Zen is an effort to become alert and awake.
Zen is a path of liberation. It liberates you. It is freedom from the first step to the last. You are not required to follow any rules; you are required to find out your own rules and your own life in the light of awareness.
Your inner world has its own taste, has its own fragrance, has its own light. And it is utterly silent.
Your happiness can not be taken by the others if it is not given by the others.
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.
You will have to create the path by walking yourself; the path is not ready-made, lying there and waiting for you.
You want a love which is born out of meditation, not born out of the mind.
You have to walk, and create the way by your walking; you will not find a ready-made path. It is not so cheap, to reach to the ultimate realization of truth.
You don't want to lose your old friend - the misery - You have invested too much into false - Hence the fear to be exposed -to be true - to be naked as you are.
You cannot be angry when alone.
You are born as freedom. It is just that you have been conditioned to forget it. Layers upon layers of conditionings have made you a puppet. The strings are in somebody else's hands.
When you love, love as if the person is a god, not less than that.
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.
When the disciple is ready, the master appears.
When sex becomes conscious it is love, it is no longer lust. Love brings freedom, and lust simply creates prisons for you.
Whatever you feel, you become. It is your responsibility.
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.
Unless you are totally destroyed as a mind, there is no hope for you.
Truth is not to be found outside. No teacher, no scripture can give it to you. It is inside you and if you wish to attain it, seek your own company. Be with yourself.
Truth is not something outside to be discovered, it is something inside to be realized.
Trust is the greatest intelligence.
True freedom is always spiritual. It has something to do with your innermost being, which cannot be chained, handcuffed, or put into a jail.
To be in time is to be asleep: to be awake is to be in eternity.
To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.
To avoid pain, they avoid pleasure. To avoid death, they avoid life.
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.
Think before you desire a thing. There is every possibility that it will be fulfilled, and then you will suffer.
There is no god, so how can I consider myself a god? God is the greatest lie invented by man.
The real seeker of truth never seeks truth. On the contrary, he tries to clean himself of all that is untrue, inauthentic, insincere - and when his heart is ready, purified, the guest comes. You cannot find the guest, you cannot go after him. He comes to you; you just have to be prepared. You have to be in a right attitude.
The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death.
The most fundamental message of Gautama the Buddha is not God, is not soul… it is freedom: freedom absolute, total, unconditional. He does not want to give you an ideology, because every ideology creates its own slavery.
The more you love, the more you become lovable.
The mind: A beautiful servant, a dangerous master.
The mind that is always after explanations is an afraid mind.
The mind lives in doubt and the heart lives in trust. When you trust, suddenly you become centered.
The freedom from something is not true freedom. The freedom to do anything you want to do is also not the freedom I am talking about. My vision of freedom is to be yourself.
That is the Zen Manifesto: freedom from oneself.
Taoism is the profoundest nonconformism that has ever been evolved anywhere in the world, at any time in history; essentially it is rebellion.
Sound is our mind, silence is our being.
So whenever a Western seeker reaches to an understanding that ego is the problem, he can easily dissolve it, more easily than any Eastern seeker.
Self love is the way to inner health and growth of self knowing. This love grows and blossoms through seven pillars of inner light. Love nourishes and soon spreads on it own accord to others.
Respect yourself, respect your own inner voice and follow it.
Real love is considerate but has no concern.
Rajneeshism is creating a Noah's Ark of consciousness, remaining centered exactly in the middle of the cyclone. You can only escape within, and that's what I teach. I do not teach worship of God or any other ritual but only a scientific way of coming to your innermost core.
Prayer is to be in love, to be in love with the whole.
Parents appreciate the child who agrees; they condemn the child who disagrees.
Only the new, accepted deeply and totally, can transform you.
One just needs a little alertness to see and find out: Life is really a great cosmic laughter.
Nothing kills the ego like playfulness, like laughter. When you start taking life as fun, the ego has to die, it cannot exist anymore.
