter is the quickest.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh