Spiritual Insights
(A Collection of Spiritual Teachings)
Part 5
1.The whole art of
meditation is just to turn your consciousness inwards, so that you can become
acquainted with yourself. You are not yet introduced to yourself. You know what
your name is -- but you did not come with that name; that label has been put by
others. You know you are a Christian, a Hindu, a Jew -- but you were not born
as a Hindu, as a Mohammedan, as a Christian.
2.God is not a goal; God is the presence right now. If you are present, God is available. If you live in the moment, you are enlightened; there is no other enlightenment. And then ordinary life is so extraordinary. Then to be just a nobody is so fulfilling.
3.Meditation is the way from the head to the heart, from the heart to the being.
4.Pleasure is dependent on others. Happiness is not so dependent on others, but still it is separate from you. Bliss is not dependent, is not separate either; it is your very being, it is your very nature. To attain it is to attain to God, to nirvana.
5.Obsession is created by your so-called saints. Whatsoever they condemn becomes your obsession. In fact, the more they condemn, the more attractive it becomes, the more magnetic it becomes.
6.Desire is our imprisonment. The man who wants nothing, who is absolutely contented as he is, is free of all bondage. He has attained to ultimate freedom, nirvana -- and that is the goal of life. And it is only by attaining that freedom that you will know the significance of being, the song of being, the celebration of being. Your life will become a continuous bliss, and not only that YOU will be blissful, you will be able to bless others too. The whole existence will be blessed by you, by your very presence.
7.Unless you become conscious, unless you take possession of your own life, unless you become independent of your instincts, you will not be a master. And without being a master there is no bliss, no benediction; life remains a hell.
8.The whole humanity is suffering from obsession, either through indulgence or through repression. The whole humanity is concerned with sex twenty-four hours a day.
9.Meditation is the only thing that can transform a man into a spiritual being, without making him Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. Meditation can release all his potential and intelligence.
10.Every father wants, and every mother wants their children to live for them. It is a strange demand: if it is to be fulfilled, then nobody can live in this world, you have to live for your father, and your father has to live for his father, but nobody can live for himself, and unless you live for yourself you cannot find any joy, any bliss.
11.Love is essential; money is non-essential. To be alive is essential; to live in a big house or not is non-essential. To be fulfilled, contented, is essential; rushing, ambitious, always trying to reach somewhere, trying to perform, trying to prove that you are somebody, is non-essential. People live only in two dimensions: the dimension of the doer and the dimension of the non-doer.
12.Unless a man is happy, simply happy, for no reason at all, unless a man is mad enough to be happy without any reason, a man is not going to be happy ever. You will always find something destroying your happiness. You will always find something missing, something absent. And that missing will become your daydream again.
13.Beliefs are all against truth; they make your mind prejudiced. Belief means you don't know, still you pretend to know. Belief is a lie, it is hypocrisy.
14.The enlightened person is no more in any conflict with the ultimate law; he has surrendered. He floats, he flows with the river. He has almost become a wave in the river, he does not exist separately.
15.Meditation is not a tension, it is not a strain. One is never tired of meditation. It is relaxation -- how you can be tired of it? It is deep rest, it is utter restfulness. One is available to everything; nothing can distract you.
16.Relaxation means you don't have any shoulds. You are simply living moment to moment, not according to some future idea of yourself, but according to your reality that is herenow. To live with the reality, moment to moment, is to be sane. To live with the idea is to be insane. The whole earth has become almost a madhouse because of these perfectionists. Perfectionism is a sort of madness; only mad people try to be perfectionists. Sane people never try to be perfectionists.
17.If you become a little more meditative and less ambitious, if you become a little more religious and less political, if you become a little more unworldly than worldly, if you start moving more within wards than without, if you start becoming a little more alert than sleepy, if you come out of your drunk state, if you bring a little light into your being, then... then you will be close, close home. You have never been away. Then your whole life will be transformed, transfigured. Then you will live in a totally different way; a new quality will be there in your life which has nothing to do with your doing, which is a gift, a benediction.
18.Look at this mind. Look at its desires. Watch, become aware.
19.Life needs continuous growth. The moment you stop its growth, it starts dying. So go into the world full of songs, full of dance and abundant love, and give it unconditionally, without any judgment, to anybody who is receptive -- and you will go on growing in the experience both deeper and higher.
20.Unless life is a celebration you have lived in vain. Unless life turns into a Gautam Buddha you have been wasting a tremendous opportunity given to you by existence.
21.Encounter every situation with your total consciousness, without any guilt. Enjoy music, enjoy food, enjoy love -- enjoy everything that is natural.
22.The real thing is that you are suffering from your expectations. When they are not fulfilled -- and they are never going to be fulfilled -- frustration arises, failure arises, and you feel neglected, as if existence does not care for you. Drop expectations for the future. Remain open, remain available to whatsoever happens, but don't plan ahead. Don't make any psychological, fixed ideas about the future -- that things should be like this -- and much more suffering will disappear.
23.Passion is obsession, neurosis. Compassion is when your energy has flowered. You are so contented within yourself, you are so enough unto yourself, now you can share, you can shower your bliss. Now you HAVE to give. Neurosis is when you go on demanding and nobody is ready to give to you, and you are a hungry ghost. Your demands are great, and all that the world provides is just peanuts.
24.The moment you desire for happiness, you have moved away from the present, you have moved away from the existential, you have already moved into the future -- which is nowhere, which has not come yet. You have moved in a dream. Now, dreams can never be fulfilling. Your desire for happiness is a dream. The dream is unreal. Through the unreal, nobody has ever been able to reach to the real. You have taken a wrong train.
25.The ego is always going to the complaint department. Whatsoever happens is meaningless because even if God comes to you, you will say: Wait, let me first reach the complaint book. The ego is headed towards the complaint book; nothing can satisfy the ego.
26.To transform life into a celebration is the only authentic science of religion.
27.To be alive needs something more, something deeper, something more profound. To be alive needs more awareness, more meditativeness, more consciousness, not more information.
28.Life can still become a paradise; it is never too late. But great courage is needed to change. All that is really needed is a little more awareness. De-automatize your behavior; just watch what you have been doing up to now. You do the same thing, and the wife reacts in the same way. It has become a settled pattern.
29.Meditation brings you to the final peak of consciousness -- that is chit, exactly in the middle. On one side is truth; on another side is bliss. As meditation flowers, you find that on one hand truth has revealed to you all its mysteries and on the other blissfulness is showering all its treasures on you.
30.Love that depends on somebody is a poor love. Love that is created within you, love that you create out of your own being, is real energy. Then move anywhere with that ocean surrounding you and you will feel that everybody who comes close to you is suddenly under a different kind of energy.
31.Remember one thing: meditation means awareness. Whatsoever you do with awareness is meditation. Action is not the question, but the quality that you bring to your action. Walking can be a meditation if you walk alertly. Sitting can be a meditation if you sit alertly. Listening to the birds can be a meditation if you listen with awareness. Just listening to the inner noise of your mind can be a meditation if you remain alert and watchful. The whole point is: one should not move in sleep. Then whatsoever you do is meditation -- and don't be worried about it!
32.Transcendence is never through repression, transcendence is through understanding, transcendence is through awareness.
33.Remember, that is the difference between bliss and happiness: happiness is excitement; bliss is happiness without excitement. If there is excitement, sooner or later you will get bored, because only when the excitement is new it is excitement. But how can you be excited about the same thing again and again?
34.Man can also be as happy as the hills and as peaceful as the rivers if he looks at the moon and the surroundings without any mind. With no thought, he will also become part of the whole scene.
35.Love seems to be more eternal than your so-called life. Your life can be destroyed very easily... just a hit on the head, just a bullet through the heart; very simple... but nothing can destroy love. Love seems to be the only eternal thing; something not belonging to the world of time. You can give it, but nobody can take it.
36.Life is not given to you to murder, to destroy. Life has been given to you to create, and to rejoice, and to celebrate. When you cry and weep, when you are miserable, you are alone. When you celebrate, the whole existence participates with you. Only in celebration do we meet the ultimate, the eternal. Only in celebration do we go beyond the circle of birth and death.
37.Once you have become master of your mind, the mind is transcended. The moment you have become master of your mind, the mind is no longer there. It remains only if you are a slave. Once you have taken hold of the bull and you are riding on it, the bull disappears. The bull exists as separate from you only if you are not the master. This has to be understood.
38.The man of awareness becomes the man of the essence. Personality consists of the non-essential. Your soul consists of the essential, and the essential is immortal. The non-essential is momentary, and we cling to the non-essential; hence we suffer, because we cannot keep hold of it. It disappears sooner or later. Whatsoever we do is futile because the momentary cannot be forever. Just as it comes, it goes. It is a wave, a ripple, a bubble; sooner or later it will be gone. For the moment it looks so beautiful -- the sun is reflected in it and a small rainbow surrounds it -- but it is just a soap bubble. You can play with it but don't become attached to it, otherwise you will suffer. And that's why people are suffering: they become attached to soap bubbles.
39.Understanding is going to happen but not through the head, it is going to happen through the heart -- not through logic but through love.
40.Love is a ladder. It starts with one person, it ends with the totality. Love is the beginning, God is the end. To be afraid of love, to be afraid of the growing pains of love, is to remain enclosed in a dark cell.
41.Bliss doesn't mean happiness; bliss means the absence of both happiness and unhappiness. Happiness will be disturbed by unhappiness, unhappiness will be disturbed by happiness they are polarities, the wheel is moving. Bliss is never disturbed; it is silence, it is peace, it is a tranquillity -- absolute peace. You have come to understand; now nothing disturbs.
42.Keep this in your consciousness:
Nature is not anguish, it is blissfulness.
It is not anxiety, misery, suffering:
It is love, it is rejoicing.
It is a constant celebration.
43.Your love cannot be robbed. There is no way to rob it. You can give it voluntarily, you can give it freely, but nobody can rob it. You can be killed, but your love cannot be killed. There exists no way to murder love.
44.Remember: a saint is really a saint only when he has abandoned the whip and the rope. That is the criterion. If he is still trying to pray, to meditate, to do this and that, and to discipline himself, then he is still not yet enlightened. Then he is still there and some doing continues. And doing accumulates the ego. He has not reached home. The journey is yet to be completed.
45.Eating is right if it gives you nourishment. It is wrong if it only gives you weight. Eating is right if it gives you vitality; eating is wrong if it just makes you heavy. It is meaningless. To be heavy is not to be vital. The vital person is not heavy, he is light, he is almost weightless. He moves on the earth, but his feet never touch the earth. He can fly any moment -- any moment. Gravitation has no affect on him.
46.Spirituality is not a sensational experience -- it is maturity, it is let-go, it is becoming desire less.
47.If you love, you will find so many occasions to be loving. If you are afraid, you will find so many occasions to be afraid.
48.Awareness is just being with yourself in utter aloneness, just being alert. It is not a relationship, the other is not needed at all. It is not outgoing, it is ingoing.
49.The knowledgeable person lives in his memory, in the past. The wise man lives in the present, not in his memory but in his awareness this very moment.
50.Life is not a fasting, it is a continuous feast -- a celebration, a festival of lights. Love transforms your life into a festival of lights. And unless your life becomes a feast and a festival, remember: you have not done the thing you have come for on this earth.
51.Love life, be more happy. God can come only to a happy soul. Only when you are utterly happy is there a possibility, otherwise not -- because misery closes you, bliss opens you up. Have you not watched it, observed it, in your own life? Whenever you are miserable you become closed; a hard shell surrounds you. You start protecting yourself, you surround yourself with a great armour -- because you know you already have so much pain, you cannot afford any more hurt from anywhere. You have to harden your surface.
52.Remember, watching is the only key. Observation is meditation -- there is nothing more to meditation; it is another name for being aware. And the miracle is that when you become aware of something, utterly aware, it disappears. It remains only if you are unaware. Your unawareness is a food for distraction, for indolence. Your awareness means they are no longer being fed, they start starving. Sooner or later they wither away of their own accord.
53.Two things happen in orgasm: one is, mind stops the constant yakkety yak -- it becomes for a moment no-mind; and second, time stops. That single moment of orgasmic joy is so immense and so fulfilling that it is equal to eternity.
54.Enlightenment is not something that has to be fought for, it is something that you have to allow. It comes in a moment of let-go. In surrender it comes.
55.Remember, once a buddha you are always a buddha. Nobody has fallen from that point. It is just against nature.
56.The ego is always expecting and hence always being frustrated. The non-egoistic person expects nothing, hence everything is fulfilling; whatsoever happens is tremendous, whatsoever happens is fantastic. Even if he comes across a small grass flower, he is hypnotized by it.
57.When Buddha talks about a poor man, he does not mean a man without money. When Buddha talks about a poor man, he means a man who is not rich inside... a loveless man. How can he share? How can he become a tremendous sharing? No, charity is not possible. Charity is possible only when you are overflowing. Overflowing is charity.
58.The moment a person attains to this eternal light, his life has a single flavour. That flavour is contained by absolute awareness. His unconscious has disappeared. There is no longer any dark part in his being.
59.Awareness is the only secret key: it transforms. It doesn't matter what your illness is, awareness is the only medicine: it cures all illness. If you are politically minded -- and everybody is... In some way or other everybody is trying to be more powerful than the other. Even in relationships politics continue -- the husband tries to be more powerful than the wife, the wife tries to be more powerful than the husband -- hence the constant conflict, even between parents and children. Everywhere there is conflict. It is all politics, different faces of politics.
60.Remember, frustration is out of expectation, and ego is always expecting. The ego is a beggar.
61.Misery comes because we choose. Bliss is when we don't choose.
62.All desires are a nag, they go on nagging you, they go on forcing you, they go on goading you. You can't have a moment of rest, you can't be relaxed -- all those desires are there. Rest, relaxation, is known only by those who have understood the art of being desireless.
63.My work here is not to comfort you, is not to console you, is not to sing a lullaby by the side of your bed. My work is to wake you up.
64.Categories are created by the mind. Appreciation and condemnation are of the mind. Once mind is not there, everything is in its reality as it is. No evaluation arises. One makes everything untrue if one is untrue. You go on projecting yourself -- everything else functions as a screen.
65.A follower is never ready for insecurity; he comes to a guru, to a master, to seek protection, shelter, to hide behind him. He is seeking a father figure. A disciple is seeking a master, not a father figure. He wants to learn what life is. Even if life is insecurity, he is ready to learn. Even if life implies death, he is ready to learn.
66.Mind is a kind of insanity because it is carrying so many impressions which are conflicting, contradictory. It has got impressions from your mother, and also from your father; and they were both fighting continuously, and they both have given their minds and heritage to you. It has got impressions from the neighbors, it has got impressions from so many teachers in the school, in the college, in the university. It is a crowd of unrelated, irrelevant, inconsistent thoughts -- it does not have any organic unity. It is a miracle that somehow you go on keeping yourself together.
67.As far as biological reproduction is concerned, orgasm is not a necessity. But as far as spiritual growth is concerned, orgasm is a necessity.
68.If meditation does not radiate love then one is in some fallacy. What he is thinking is meditation is not meditation. It may be concentration, it may be contemplation, but it is not meditation.
69.Misery is because of the conflict. Misery is because your house is divided, misery is because you are not one, you are a crowd -- a thousand and one voices inside you pulling you and pushing you in all sorts of ways and all directions.
70.Truth cannot be practiced. You have to dissolve yourself into it. Truth can never become something that you can hold in your hand. It is vast. How can you hold it in your hand? It can never become your property. You have to relax into it, dissolve into it.
71.The mind either clings with the past or with the future. This is a way of not being. This is how we miss existence. This is how by and by we become phantoms, shadows, ghosts. Watch yourself. As I see people, millions of people remain in a life of a ghost.
72.Buddha says this world is just like darkness. Once you bring light to it, once you become aware, once you drop your passions and become meditative, once the mind attains to the purity of meditation, suddenly the light is there. Darkness dissipates, disappears instantly, immediately, within no time.
73.Beware of desires. Become more watchful, more alert. And you will see -- the more alert you are, the less desires are there. Ripples start subsiding, waves start disappearing. And one day, suddenly... any moment it can happen, because all moments are as potential as any other. There is no auspicious moment for it to happen. It can happen in any ordinary moment, because all ordinary moments are auspicious. There is no need for it to happen under a bodhi tree. It can happen under any tree, or even without a tree. It can happen under the roof of your house. It can happen anywhere... because god is everywhere.
74.A real man has no nostalgia at all. He never looks back because it is no longer there. He lives in the moment and remains open for the future. The present is his, and the present makes him capable of receiving the future. His doors are always open for the wind, for the rain, for the sun. He is an opening.
75.The danger is not to live in totality and intensity, not to make your life a dance, a celebration.
To me, to be innocent is all that is to be achieved. Be innocent, and the divine is always blissfully flowing towards you. Innocence is the capacity to receive, to be part of the divine. Be innocent, and the guest is there. Become the host.
76.When the mind is free of passion, the mind is free. Freedom means freedom from passion. And only a free mind can see what is real. Only a free mind -- free from passions -- can see what is here.
77.A mind full of consciousness will be empty of all contents. He will be neither a Christian nor a Hindu nor a Jew. He will not be a moral man nor an immoral man. He will simply be. That being, that be-ness, is purity. That's what I call primal innocence. Then all dust is washed and you are just a reflective force.
78.Meditation has to happen first, then character comes as a shadow to it. And if meditation does not happen, then your character is just a hypocrisy and nothing else. Your saints are great hypocrites; they say one thing, they think another, maybe just the opposite. They do one thing, but they want to do something exactly the opposite. On the surface they show one thing, but deep down they are just its contrary.
79.If you can allow your flame of life to reach the third eye, you will see there is no death. And you will suddenly see that you are no more attached to the world.
80.Love is the nourishment that is missing in the world.
81.Man can rise above gods and fall below animals. Man has a great spectrum. From the lowest to the highest, man is a ladder.
82.Enlightenment cannot be claimed. One has to utterly disappear for it to be. The mind has to cease for God to be. Call it God or enlightenment -- it is the same thing.
83.Innocence is religiousness. To be innocent is the peak of true realization. But true innocence comes only through a conscious revolution; it is not possible through any collective, unconscious evolution. Man is alone. He is free to choose heaven or hell, life or death, the ecstasy of realization or the misery of our so-called life.
84.Nothing has to be achieved, all is showering on you. Just be here now and celebrate. My definition of religion is celebration.
85.Look at old people: you will not find anything else but wounds; their whole being is nothing but wounds -- ulcers and ulcers and ulcers. When a person dies you don't see blossoming flowers in his being; you simply see stinking wounds. If a person has really lived and not been deceived by his dreams and illusory desires, the older he grows the more beautiful he becomes. In his death he is superb.
86.Misery makes you special. Misery makes you more egoistic. A miserable man can have a more concentrated ego than a happy man. A happy man really cannot have the ego, because a person becomes happy only when there is no ego. The more egoless, the more happy; the more happy, the more egoless. You dissolve into happiness. You cannot exist together with happiness; you exist only when there is misery. In happiness there is dissolution.
87.The urge to possess is the urge not to be alone. One cannot be alone, so he seeks company. But the company of other people is not reliable, so he seeks, instead, the company of things. To live with a wife is difficult; to live with a car is not so difficult. So ultimately, possessiveness turns toward things.
88.My vision of a good world is that people will be individuals, meeting with others, sharing their joy, their love, unconditionally. And not expecting that tomorrow also will be the same -- they will remain aware of the constantly changing existence.
89. The more empty you are within, the more you seek fame; it is a sort of substitute. The more poor you are within, the more you seek riches; it is a substitute to somehow stuff yourself with something.
90.An enlightened person is the richest person possible, but his richness comes from surrender, not from fight. He does not... he has not any conflict with the whole. He has fallen in harmony, he is in a harmonia.
91.Misery is manufactured by man -- existence is just playfulness, bliss. It is a song, it is a dance, it is a continuous celebration all the year round.
92.If you really want to be with me, drop guilt. And the same energy that has become a guilt complex becomes celebration once it is released. Celebration is the right attitude. Celebrate all that God has given to you. I promise you that if you can celebrate all that God has given to you, you will become worthy of more.
93.The world is never going to be happy, it has never been so, and it is never going to be so. The world is bound to remain unhappy, only individuals can be happy. It is something personal. It needs consciousness to be happy. It needs intensity to be happy. It needs awareness to be happy. The world can never be happy because it has no awareness. Society has no soul, only man has it. But it is very difficult for the ego to accept this.
94.My whole work is to demolish, to demolish all the lies that are surrounding you and not to replace them by anything else, but to leave you utterly naked in your aloneness. To me, only in your aloneness will you be able to know the truth -- because you are the truth.
95.Each child comes with a tremendous intelligence but the family makes him mediocre, because to live with an intelligent child is troublesome. He doubts, he is skeptical, he inquires, he is disobedient, he is rebellious -- and the family wants somebody who is obedient, ready to follow, imitate. Hence from the very beginning the seed of intelligence has to be destroyed, almost completely burnt, so there is no possibility of any sprouts coming out of it.
96The whole life people simply go on saving, saving -- for what? The life is slipping by; each moment a precious moment is gone and it cannot be reclaimed. Buddha says: Don't waste it in foolish things. Fame is foolish, it is pointless, meaningless. Even if the whole world knows you, how does it make you richer? How does it make your life more blissful? How does it help you to be more understanding? to be more aware? to be more alert? to be more alive?
97.Sexuality is possible without any understanding, without any meditation. Love is possible only with understanding. Compassion is possible only with understanding and meditation, understanding and awareness. Not only do you understand and respect the other person, but you have come to your deepest core of being. Seeing your own deepest core, you have become capable of seeing the deepest core in the other also. Now the other does not exist as a body or a mind; the other exists as a soul. And souls are not separate. Your soul and my soul are one.
98.Joy is something which happens as a consequence; it is not a result. You cannot make any effort to be joyful. You can move into some activity so deeply that you forget yourself, and joy arises. Joy arises only when you are not.
99.Rest should be the criterion of power. A man of power is absolutely at rest, he has no restlessness in him. Because restlessness is nothing but dissipation of energy. When you are feeling restless, you are dissipating energy.
100.All old people are not wise. Wisdom has nothing to do with old age. A real man of understanding can become wise any time. Even as a child he can become wise. If you have a penetrating understanding, even a single experience of anger and you will be finished with it. It is so ugly. A single experience of greed and you will be finished with it. It is so poisonous.
101.Remember, the whole effort of sadhana is to help you to become alone, because only when you are ready to become alone, when you are ready to fall into inner silence, when you are no more clinging to this constant talking, inner talk, then only can you become a unity. Because this constant inner talk helps you to remain dual, divided.
102.Buddha says this life, this world that you live in, that you are surrounded with, that you have created around yourself, is but a dream -- impermanent, temporary. Don't make your abode there, otherwise you will suffer. Because nobody can be contented with the temporary. By the time you think it is in your hands it is gone. By the time you think you have possessed it, it is no more there. You struggle for it -- by the time you achieve it, it has disappeared. The beauty is fleeting, love is fleeting, everything in this life is fleeting. You are running to catch shadows. They look real; by the time you have arrived they prove mirages.
103.To be herenow is to be attired in divine glory. To be herenow is to attain the splendour of existence. To be herenow is to be in bliss, is to be in paradise.
2.God is not a goal; God is the presence right now. If you are present, God is available. If you live in the moment, you are enlightened; there is no other enlightenment. And then ordinary life is so extraordinary. Then to be just a nobody is so fulfilling.
3.Meditation is the way from the head to the heart, from the heart to the being.
4.Pleasure is dependent on others. Happiness is not so dependent on others, but still it is separate from you. Bliss is not dependent, is not separate either; it is your very being, it is your very nature. To attain it is to attain to God, to nirvana.
5.Obsession is created by your so-called saints. Whatsoever they condemn becomes your obsession. In fact, the more they condemn, the more attractive it becomes, the more magnetic it becomes.
6.Desire is our imprisonment. The man who wants nothing, who is absolutely contented as he is, is free of all bondage. He has attained to ultimate freedom, nirvana -- and that is the goal of life. And it is only by attaining that freedom that you will know the significance of being, the song of being, the celebration of being. Your life will become a continuous bliss, and not only that YOU will be blissful, you will be able to bless others too. The whole existence will be blessed by you, by your very presence.
7.Unless you become conscious, unless you take possession of your own life, unless you become independent of your instincts, you will not be a master. And without being a master there is no bliss, no benediction; life remains a hell.
8.The whole humanity is suffering from obsession, either through indulgence or through repression. The whole humanity is concerned with sex twenty-four hours a day.
9.Meditation is the only thing that can transform a man into a spiritual being, without making him Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. Meditation can release all his potential and intelligence.
10.Every father wants, and every mother wants their children to live for them. It is a strange demand: if it is to be fulfilled, then nobody can live in this world, you have to live for your father, and your father has to live for his father, but nobody can live for himself, and unless you live for yourself you cannot find any joy, any bliss.
11.Love is essential; money is non-essential. To be alive is essential; to live in a big house or not is non-essential. To be fulfilled, contented, is essential; rushing, ambitious, always trying to reach somewhere, trying to perform, trying to prove that you are somebody, is non-essential. People live only in two dimensions: the dimension of the doer and the dimension of the non-doer.
12.Unless a man is happy, simply happy, for no reason at all, unless a man is mad enough to be happy without any reason, a man is not going to be happy ever. You will always find something destroying your happiness. You will always find something missing, something absent. And that missing will become your daydream again.
13.Beliefs are all against truth; they make your mind prejudiced. Belief means you don't know, still you pretend to know. Belief is a lie, it is hypocrisy.
14.The enlightened person is no more in any conflict with the ultimate law; he has surrendered. He floats, he flows with the river. He has almost become a wave in the river, he does not exist separately.
15.Meditation is not a tension, it is not a strain. One is never tired of meditation. It is relaxation -- how you can be tired of it? It is deep rest, it is utter restfulness. One is available to everything; nothing can distract you.
16.Relaxation means you don't have any shoulds. You are simply living moment to moment, not according to some future idea of yourself, but according to your reality that is herenow. To live with the reality, moment to moment, is to be sane. To live with the idea is to be insane. The whole earth has become almost a madhouse because of these perfectionists. Perfectionism is a sort of madness; only mad people try to be perfectionists. Sane people never try to be perfectionists.
17.If you become a little more meditative and less ambitious, if you become a little more religious and less political, if you become a little more unworldly than worldly, if you start moving more within wards than without, if you start becoming a little more alert than sleepy, if you come out of your drunk state, if you bring a little light into your being, then... then you will be close, close home. You have never been away. Then your whole life will be transformed, transfigured. Then you will live in a totally different way; a new quality will be there in your life which has nothing to do with your doing, which is a gift, a benediction.
18.Look at this mind. Look at its desires. Watch, become aware.
19.Life needs continuous growth. The moment you stop its growth, it starts dying. So go into the world full of songs, full of dance and abundant love, and give it unconditionally, without any judgment, to anybody who is receptive -- and you will go on growing in the experience both deeper and higher.
20.Unless life is a celebration you have lived in vain. Unless life turns into a Gautam Buddha you have been wasting a tremendous opportunity given to you by existence.
21.Encounter every situation with your total consciousness, without any guilt. Enjoy music, enjoy food, enjoy love -- enjoy everything that is natural.
22.The real thing is that you are suffering from your expectations. When they are not fulfilled -- and they are never going to be fulfilled -- frustration arises, failure arises, and you feel neglected, as if existence does not care for you. Drop expectations for the future. Remain open, remain available to whatsoever happens, but don't plan ahead. Don't make any psychological, fixed ideas about the future -- that things should be like this -- and much more suffering will disappear.
23.Passion is obsession, neurosis. Compassion is when your energy has flowered. You are so contented within yourself, you are so enough unto yourself, now you can share, you can shower your bliss. Now you HAVE to give. Neurosis is when you go on demanding and nobody is ready to give to you, and you are a hungry ghost. Your demands are great, and all that the world provides is just peanuts.
24.The moment you desire for happiness, you have moved away from the present, you have moved away from the existential, you have already moved into the future -- which is nowhere, which has not come yet. You have moved in a dream. Now, dreams can never be fulfilling. Your desire for happiness is a dream. The dream is unreal. Through the unreal, nobody has ever been able to reach to the real. You have taken a wrong train.
25.The ego is always going to the complaint department. Whatsoever happens is meaningless because even if God comes to you, you will say: Wait, let me first reach the complaint book. The ego is headed towards the complaint book; nothing can satisfy the ego.
26.To transform life into a celebration is the only authentic science of religion.
27.To be alive needs something more, something deeper, something more profound. To be alive needs more awareness, more meditativeness, more consciousness, not more information.
28.Life can still become a paradise; it is never too late. But great courage is needed to change. All that is really needed is a little more awareness. De-automatize your behavior; just watch what you have been doing up to now. You do the same thing, and the wife reacts in the same way. It has become a settled pattern.
29.Meditation brings you to the final peak of consciousness -- that is chit, exactly in the middle. On one side is truth; on another side is bliss. As meditation flowers, you find that on one hand truth has revealed to you all its mysteries and on the other blissfulness is showering all its treasures on you.
30.Love that depends on somebody is a poor love. Love that is created within you, love that you create out of your own being, is real energy. Then move anywhere with that ocean surrounding you and you will feel that everybody who comes close to you is suddenly under a different kind of energy.
31.Remember one thing: meditation means awareness. Whatsoever you do with awareness is meditation. Action is not the question, but the quality that you bring to your action. Walking can be a meditation if you walk alertly. Sitting can be a meditation if you sit alertly. Listening to the birds can be a meditation if you listen with awareness. Just listening to the inner noise of your mind can be a meditation if you remain alert and watchful. The whole point is: one should not move in sleep. Then whatsoever you do is meditation -- and don't be worried about it!
32.Transcendence is never through repression, transcendence is through understanding, transcendence is through awareness.
33.Remember, that is the difference between bliss and happiness: happiness is excitement; bliss is happiness without excitement. If there is excitement, sooner or later you will get bored, because only when the excitement is new it is excitement. But how can you be excited about the same thing again and again?
34.Man can also be as happy as the hills and as peaceful as the rivers if he looks at the moon and the surroundings without any mind. With no thought, he will also become part of the whole scene.
35.Love seems to be more eternal than your so-called life. Your life can be destroyed very easily... just a hit on the head, just a bullet through the heart; very simple... but nothing can destroy love. Love seems to be the only eternal thing; something not belonging to the world of time. You can give it, but nobody can take it.
36.Life is not given to you to murder, to destroy. Life has been given to you to create, and to rejoice, and to celebrate. When you cry and weep, when you are miserable, you are alone. When you celebrate, the whole existence participates with you. Only in celebration do we meet the ultimate, the eternal. Only in celebration do we go beyond the circle of birth and death.
37.Once you have become master of your mind, the mind is transcended. The moment you have become master of your mind, the mind is no longer there. It remains only if you are a slave. Once you have taken hold of the bull and you are riding on it, the bull disappears. The bull exists as separate from you only if you are not the master. This has to be understood.
38.The man of awareness becomes the man of the essence. Personality consists of the non-essential. Your soul consists of the essential, and the essential is immortal. The non-essential is momentary, and we cling to the non-essential; hence we suffer, because we cannot keep hold of it. It disappears sooner or later. Whatsoever we do is futile because the momentary cannot be forever. Just as it comes, it goes. It is a wave, a ripple, a bubble; sooner or later it will be gone. For the moment it looks so beautiful -- the sun is reflected in it and a small rainbow surrounds it -- but it is just a soap bubble. You can play with it but don't become attached to it, otherwise you will suffer. And that's why people are suffering: they become attached to soap bubbles.
39.Understanding is going to happen but not through the head, it is going to happen through the heart -- not through logic but through love.
40.Love is a ladder. It starts with one person, it ends with the totality. Love is the beginning, God is the end. To be afraid of love, to be afraid of the growing pains of love, is to remain enclosed in a dark cell.
41.Bliss doesn't mean happiness; bliss means the absence of both happiness and unhappiness. Happiness will be disturbed by unhappiness, unhappiness will be disturbed by happiness they are polarities, the wheel is moving. Bliss is never disturbed; it is silence, it is peace, it is a tranquillity -- absolute peace. You have come to understand; now nothing disturbs.
42.Keep this in your consciousness:
Nature is not anguish, it is blissfulness.
It is not anxiety, misery, suffering:
It is love, it is rejoicing.
It is a constant celebration.
43.Your love cannot be robbed. There is no way to rob it. You can give it voluntarily, you can give it freely, but nobody can rob it. You can be killed, but your love cannot be killed. There exists no way to murder love.
44.Remember: a saint is really a saint only when he has abandoned the whip and the rope. That is the criterion. If he is still trying to pray, to meditate, to do this and that, and to discipline himself, then he is still not yet enlightened. Then he is still there and some doing continues. And doing accumulates the ego. He has not reached home. The journey is yet to be completed.
45.Eating is right if it gives you nourishment. It is wrong if it only gives you weight. Eating is right if it gives you vitality; eating is wrong if it just makes you heavy. It is meaningless. To be heavy is not to be vital. The vital person is not heavy, he is light, he is almost weightless. He moves on the earth, but his feet never touch the earth. He can fly any moment -- any moment. Gravitation has no affect on him.
46.Spirituality is not a sensational experience -- it is maturity, it is let-go, it is becoming desire less.
47.If you love, you will find so many occasions to be loving. If you are afraid, you will find so many occasions to be afraid.
48.Awareness is just being with yourself in utter aloneness, just being alert. It is not a relationship, the other is not needed at all. It is not outgoing, it is ingoing.
49.The knowledgeable person lives in his memory, in the past. The wise man lives in the present, not in his memory but in his awareness this very moment.
50.Life is not a fasting, it is a continuous feast -- a celebration, a festival of lights. Love transforms your life into a festival of lights. And unless your life becomes a feast and a festival, remember: you have not done the thing you have come for on this earth.
51.Love life, be more happy. God can come only to a happy soul. Only when you are utterly happy is there a possibility, otherwise not -- because misery closes you, bliss opens you up. Have you not watched it, observed it, in your own life? Whenever you are miserable you become closed; a hard shell surrounds you. You start protecting yourself, you surround yourself with a great armour -- because you know you already have so much pain, you cannot afford any more hurt from anywhere. You have to harden your surface.
52.Remember, watching is the only key. Observation is meditation -- there is nothing more to meditation; it is another name for being aware. And the miracle is that when you become aware of something, utterly aware, it disappears. It remains only if you are unaware. Your unawareness is a food for distraction, for indolence. Your awareness means they are no longer being fed, they start starving. Sooner or later they wither away of their own accord.
53.Two things happen in orgasm: one is, mind stops the constant yakkety yak -- it becomes for a moment no-mind; and second, time stops. That single moment of orgasmic joy is so immense and so fulfilling that it is equal to eternity.
54.Enlightenment is not something that has to be fought for, it is something that you have to allow. It comes in a moment of let-go. In surrender it comes.
55.Remember, once a buddha you are always a buddha. Nobody has fallen from that point. It is just against nature.
56.The ego is always expecting and hence always being frustrated. The non-egoistic person expects nothing, hence everything is fulfilling; whatsoever happens is tremendous, whatsoever happens is fantastic. Even if he comes across a small grass flower, he is hypnotized by it.
57.When Buddha talks about a poor man, he does not mean a man without money. When Buddha talks about a poor man, he means a man who is not rich inside... a loveless man. How can he share? How can he become a tremendous sharing? No, charity is not possible. Charity is possible only when you are overflowing. Overflowing is charity.
58.The moment a person attains to this eternal light, his life has a single flavour. That flavour is contained by absolute awareness. His unconscious has disappeared. There is no longer any dark part in his being.
59.Awareness is the only secret key: it transforms. It doesn't matter what your illness is, awareness is the only medicine: it cures all illness. If you are politically minded -- and everybody is... In some way or other everybody is trying to be more powerful than the other. Even in relationships politics continue -- the husband tries to be more powerful than the wife, the wife tries to be more powerful than the husband -- hence the constant conflict, even between parents and children. Everywhere there is conflict. It is all politics, different faces of politics.
60.Remember, frustration is out of expectation, and ego is always expecting. The ego is a beggar.
61.Misery comes because we choose. Bliss is when we don't choose.
62.All desires are a nag, they go on nagging you, they go on forcing you, they go on goading you. You can't have a moment of rest, you can't be relaxed -- all those desires are there. Rest, relaxation, is known only by those who have understood the art of being desireless.
63.My work here is not to comfort you, is not to console you, is not to sing a lullaby by the side of your bed. My work is to wake you up.
64.Categories are created by the mind. Appreciation and condemnation are of the mind. Once mind is not there, everything is in its reality as it is. No evaluation arises. One makes everything untrue if one is untrue. You go on projecting yourself -- everything else functions as a screen.
65.A follower is never ready for insecurity; he comes to a guru, to a master, to seek protection, shelter, to hide behind him. He is seeking a father figure. A disciple is seeking a master, not a father figure. He wants to learn what life is. Even if life is insecurity, he is ready to learn. Even if life implies death, he is ready to learn.
66.Mind is a kind of insanity because it is carrying so many impressions which are conflicting, contradictory. It has got impressions from your mother, and also from your father; and they were both fighting continuously, and they both have given their minds and heritage to you. It has got impressions from the neighbors, it has got impressions from so many teachers in the school, in the college, in the university. It is a crowd of unrelated, irrelevant, inconsistent thoughts -- it does not have any organic unity. It is a miracle that somehow you go on keeping yourself together.
67.As far as biological reproduction is concerned, orgasm is not a necessity. But as far as spiritual growth is concerned, orgasm is a necessity.
68.If meditation does not radiate love then one is in some fallacy. What he is thinking is meditation is not meditation. It may be concentration, it may be contemplation, but it is not meditation.
69.Misery is because of the conflict. Misery is because your house is divided, misery is because you are not one, you are a crowd -- a thousand and one voices inside you pulling you and pushing you in all sorts of ways and all directions.
70.Truth cannot be practiced. You have to dissolve yourself into it. Truth can never become something that you can hold in your hand. It is vast. How can you hold it in your hand? It can never become your property. You have to relax into it, dissolve into it.
71.The mind either clings with the past or with the future. This is a way of not being. This is how we miss existence. This is how by and by we become phantoms, shadows, ghosts. Watch yourself. As I see people, millions of people remain in a life of a ghost.
72.Buddha says this world is just like darkness. Once you bring light to it, once you become aware, once you drop your passions and become meditative, once the mind attains to the purity of meditation, suddenly the light is there. Darkness dissipates, disappears instantly, immediately, within no time.
73.Beware of desires. Become more watchful, more alert. And you will see -- the more alert you are, the less desires are there. Ripples start subsiding, waves start disappearing. And one day, suddenly... any moment it can happen, because all moments are as potential as any other. There is no auspicious moment for it to happen. It can happen in any ordinary moment, because all ordinary moments are auspicious. There is no need for it to happen under a bodhi tree. It can happen under any tree, or even without a tree. It can happen under the roof of your house. It can happen anywhere... because god is everywhere.
74.A real man has no nostalgia at all. He never looks back because it is no longer there. He lives in the moment and remains open for the future. The present is his, and the present makes him capable of receiving the future. His doors are always open for the wind, for the rain, for the sun. He is an opening.
75.The danger is not to live in totality and intensity, not to make your life a dance, a celebration.
To me, to be innocent is all that is to be achieved. Be innocent, and the divine is always blissfully flowing towards you. Innocence is the capacity to receive, to be part of the divine. Be innocent, and the guest is there. Become the host.
76.When the mind is free of passion, the mind is free. Freedom means freedom from passion. And only a free mind can see what is real. Only a free mind -- free from passions -- can see what is here.
77.A mind full of consciousness will be empty of all contents. He will be neither a Christian nor a Hindu nor a Jew. He will not be a moral man nor an immoral man. He will simply be. That being, that be-ness, is purity. That's what I call primal innocence. Then all dust is washed and you are just a reflective force.
78.Meditation has to happen first, then character comes as a shadow to it. And if meditation does not happen, then your character is just a hypocrisy and nothing else. Your saints are great hypocrites; they say one thing, they think another, maybe just the opposite. They do one thing, but they want to do something exactly the opposite. On the surface they show one thing, but deep down they are just its contrary.
79.If you can allow your flame of life to reach the third eye, you will see there is no death. And you will suddenly see that you are no more attached to the world.
80.Love is the nourishment that is missing in the world.
81.Man can rise above gods and fall below animals. Man has a great spectrum. From the lowest to the highest, man is a ladder.
82.Enlightenment cannot be claimed. One has to utterly disappear for it to be. The mind has to cease for God to be. Call it God or enlightenment -- it is the same thing.
83.Innocence is religiousness. To be innocent is the peak of true realization. But true innocence comes only through a conscious revolution; it is not possible through any collective, unconscious evolution. Man is alone. He is free to choose heaven or hell, life or death, the ecstasy of realization or the misery of our so-called life.
84.Nothing has to be achieved, all is showering on you. Just be here now and celebrate. My definition of religion is celebration.
85.Look at old people: you will not find anything else but wounds; their whole being is nothing but wounds -- ulcers and ulcers and ulcers. When a person dies you don't see blossoming flowers in his being; you simply see stinking wounds. If a person has really lived and not been deceived by his dreams and illusory desires, the older he grows the more beautiful he becomes. In his death he is superb.
86.Misery makes you special. Misery makes you more egoistic. A miserable man can have a more concentrated ego than a happy man. A happy man really cannot have the ego, because a person becomes happy only when there is no ego. The more egoless, the more happy; the more happy, the more egoless. You dissolve into happiness. You cannot exist together with happiness; you exist only when there is misery. In happiness there is dissolution.
87.The urge to possess is the urge not to be alone. One cannot be alone, so he seeks company. But the company of other people is not reliable, so he seeks, instead, the company of things. To live with a wife is difficult; to live with a car is not so difficult. So ultimately, possessiveness turns toward things.
88.My vision of a good world is that people will be individuals, meeting with others, sharing their joy, their love, unconditionally. And not expecting that tomorrow also will be the same -- they will remain aware of the constantly changing existence.
89. The more empty you are within, the more you seek fame; it is a sort of substitute. The more poor you are within, the more you seek riches; it is a substitute to somehow stuff yourself with something.
90.An enlightened person is the richest person possible, but his richness comes from surrender, not from fight. He does not... he has not any conflict with the whole. He has fallen in harmony, he is in a harmonia.
91.Misery is manufactured by man -- existence is just playfulness, bliss. It is a song, it is a dance, it is a continuous celebration all the year round.
92.If you really want to be with me, drop guilt. And the same energy that has become a guilt complex becomes celebration once it is released. Celebration is the right attitude. Celebrate all that God has given to you. I promise you that if you can celebrate all that God has given to you, you will become worthy of more.
93.The world is never going to be happy, it has never been so, and it is never going to be so. The world is bound to remain unhappy, only individuals can be happy. It is something personal. It needs consciousness to be happy. It needs intensity to be happy. It needs awareness to be happy. The world can never be happy because it has no awareness. Society has no soul, only man has it. But it is very difficult for the ego to accept this.
94.My whole work is to demolish, to demolish all the lies that are surrounding you and not to replace them by anything else, but to leave you utterly naked in your aloneness. To me, only in your aloneness will you be able to know the truth -- because you are the truth.
95.Each child comes with a tremendous intelligence but the family makes him mediocre, because to live with an intelligent child is troublesome. He doubts, he is skeptical, he inquires, he is disobedient, he is rebellious -- and the family wants somebody who is obedient, ready to follow, imitate. Hence from the very beginning the seed of intelligence has to be destroyed, almost completely burnt, so there is no possibility of any sprouts coming out of it.
96The whole life people simply go on saving, saving -- for what? The life is slipping by; each moment a precious moment is gone and it cannot be reclaimed. Buddha says: Don't waste it in foolish things. Fame is foolish, it is pointless, meaningless. Even if the whole world knows you, how does it make you richer? How does it make your life more blissful? How does it help you to be more understanding? to be more aware? to be more alert? to be more alive?
97.Sexuality is possible without any understanding, without any meditation. Love is possible only with understanding. Compassion is possible only with understanding and meditation, understanding and awareness. Not only do you understand and respect the other person, but you have come to your deepest core of being. Seeing your own deepest core, you have become capable of seeing the deepest core in the other also. Now the other does not exist as a body or a mind; the other exists as a soul. And souls are not separate. Your soul and my soul are one.
98.Joy is something which happens as a consequence; it is not a result. You cannot make any effort to be joyful. You can move into some activity so deeply that you forget yourself, and joy arises. Joy arises only when you are not.
99.Rest should be the criterion of power. A man of power is absolutely at rest, he has no restlessness in him. Because restlessness is nothing but dissipation of energy. When you are feeling restless, you are dissipating energy.
100.All old people are not wise. Wisdom has nothing to do with old age. A real man of understanding can become wise any time. Even as a child he can become wise. If you have a penetrating understanding, even a single experience of anger and you will be finished with it. It is so ugly. A single experience of greed and you will be finished with it. It is so poisonous.
101.Remember, the whole effort of sadhana is to help you to become alone, because only when you are ready to become alone, when you are ready to fall into inner silence, when you are no more clinging to this constant talking, inner talk, then only can you become a unity. Because this constant inner talk helps you to remain dual, divided.
102.Buddha says this life, this world that you live in, that you are surrounded with, that you have created around yourself, is but a dream -- impermanent, temporary. Don't make your abode there, otherwise you will suffer. Because nobody can be contented with the temporary. By the time you think it is in your hands it is gone. By the time you think you have possessed it, it is no more there. You struggle for it -- by the time you achieve it, it has disappeared. The beauty is fleeting, love is fleeting, everything in this life is fleeting. You are running to catch shadows. They look real; by the time you have arrived they prove mirages.
103.To be herenow is to be attired in divine glory. To be herenow is to attain the splendour of existence. To be herenow is to be in bliss, is to be in paradise.
104. Watching is
meditation. What you watch is irrelevant. You can watch the trees, you can
watch the river, you can watch the clouds, you can watch children playing
around. Watching is meditation. What you watch is not the point; the object is
not the point. The quality of observation, the quality of being aware and alert
-- that's what meditation is.
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