Osho Quotes on Judging and Judgments

1. Judgment is one of the crimes. We go on judging other people, and we do the same with ourselves. We go on judging our thoughts, our actions, what is good, what is bad, what should have been done, what should not have been done; and we are constantly creating conflict and duality.
2. Meditation is a kind of watchfulness and a sitting, just looking around with no purpose — because there is no purpose. If anybody passes by you have to look without any purpose, without any judgement; you have just to see. That is another quality of meditation: to look at things without any kind of prejudice — good or bad — without any judgement. And then sitting there the whole day doing nothing the energy settles — it is not hectic; it rests.
3. To go beyond judgments of good and bad is the way of watchfulness. And it is through watchfulness that transformations happen. This is the difference between morality and religion. Morality says, “Choose the right and reject the wrong. Choose the good and reject the bad.” Religion says, “Simply watch both. Don’t choose at all. Remain in a choiceless consciousness.”
4. The whole phenomenon of religion depends on this possibility, that man can take a jump out of the mind. And that’s what meditation is all about: the art of getting out of the mind. And it is not difficult at all, it is very simple. Just watch the mind, with no judgement. Don’t be a judge, just be a witness, mirrorlike.
5. The mind that continuously goes on judging creates anguish in you. But we are taught to judge. Even those with whom we have no concern, we go on judging: this man is good, that man is bad. What business is this, what concern is it of yours? And if you knew the whole story of the man, perhaps you would have said that this act you had thought was bad was absolutely inevitable. Without this act there would have remained something incomplete in the whole story.
6. Just by being a simple witness of your thought processes. That’s my method of meditation. It is not a prayer because there is no God to pray to. It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts passing before you. Just witnessing — not interfering, not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness. The moment you say this is good, this is bad, you have already jumped into the thought process. 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: you are not the mind, you are the witness, a watcher.
7. The man of understanding, meditation, is not a man of control — just the opposite. He is a watcher. And if you want to watch, you have to be absolutely nonjudgmental. The man who controls is judgmental, continuously condemning, “This is wrong”; continuously praising, “This is good, this is evil, this will lead to hell, this will lead to heaven.” He is constantly judging, condemning, praising, choosing. The man of control lives in choice, and the man of understanding lives in choicelessness.
8. Have you ever thought about it — about what you are doing? You go on judging, not knowing anything even about yourself, which is the nearest point of consciousness to you. Who is more close to you than yourself? — and you have not known even that.
9. You are always judging from the past. The past is no more, it is absolutely irrelevant, but it goes on interfering. You go on judging according to it; you go on saying, “This is right and that is wrong,” and all those ideas of right and wrong, all those judgments are coming from something which is dead. Your dead past remains so heavy on you that it does not allow you to move. Drop the past completely and you will be surprised: much of the suffering has disappeared.
10. Remember continuously, because the struggle is long, and the journey is arduous. Many times you will fall and forget, many times you will start judging. Many times you will start getting identified with this or that, many times the ego will assert itself again and again. Whenever the ego asserts itself, whenever identification happens, whenever judgment arises, immediately remember: watch, simply watch, and there will be understanding. And understanding is the secret of transformation. If you can understand anger, immediately you will be showered with compassion. If you can understand sex, immediately you will attain to samadhi. ‘Understanding’ is the most important word to remember.
11. The only possibility of being blissful is to discover your godhood, and the method is meditation. By meditation I mean watching your mind, simply watching your mind — not doing anything, not interfering with the mind, not judging — remaining absolutely silent and looking at the mind, whatsoever goes on: the traffic of thoughts, desires, memories — aloof, cool, just looking at it unconcerned, detached. Slowly slowly that traffic disappears a window opens into god. You become aware of a godliness which was always there, within and without, but of which you were not aware. You were fast asleep.
12. You can become enlightened by becoming more conscious, more of a witness. Be less of a judge and you will be surprised that when you become a witness and you don’t judge yourself, you stop judging others too. And that makes you more human, more compassionate, more understanding. The man who judges himself continuously is bound to judge others too. Even more — he will be cruel, he will be hard on others. If he condemns himself for something, he will condemn others even more; he will always be looking for faults. He will never be able to see the glory of your being; he will become too concerned with trifles, with trivia. He will become too concerned with your small acts.
13. Enlightenment happens only in that moment when there is no complaint in you, when you are not going anywhere, not desiring, not condemning, not judging. You simply exist and with total acceptance. This moment there is enlightenment.
14. The message is drop comparing, drop judging; otherwise you will remain miserable, and just because of your judgments and comparisons. Look at life without being a judge. Who are you to judge? What do you know about life? What do you know even about yourself? Who are you to judge? Judgment comes from the idea that you know, judgment is knowledgeability. Look at life with a state of not-knowing, through a state of not-knowing, look at life through wonder — and suddenly all is perfect. Yes, sometimes it is cloudy, but it is perfect. And sometimes it is sunny and it is perfect. And sometimes it rains and sometimes it doesn’t rain, but it is perfect. As it is, it is a blessing. To be in tune with this blessing is to be prayerful.
15. Wisdom comes from watchfulness; not by study but by awareness, not by concentration but by meditation. One has to be just open to this infinite splendor called life. One has to open to the earth and to the sky. One has to be open to everything, each and everything. Without judgement, one has to be open; then wisdom comes.
16. You hear but you don’t listen. You will have to learn how to listen. Listening means being utterly silent, not interpreting, not judging, not evaluating — neither for nor against — just being present.
17. If you are non-judging, not taking any moral standpoint, simply observing facts as they are, not interpreting them according to yourself, then you cannot be judged. You are transformed completely. Now there is no need for YOU to be judged by any divine power — there is no need! You have become divine yourself; you have become God yourself. Be a witness, not a judge.
18. The whole emphasis is just on being alert, that’s all, so that nothing passes without your knowledge. You don’t do anything to the facticity of life: you don’t touch it, retouch it, you don’t project anything. Life is no more a screen, and you are no more a projector. You are simply witnessing, whatsoever it is, with no judgement on your part of good or bad, beautiful or ugly.
19. The mind is constantly involved in thinking, in judging, in evaluating. Its whole function seems to be to keep you involved in thoughts, which are nothing but soap bubbles — or perhaps soap bubbles have more substance to them than your thoughts.
20. What is wrong in some small idiotic things? Why can’t you laugh and enjoy them? All the time you are judging what is right, what is wrong. All the time you are sitting in the seat of a judge, and that makes you serious.
21. If you want to improve on existence, on other people, you cannot be at ease with yourself. Your own judgments will kill you. You have never thought about it … whenever you are judging somebody, you are judging yourself also; if you condemn somebody as a thief, you are condemning yourself also. You may have have done many kinds of stealing — you may have stolen thoughts from other people, you may have stolen hypotheses from other people.
22. Jealousy is not seeing a simple fact — that you have been taught to see yourself as inferior to someone, as superior to someone. And you have become so unconscious of it that you are constantly judging people as inferior, as superior, as good, as bad, right, wrong. Don’t judge. Everybody is just himself. Accept him as he is. But this is possible only if you accept yourself as you are, with no shame, with no feeling of worthlessness. Jealousy is not seeing a simple fact — that you have been taught to see yourself as inferior to someone, as superior to someone. And you have become so unconscious of it that you are constantly judging people as inferior, as superior, as good, as bad, right, wrong. Don’t judge. Everybody is just himself.Accept him as he is. But this is possible only if you accept yourself as you are, with no shame, with no feeling of worthlessness.

Osho Quotes on Purity

1. What is purity? Don’t misunderstand me, purity has nothing to do with morality. Don’t interpret it in a moralistic way. Purity has nothing to do with puritans. Purity simply means an uncontaminated state of mind, where only your consciousness is and nothing else. Nothing else really enters into your consciousness, but if you hanker to possess, that hankering contaminates you. Gold cannot enter into your consciousness. There is no way. How can you take gold into your being? There is no way. Money cannot enter into you r consciousness. But if you want to possess, that possessiveness can enter into your consciousness. Then you become impure. If you don’t want to possess anything, you become fearless. Then even death is a beautiful experience to pass through.
2. Your innermost core has always been pure; purity is intrinsic to you, it cannot be taken away. Your virginity is eternal; you cannot lose it, there is no way to lose it. You can only forget about it or remember it. If you forget about it, you live in confusion; if you remember it, all is clear. Again, I will not say “certain,” but just “clear.” All is transparent. That transparency is freedom, that transparency is wisdom. This transparency is your birthright; if you are not claiming it, nobody else is responsible except you. Claim it! It is yours. It is yours just for the asking.
3. My whole message is to see the truth, to see the hell that ego creates in the name: of perfection, uniqueness — and to let it drop. Then there is a tremendous beauty — no ego, no self, just a deep emptiness. And out of deep emptiness is creativity, out of that nothingness arises bliss, SATCHITANANDA, truth. Being, bliss, all arise out of that absolute purity. When the ego is not, you are a virgin. Christ was born out of a virgin; your nothingness is that Mother Virgin, Mother Mary.
4. People have their own reasons. Even laughter is businesslike; even laughter is economic, political. Even laughter is not just laughter. All purity is lost. You cannot even laugh in a pure way, in a simple way, childlike. And if you cannot laugh in a pure way, you are losing something tremendously valuable. You are losing your virginity, your purity, your innocence.
5. Whenever Buddha uses the phrase ‘impure mind’ you can misunderstand it. By ‘impure mind’ he means mind, because all mind is impure. Mind as such is impure, and no-mind is pure. Purity means no-mind; impurity means mind.
6. Drop things and go into thoughts; then one day thoughts also have to be dropped and then you are left alone in your purity, then you are left absolutely alone. In that aloneness is God, in that aloneness is liberation, moksha, in that aloneness is nirvana, in that aloneness for the first time you are in the real.
7. All that you need is just to be watchful, and nothing will affect you. This unaffectedness will keep your purity, and this purity has certainly the freshness of life, the joy of existence — all the treasures that you have been endowed with. But you become attached to the small things surrounding you and forget the one that you are. It is the greatest discovery in life and the most ecstatic pilgrimage to truth.
8. Samadhi is your very nature in its absolute clarity, in its absolute purity, in its absolute awareness.
9. No-mind is clarity, purity, innocence. No-mind is the real way to live, the real way to know, the real way to be.
10. 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.
11. Zen does not want you to renounce the world but to renounce the mind, so that you can find the empty heart. The empty heart is your purity, your virginity. This empty heart opens the door to the universal and the eternal.
12. When you are in deep meditation, you feel a great serenity, a joy that is unknown to you, a watchfulness that is a new guest. Soon this watchfulness will become the host. The day the watchfulness becomes the host, it remains twenty-four hours with you. And out of this watchfulness, whatever you do has a wisdom in it. Whatever you do shows a clarity, a purity, a spontaneity, a grace.
13. Remove knowledge, information, remove all your egoistic trips. Remove desires, remove memories, imaginations, remove the whole mind. Become a no-mind. That is purity, and in that purity wisdom blooms.
14. Only a no-thought is pure, because then you are utterly yourself, alone, nothing interfering. Jean-Paul Sartre says: The other is hell. And he is right in a way, because whenever you are thinking of the other you are in hell. And all thoughts are addressed to others. When you are in a state of no-thought you are alone, and aloneness is purity. And in that aloneness happens all that is worth happening.
15. Don’t teach a child Christianity, HYinduism, Jainism. At the most, give him a milieu, if you love him, so that he can grow a sensitivity towards what religion is in its essence in its purity. Don’t teach him about so many flowers, just let him become sensitive to the fragrance of it — that will do. THAT is baptism.
16. Purity does not mean that you should eat food only prepared by a brahmin; purity does not mean that you should eat only when the sun is in the sky; purity does not mean that you should only wear this and you should not wear that. Purity means living out of no-mind, living spontaneously, moment to moment like a child, innocently — living from a state of not knowing. All knowledge is cunning, and all knowledge corrupts. Living from a state of not knowing — that is purity.
17. By purity Buddha never means moral purity; by purity he means childlike innocence. There is a great difference between moral purity and childlike innocence. Moral purity is cunning, clever. It is not really purity, it is something imposed. It has a motivation. The moral person is trying to attain to heaven, to otherworldly joys; he wants to become immortal. The moral person is not desireless: his object of desire has changed and he is ready to sacrifice everything for his new object of desire. He imposes purity upon himself, but that purity is not even skin-deep. Deep down he is cunning, manipulating. In fact, he is trying to manipulate God according to his desires.
18. Remember always, with Buddha purity is never a moral concept. He is not a priest, he is not a politician. He is a man who has gone beyond all dualities — the duality of good and bad included. Then what can he mean by purity? By purity he always means innocence, just like a small child who knows nothing of what is good and what is bad. The sage also becomes a child again, but he goes beyond. The child is below the duality, and the sage is beyond duality. One thing is similar, that both are not part of the world of duality, of the world where everything is divided into polar opposites: good and bad, night and day, love and hate, life and death, this world and that world, the sinner and the saint. The sinner is one who knows what is good and what is bad, but follows the bad. The saint is one who knows what is good and what is bad, but follows the good. And the sage is one who knows what is good and what is bad, but has gone beyond both and is no longer interested in those divisions. He lives in a choiceless awareness. That is purity.

Osho Quotes on Comparison

1. We have always been thinking in terms of comparison. Man is very much conditioned to create hierarchies: who is clever, who is stupid, who is beautiful, who is ugly…We can’t accept people as they are.
2. Comparison is mind-oriented.
3. Love knows no contradiction. It knows no comparison. Each moment it is available.
4. If you are egoistic you are bound to compare yourself with others. The ego cannot exist without comparison, hence if you really want to drop the ego, drop comparing. You will be surprised: where has the ego gone? Compare, and it is there; and it is there only in comparison. It is not an actuality, it is a fiction created out of comparison.
5. Don’t compare. Be contented with yourself. Enjoy, delight — help yourself to be yourself.
6. Man creates comparison because ego is possible only if nourished by comparison continuously. But then you will have two outcomes: sometimes you will feel superior, and sometimes you will feel inferior. And the possibility of feeling inferior is greater than the possibility of feeling superior, because there are millions of people: somebody is more beautiful than you, somebody is taller than you, somebody is stronger than you, somebody seems to be more intelligent than you, somebody is more learned than you, somebody is more successful, somebody is more famous, somebody is this, somebody is that. If you just go on comparing, millions of people… you will gather a great inferiority complex. But it doesn’t exist, it is your creation.
7. The mind compares. How can you compare when the mind is not? How can you say this tree is small and that tree big? When the mind drops, comparison drops, and when there is no comparison the beauty of existence erupts. It becomes a volcanic eruption, it explodes. Then you see the small is big and the big is small; then all contradictions are lost and the inner consistency is seen.
8. 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.
9. The nature of desire is Jewish. It wants more, it is mad for more. And those who live in desire are bound to be victims of death. Only the person who understands the foolishness of desiring, of greed, of constantly longing for more, of jealousy, of comparison, one who becomes aware of all this nonsense and drops it, goes beyond death.
10. Comparison is a very foolish attitude, because each person is unique and incomparable. Once this understanding settles in you, jealousy disappears. Each is unique and incomparable. You are just yourself: nobody has ever been like you, and nobody will ever be like you. And you need not be like anybody else, either. God creates only originals; he does not believe in carbon copies.
11. A mystic is the one who simply knows that he is himself. He lives his life according to his own light, he creates his own space, he has his own being. He is utterly contented with himself, because without comparison you cannot be discontented either. And he is not an egoist, he cannot be — ego needs comparison, ego feeds on comparison. He is simply doing his thing. The rose is a rose and the lotus is a lotus, and some tree is very high and some other tree is very small — but everything is as it is.
12. Comparison is the way of the ego. Avoid comparison, otherwise you will always suffer. You will suffer in two ways. Sometimes your ego will feel superior to somebody; that will give you airs, that will get into your head, that will make you tense. You will not walk on the earth; you will become drunk, drugged. Or sometimes it will give you the feeling of inferiority; then too you will be crestfallen, shattered. Again great anguish and pain….
13. Remember, ego is comparative — it always compares itself with others — and the self is noncomparative. When you know yourself it is neither inferior nor superior in comparison to anybody, it is simply itself. But the ego is comparative. And remember, if you feel superior to somebody, you are bound to feel inferior to somebody else. So the ego is a very tricky phenomenon: on the one hand it makes you feel superior, on the other hand it makes you feel inferior. It keeps you in a double bind, it goes on pulling you apart. It drives you crazy.
14. There are millions of people and each individual is unique. Drop that nonsense of comparing. But you cannot drop it unless you drop the past — the past LIVES on comparison, the ego FEEDS on comparison.
15. Never compare, because all comparison is foolish. Everybody is just like himself. What is the point of comparing? Who are you to compare? And who are you to fix a criterion — to decide who is learned and who is not learned? Who are you to make a criterion who is beautiful and who is not beautiful? Who are you? Why should you judge? Jesus says, ‘Judge ye not.
16. Not only do you go on moving in the same small circles, you repeat, you imitate other people and their stupidities. You are constantly repeating, you are constantly looking around at what is being done by whom. You don’t live a life from within; you are imitators. Your whole interest is exhibition: how to show that you are better than others, how to show that you are richer than others, how to show that you are more intelligent than others. In fact, it is only the unintelligent person who ever compares himself with others. The really intelligent never compares, because each individual is unique and comparison is impossible.

Osho Quotes on Laughter

1. Laughter comes out of health. It’s an overflowing energy. That’s why children can laugh and their laughter is total. Their whole body is involved in it — when they laugh you can see their toes laughing. The whole body, every cell, every fiber of the body, is laughing and vibrating. They are so full of health, so vital; everything is flowing.
2. A sad child means an ill child, and a laughing old man means he is still young. Even death cannot make him old, nothing can make him old. His energy is still flowing and overflowing, he is always flooded. Laughter is a flooding of energy.
3. My emphasis is to increase your cheerfulness, your laughter, because this world is not for the miserable. This world is not for the people who have become too accustomed to anxiety, anguish. This world belongs to those who live moment to moment in utter ecstasy. Cheerfulness, nonseriousness, a sense of humor to me are very fundamental qualities of a religious being.
4. If we can fill the whole earth with laughter, with dancing and singing — people singing and swinging! — if we can make the earth a carnival of joy, a festival of lights, we will have brought for the first time a true sense of religiousness to the earth.
5. When you really laugh, suddenly mind disappears. And the whole Zen methodology is how to get into no-mind — laughter is one of the beautiful doors to get to it.
6. If you are possessed by laughter, thinking stops. And if you know a few moments of no-mind, those glimpses will promise you many more rewards that are going to come. You just have to become more and more of the sort, of the quality, of no-mind. More and more, thinking has to be dropped.
7. TM has an appeal for the American mind, because repeating a mantra — monotonous, the same again and again — the mind loses interest in it, starts falling asleep. That’s the beauty of laughter: you cannot fall asleep. Laughing, how can you fall asleep? It brings a state of no-mind and no-thought, and does not allow you to fall asleep.
8. Look at people’s faces. They carry life as a burden — boring, with no meaning. It seems that everything is just a nightmare, a very cruel joke, that somebody is playing a trick, torturing them. Life is not a celebration, it cannot be. With a mind burdened by memory life cannot be a celebration. Even if you laugh, your laughter carries boredom. Look at people laughing: they laugh with an effort. Their laugh may be just to be mannerly, their laugh may be just etiquette.
9. My whole effort here is to keep you as non-serious as possible, for the simple reason that meditation, all kinds of meditation, can make you too serious and that seriousness will create a spiritual disease and nothing else. Unless a meditation brings you more laughter, more joy, more playfulness, avoid it. It is not for you.
10. Life has to be taken hilariously! Life is so full of laughter, it is so ridiculous, it is so funny that unless your juices have gone completely dry you cannot be serious. I have looked around at life in every possible way and it is always funny, whatever way you look at it! It gets funnier and funnier! It is such a beautiful gift of the beyond.
11. When laughter comes out of thinking it is ugly; it belongs to this ordinary, mundane world, it is not cosmic. Then you are laughing at somebody else, at somebody else’s cost, and it’s ugly and violent. When laughter comes out of silence you are not laughing at anybody’s cost, you are simply laughing at the whole cosmic joke. And it really is  a joke! That’s why I go on telling jokes to you.
12. Nobody is for life, nobody is for living, nobody is for laughter. No religion has accepted a sense of humor as a quality of religiousness.
13. If my people go on being nonserious, laughing, dancing, singing, not finding any reason for it — life is enough reason for it — we can make the whole world aflame with laughter. Nuclear weapons can be destroyed by a laughing, smiling, dancing humanity. But as humanity is now, there is no hope.
14. To me, authentic religiousness means a childlike innocence, playfulness, and a wholehearted capacity for laughter.
15. Whenever you touch a height, enjoy the height; whenever you touch the bottom, enjoy the bottom. One thing should remain continuously flowing in you — the enjoyment. Giggle within yourself when you are beyond yourself, and giggle within yourself when you are within yourself — but giggling should continue. Make life a laughter when great things are happening, and when nothing is happening, laughter should continue. Laughter should be the running thread of the garland of flowers of all your ecstasies and experiences of the beyond. They will change, but one thread of laughter can continue within you. Laughter is almost the shrine of the witness. Within the laughter, you will always find the watcher. And to become a watcher without discontinuity, without gaps, is all that is meant by enlightenment.
16. No religion in the world has accepted a sense of humor as one of the fundamental religious qualities. I accept it, and I want that no religion can possibly exist in the future unless it has as a fundamental quality the sense of humor. A religion without laughter… a God who cannot laugh and dance and sing is not worthy of being God. Send him to hell!

Osho Quotes on Wisdom

1. Wisdom consists only of one thing, not of knowing many things but of knowing only one thing: that is your awareness and its separation from the mind.
2. Wisdom is an interior phenomenon. It is the discovery of the spirit of all the Buddhas. And there is no need to go into the history of the Buddhas. You have only to go within yourself, because you contain the whole past of existence, the infinite past, and you also contain the infinite future.
3. Knowledge makes you learned: wisdom makes you innocent. Knowledge is very ego-fulfilling, very ego-strengthening. The ego feeds on knowledge; it is the best tonic for the ego. But wisdom happens only when ego has disappeared; wisdom appears only on the death of the ego. The death of the ego is the birth of wisdom.
4. People go on collecting knowledge and get mixed up and start thinking that this knowledge is wisdom. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom comes through your growth of consciousness, and knowledge comes through collecting from the scriptures, from learned people, and making some sort of a system. But you remain the same; you don’t go through any transformation.
5. Mind is interested in knowledge not in wisdom, because for wisdom you will have to create a space called no-mind. And, naturally, mind is afraid of your ever becoming interested in wisdom, because mind does not want to commit suicide.
6. Wisdom is knowing. And when you know, you need not guess. You are not guessing that this is morning and the birds are singing and the trees are bathed in sunlight. You are not guessing it, you are not thinking that it is so. If somebody is guessing it, then he must be blind or at least drunk. It is an experience, and every experience is self-validating.
7. The exact thing is meditation. On one side it brings morality in your life; on another side it brings wisdom in your life. But you cannot do anything to attain wisdom directly; neither can you do anything to be moral directly. But you can do something for meditation; you can meditate directly, and morality and wisdom both are by-products. Morality will be in your actions and wisdom will be your intelligence, your awareness, your final enlightenment.
8. Eat the fruit of knowledge! Become knowledge-able, and one day renounce your knowledge. Then wisdom is born. Wisdom is not ignorance; wisdom is renunciation of knowledge — but first the knowledge is required.
9. Wisdom is a shadow of meditation. In fact, all so-called virtues, without meditation, are fake. With meditation, authentic virtues start arising all over your inner space.
10. Knowledge gratifies the ego, wisdom happens only when the ego is gone, forgotten. Knowledge can be taught; universities exist to teach you. Wisdom cannot be taught, it is like an infection: you have to be with the wise, you have to move with the wise, and only then will something start moving inside you.
11. Enlightenment cannot come from the mind. Enlightenment can come only when the mind disappears. In fact, enlightenment is the light and mind is the ignorance. Enlightenment is the wisdom; mind is the darkness.
12. God is the ultimate dance. You will have to learn ecstatic dancing to experience God. God is the dance where the dancer disappears. Then the experience arrives, showers on you, and you KNOW. But that knowing is not knowledge, that knowing is wisdom.God is the ultimate dance. You will have to learn ecstatic dancing to experience God. God is the dance where the dancer disappears. Then the experience arrives, showers on you, and you KNOW. But that knowing is not knowledge, that knowing is wisdom.
13. If your mind is dropped and you go beyond it, you enter into the world of wisdom — into the world of awakening. In that awakening everything is true. Because you are true, everything is authentic because YOU are authentic. In the mind you are untrue, you are false. That’s why whatever happens through the mind turns into a falsity, a hypocrisy. Mind is the greatest enemy of man.
14. Nature has tremendous wisdom, just we have forgotten to listen to it. The only way for you to listen to nature is by going deeper into yourself, because there are roots which are spread into existence. Those roots still understand the language of existence.
15. The mind always functions in an eccentric way, the mind is always an idiot. The really intelligent person has no mind. Intelligence arises out of no-mind, idiocy out of the mind. Mind is idiotic, no-mind is wise. No-mind is wisdom, intelligence. Mind depends on knowledge, on methods, on money, on experience, on this and that. Mind always needs props, it needs supports, it cannot exist on its own. On its own, it flops.
16. The asleep person at the most can dream that he is awake. But that too is a dream. That dream is knowledge. The person who is asleep and thinks that he knows… that is knowledge. But the person who really awakes is wise. Knowledge is a false, plastic substitute for wisdom. Wisdom is true knowledge — rather knowing than knowledge, because it has no full point to it. It goes on growing, it goes on flowing. The man of wisdom goes on learning; there never comes a stop. Don’t be knowledgeable, be wise.
17. When you are in deep meditation, you feel a great serenity, a joy that is unknown to you, a watchfulness that is a new guest. Soon this watchfulness will become the host. The day the watchfulness becomes the host, it remains twenty-four hours with you. And out of this watchfulness, whatever you do has a wisdom in it. Whatever you do shows a clarity, a purity, a spontaneity, a grace.
18. Wisdom needs unity, wisdom needs integration, wisdom needs a crystallization of awareness, of watchfulness, of watching your acts, your moods, your thoughts, your emotions…of watching everything that is happening in your inner world. By just watching it, a miracle starts happening. If you start seeing that you tell lies for no reason at all, just that very awareness will become a hindrance. Next time you are just on the verge of telling a lie a voice within you will say, “Watch, beware — you are moving into the trap again.” The next time you are falling into sadness, something inside you will make you alert, will alarm you. This is the path of transforming your energies — AES DHAMMO SANANTANO. AES MAGGO VISUDDHYA — this is the way of purification, this is the eternal law of transformation.

Osho Quotes on Seeker

1. Remember, always remember. Buddha insisted again and again: Remember you are a seeker. You are seeking your true home; you have not yet found it. Many lives you have been seeking, this life also you are seeking. Have you found it? Don’t waste your time, don’t go astray. Pour your whole energy into seeking, because nobody knows about tomorrow. This may be your last day. Find it so that you can live joyously and you can die joyously. YOU ARE A SEEKER.
2. To be total is a basic thing for any seeker, for anyone in search of silence and truth.
3. To be a sannyasin, to be a seeker of truth, means getting out of the world of crowd psychology, the mob mentality. Unless you become aware that the crowd is dragging you with itself and you step out of the power of the crowd, you will never be able to know what truth is, you will never become a buddha. And to be a buddha is your birthright.
4. If you come to me and you are really a seeker of truth, you immediately become related to me.
5. The seeker has to be empty, unprejudiced. The seeker has to be without any idea of what God is, or truth is. If he has some idea, the danger is he will project his idea on the existence and he will think that he has come to know the truth. Truth can be known only when you are utterly empty, when there is nothing to distort or project inside you; when you are so silent that you are only receptive, not projective. In total receptivity truth is known.
6. A seeker should keep in mind only one factor, and that is: to utilize each moment to awaken awareness. Then be it hunger or anger or lust or greed, every state can be utilized towards awareness. If you go on accumulating awareness bit by bit, eventually you will have a good store of fuel within you. In the flame this fuel creates, you will find that you are neither awake nor dreaming nor in deep slumber; you are beyond and apart from all three.
7. It is one of the perennial problems encountered by every seeker of truth. You cannot grasp truth — if you try, it will be far far away. You cannot possess truth — if you try, you will find your hands utterly empty. Truth cannot be possessed because it is not a thing. On the contrary, you have to be courageous enough to be possessed by truth — because it is a love affair.
8. Remember, if you are a real seeker… and this is a strange paradox: if you are a real seeker, you will have to drop all seeking as such. Otherwise you will go on seeking one thing after another, and there is no end to it. When all seeking stops, you are suddenly at the very center of your being. Seeking drives you outside, seeking takes you away from yourself. Jesus says: Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the doors shall be opened unto you. Ask and it shall be given.
9. The first thing for the seeker is to get rid of all these beliefs given by others. A believer can never find the truth.
10. The true seeker holds back nothing, he gives everything that he has. He shares totally his love, his joy, his experience — and he holds to nothing, he clings to nothing. He need not cling to anything: the whole universe belongs to him, the whole kingdom of God is his.
11. A seeker means one for whom the inquiry is not only curiosity, not a childish phenomenon, but a mature inquiry, for whom it has become a question of life and death. Unless truth becomes a question of life and death you are not a seeker.
12. Krishna, in the Gita, says: The real seeker is awake even while others are fast asleep. When it is night for others it is still day for him. Something deep inside him remains constantly alert. That which is a night for everybody else is not a night for the one who is aware, who is alert, who is meditative, who is balanced, who lives in equilibrium, who lives in silence. Something deep inside him keeps awake. The body sleeps, the mind sleeps, but the soul is always alert. It is never tired so it need not sleep at all. It is awareness itself; it is made of awareness.
13. The seeker has to be very cautious, very conscious on each step; because the false is easy to attain. It is very easy to become dead, and very difficult to be overflowing with life.
14. Jesus says: Truth liberates. This is one of the most important statements ever made, very fundamental for every seeker to understand. Truth liberates — not the truth that you gather from scriptures but the truth that you come across through your own experiencing.
15. Science is male, religion is female. Science is an effort to conquer nature; religion is a let-go, dissolving oneself into nature. The woman knows how to melt, how to become one. And each seeker of truth has to know how to dissolve into nature, how to become one with nature, how to go with the flow, without resisting, without fighting. And then you will see: the proportion will always be the same.
16. The truth of science is outside, but the truth of religion is within. Jesus may have discovered it, but his discovery will remain personal. It cannot be transferred to anybody else. Buddha may have discovered it, but the discovery will disappear w hen Buddha disappears. Each and every seeker will have to find the truth again and again, individually.
17. Every human being would be a seeker of truth if the society were not interfering with children.
18. As far as I am concerned the basic quality of a seeker of truth is to cut himself away from all belief systems, from all borrowed knowledge — in other words, to have the courage to be ignorant rather than to have borrowed knowledge. Ignorance has a beauty; it is at least yours, authentic, sincere. It has come with you. It is your blood, it is your bones, it is your marrow. Knowledgeability is ugly, absolute rubbish. It has been poured upon you by others, and you are carrying the load of it. And the load is such that it will not give you any opportunity to enquire on your own what truth is. Your collection of knowledge will answer immediately that this is truth.

Osho Quotes on Freedom

1. When I say to you that you are free, I mean that you are responsible. You cannot throw responsibility on anybody else, you are alone. And whatsoever you do, it is your doing. You cannot say that somebody else forced you to do it — because you are free; nobody can force you! Because you are free, it is your decision to do something or not to do something. With freedom comes responsibility. Freedom IS responsibility. But the mind is very cunning, the mind interprets in its own way: it always goes on listening to that which it wants to listen to. It goes on interpreting things in its own way. The mind never tries to understand what really is the truth. It has taken that decision already.
2. It is your freedom to be a Buddha or not to be a Buddha — and if you like sleep and the dreams it’s perfectly okay with me. I respect your freedom.
3. The moment you give your whole responsibility to somebody, unknowingly you are also giving your whole freedom.
4. When I say ‘freedom’, I mean be responsible. The more responsible you become, the more free you become; or, the more free you become, the more responsibility comes on you. Then you have to be very alert to what you are doing, what you are saying. Even about your small unconscious gestures you have to be very alert — because there is nobody else to control you, it is only you. When I say to you that you are free, I mean that you are a God. It is not licence, it is tremendous discipline.
5. The whole effort of meditation is to give you a taste of ultimate freedom. So don’t be afraid of anything — there is nothing to be afraid of. It is your own sky, it is your own truth, it is your own originality.
6. Many people become too much afraid of the responsibility because they don’t see the other side of the coin. On one side is written ‘responsibility’; on another side is written ‘freedom’. Responsibility means freedom. If somebody else is forcing you to be in misery, then you cannot get out of it — how can you get out of it if somebody else is forcing you into misery? Unless the other decides not to make you miserable you can never get out of it. If it is you who are responsible for your misery, then it is for you to decide. If you are enjoying being miserable, be miserable thousandfold — there is no problem. Enjoy! If you are not enjoying it, then drop it. Be clear-cut.
7. Man lives in freedom. Freedom needs insecurity and uncertainty. A real man of intelligence is always hesitant because he has no dogma to rely upon, to lean upon. He has to look and respond.
8. The greatest discovery in life, the most precious treasure, is of awareness. Without it you are bound to be in darkness, full of fears. And you will go on creating new fears — there is no end to it. You will live in fear, you will die in fear, and you will never be able to taste something of freedom. And it was all the time your potential; any moment you could have claimed it, but you never claimed it. It is your responsibility.
9. I am not here to discipline you, I am not here to give you principles — my whole effort is to give you an unprincipled Life, a spontaneous, undisciplined life. The only gift that I can present to you is freedom. And freedom has no walls to it, it is as infinite as the sky. Claim the whole sky — it is yours.
10. I don’t teach tolerance. I teach freedom from all the nonsense of being Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian. Be free from all prejudices. Be just a human being! And in that freedom you will find great joy, and in that freedom. for the first time you will feel love for other human beings, compassion, brotherhood. You will start feeling the whole universe as your family, your commune. And not only with human beings — when the fascist in you has disappeared and the fanatic is gone, even with the trees and the birds and the animals you will have a communion. You will be constantly in a beautiful dialogue with existence.
11. Meditation is the balance. Meditation is the bird with two wings: freedom and love.
12. At this moment, your sole concern is meditation. Go deeper into meditation and you will find compassion, and you will find understanding of compassion. You will find freedom, and you will find that freedom does not mean ungratefulness, unthankfulness.
13. Be on your own. Only that way one grows. There is no other way to grow. The mind always wants to throw responsibility onto somebody else; the mind always wants to become a slave. The mind is a slave. It is afraid of freedom, it is afraid of responsibility — hence so many churches and so many organisations exist in the world, because so many people are ready to fall in their traps. In fact churches are not responsible, it is the people’s need. Because they need certain types of imprisonments somebody is going to provide them.
14. Go in insecurity, go in freedom; go independent — there is no need to lean on anything or anybody. Don’t use me as a crutch. Allow me to help you to become independent, to be free of me and to be free of everything.
15. Any habit that becomes a force, a dominating force over you, is a sin. One should live more in freedom. One should be able to do things not according to habits but according to the situations.
16. God is available only when you are unburdened. But they will never know. They will knock at the doors of temples but they will never know where the real temple exists. The real temple is freedom: dying moment to moment to the past and living the present. And freedom to move, to move into the dark, into the unknown — that is the door to the divine!
17. Don’t throw the responsibility on anybody else. Nobody else is a deciding factor, neither your mother nor your father. Whatsoever the psychoanalysts say is really irrelevant to your being. It is for you to decide. Even the people who are mad are mad because of their own decision. Somehow they found it to be convenient. Somehow they decided; they voted for it. Nobody has forced them. Nobody can force anybody because the innermost quality of being is freedom. It is not something accidental; it is your very nature.
18. Each individual is a freedom, an unknown freedom. It is impossible to predict, impossible to expect. One has to live in awareness and in understanding.
19. You cannot possess your beloved like a thing; you cannot become a possessor — yet in a certain sense you possess your beloved, and in a certain sense you don’t possess. In fact, the more you love, the more you make your beloved free. In fact, the more freedom you give to your beloved, the more you possess. The more you possess, the less you possess. This is the paradox of love.
20. Buddha says: You can be victorious, but take the responsibility upon your own shoulders. It is your own desiring mind that has been creating your lives. This wheel of life and death is your own creation. When for the first time you realize this, you are shocked, shaken — shaken to the very roots. But slowly slowly, you start seeing a great freedom in it. You start rejoicing that, “If I am responsible, then there is a possibility for me to change the whole pattern.”
21. Guilt is bad, guilt is very dangerous — it destroys you. It is like a wound. But to feel responsible is very, very essential — it gives you soul, it gives you an integration. And unless you feel responsibles you are not a healthy person. A healthy person is always aware that whatsoever he is doing, he is responsible. The very idea of responsibility will give you a freedom, a dignity. An authentic being will come out of it. You will become more present, you will be more here and now.
22. I am not confusing you, I am simply giving you total freedom — and of course, freedom is confusing. Confusing, because you have to decide every moment. I am not going to decide for you. Who am I to decide for you? Anybody who decides for you is a murderer. And you are in search of your murderers. You want somebody to take the whole responsibility.

Osho Quotes on Inner Beauty

1. You don’t know what beauty is. You use the word, certainly, but your word is empty. Beauty is known only by one who has known the inner beauty, one who has known the inner flower opening. Then whenever a flower is seen, it reminds you of your inner beauty.
2. All this knowledge of the objective world is of no value in comparison to having a little glimpse of the inner sky and its beauty — its sunrises and sunsets, its days and nights, its blue sky and its stars. The outer then looks only a pale reflection of the inner. The inner becomes more real and the outer becomes just a shadow.
3. Only one thing I expect from all of you: to be yourself, to discover your inner beauty, your purity of consciousness, your hidden splendor — and spread it to as many people as possible. People are miserable. Help them to laugh a little, to sing a little, to dance a little.
4. Physical beauty and ugliness is not very important. The real thing is the inner. I can teach you how to be beautiful from within, and that is real beauty. Once it is there, your physical form won’t matter much. Your eyes will start shining with joy; your face will have a gleam, a glory. The form will become immaterial. When something starts flowing from within you, some grace, then the outer form is just put aside.
5. All beauty, all other beauties are only skin-deep. One can fool oneself for the time being, but sooner or later the other beauty wears out and one is left in utter ugliness because one never developed the real beauty. The real beauty has nothing to do with the face but with the luminosity that comes from your within. It has nothing to do with the form of the eyes but with light that shines through them. It has nothing to do with the body but with the inner presence that vibrates through the body. The real beauty arises at the core, at the very core of your being, and spreads outwards towards the body. The false beauty is just on the surface; it has no roots in you. It is ungrounded.
6. If your inner being changes, your whole outer life will be totally different. It will have a different fragrance, a different beauty, a different grace. And when your inner being is changed and becomes a flame of light, you will become a light unto others too. You will become a beckoning light, a great herald of a new dawn. Your very presence will trigger revolutions in other people’s lives.
7. The outer beauty comes from a different source than the inner. The outer beauty comes from your father and mother: their bodies create your body. But the inner beauty comes from your own growth of consciousness that you are carrying from many lives. In your individuality both are joined, the physical heritage from your father and mother and the spiritual heritage of your own past lives, its consciousness, its bliss, its joy.
8. In your inner being, look at the gaps. Be indifferent to the filled spaces, the occupied spaces. Be interested in the gaps, the intervals. Through those intervals you can dissolve into the ultimate beauty.
9. I want my people to know the peace, to know the silence, to know the beauty of their inner being, the blissfulness and love and light, and spread it. And spreading it is not going to be a missionary thing — you are not to convert anybody. Just your very presence, just your loving eyes, your peaceful existence — the charisma that arises with enlightenment, a certain different wavelength that the enlightened man starts radiating around him, changes people’s hearts without their knowing.
10. Once you have seen the inner beauty, then you will be able to see the outer also as beautiful. Once you have seen God within, you will be able to see him without too. The original is very beautiful.
11. Go inwards. Find your inner space, and suddenly, you will find an explosion of light, of beauty, of ecstasy — as if suddenly thousands of roses have blossomed within you and you are full of their fragrance.
12. Only your inner beauty can bring you close to me. Just beware of your mind dragging you into unawareness.
13. Self-awareness is awareness of your inner world, the kingdom of God. As you become aware of the tremendous beauty of your own being — its joy, its light, its eternal life, its richness, its overflowing love — you feel so blessed that you can bless the whole world without any discrimination.
14. Buddha says: But there is a flowering of your inner being, which is far more beautiful than sandalwood, rosebay or jasmine. Its beauty is its absolute freedom. It can go against the wind. The really virtuous man lives in freedom; he follows no commandments, he follows no scriptures, he follows nobody else but his own inner light. He lives according to his heart — he is a rebel.
15. Buddha is rich because the inner light is there. Jesus is rich because the inner light is there. You are rich if your inner being is suffused with light, bathed in light. You are rich if you know that existence is divine. You are rich if you have experienced the exquisite beauty that surrounds, that permeates the whole. You are rich if you have tasted the nectar of your own consciousness. You are rich if you are capable of sharing your love unconditionally. Otherwise you are a beggar.
16. In your inner being also you are carrying greater peaks than Everest, with eternal beauty.
17. You cannot go inwards if you are not finished with the outside world — its beauty, its treasure, its immense vastness. If you have not become acquainted with it, you will never think of going in, because the inner is vaster, the inner is bigger, the inner is more intelligent. The inner is pure wisdom. It is truth, it is beauty, it is godliness.
18. Unless you get rid of the inner Jew you will never be religious, you will never have innocence — and without innocence there is no beauty, no benediction.
19. The question is not how to change ugliness into beauty, how to change pain into pleasure, how to change misery into happiness. No. The question is how to change the unconscious into conscious, the unenlightened attitude into the enlightened attitude — how to change your inner world of being, how to attain to life-affirmative values and drop life-negative values.
20. The beauty is that the more you share the inner riches, the more you have them. The more you give, the more you have them. If you hoard them, you will lose them. So nobody who attains to inner blissfulness can hoard it. Hoarding kills it. He has to share it, it is an absolute necessity to share it. Only by sharing it remains alive and flowing. And more and more it goes on coming to you. One is simply amazed.
21. According to my experience, enjoying the beauty of flowers and stars suddenly makes you aware to look into yourself: what is my beauty? What is my being’s light? The outer beauty indicates towards the inner.
22. The man of the inner eye not only becomes aware of the inner mysteries, he also becomes aware of the mysteries that are just around him everywhere. A buddha, one who is awakened, is awakened to truth, to beauty, to goodness. His riches are great.

Osho Quotes on Effortlessness

1. To see existence as it is, choicelessly, is what is meant by effortlessness.
2. If you come to a really religious man you will feel a grace around him, effortless. He has not done anything to himself, he has simply relaxed into the ultimate, and you feel the effortlessness around him.
3. Effortlessness is a great phenomenon. Once you know it, many millions of things become possible to you. Through effort the market; through effortlessness the God. Through effort you can never reach to nirvana — you can reach lo New Delhi, but not to nirvana.
4. First you have to do all that you can do, and then you have to learn non-doing. The doing of the non-doing is the greatest doing, and the effort of effortlessness is the greatest effort.
5. Effort brings you to the moment of effortlessness, and effortlessness makes you available to God. So effort is not absolutely unnecessary, remember. It is not a condition to attain truth but it is a condition to attain effortlessness. It is just like when for the whole day you have been working hard, then in the night you move into a very very deep sleep. But if you have rested the whole day then in the night you will toss and turn and there will be no deep sleep possible. The whole day’s effort makes it possible for you to relax.
6. With Patanjali effort is the path, effortlessness is the goal; effort is the means, effortlessness is the end.
7. I teach you both effort and effortlessness, because unless you attain to effortless-effort, unless you attain to active passivity, unless you attain to a singing-silence — they look paradoxical — unless you attain to an unmoving dance, you have not attained.
8. Much can be done through effort but more can be done through effortlessness. Much can be achieved through will but much more can be achieved through will-lessness. And whatsoever you achieve through will will always remain a burden to you; it will always be a conflict, an inner tension, and you can lose it at any moment.It has to be maintained continuously — and maintaining it takes energy, maintaining it finally dissipates you.
9. Effortlessness means not doing anything, inactivity — AKARMA. Effort means doing much, activity — KARMA. Both have to be there. Do much, but don’t be a doer — then you achieve both. Move in the world, but don’t be a part of it. Live in the world, but don’t let the world live in you. Then the contradiction has been absorbed. Then you are not rejecting anything, not denying anything. Then the whole God has been accepted.
10. Buddha says: Never stop anywhere unless you have attained to the seventh — the state of a disciplined no-discipline, the state of effortlessness, the state of TAO, DHAMMA, the state which Kabir calls SAHAJ, spontaneous. But you have to work hard for it.
11. Kabir does not believe in effort, he believes in effortlessness. That’s what he calls SAHAJ SAMADHI, spontaneous ecstasy. Kabir is a lover; his path is the path of love. Love knows no effort.
12. Only that which is attained through effortlessness will never be a burden to you, and only that which is not a burden can be eternal. Only that which is not in any way unnatural can remain with you forever and forever.
13. For meditation you have to learn the art of non-achieving the art of effortlessness, the art of relaxing, the art of not doing anything. That’s what meditation is — just a total rest.
14. The whole zen attitude is to bring to your notice the fact that there is no effort to be made. The zen attitude is that of effortlessness.
15. Tao is not female-oriented. Tao is both — a synthesis. Circulation is masculine energy, and fixation is feminine energy. Reach to the non-active, reach to the passive through action. Through effort attain to effortlessness.
16. With effort, reach to effortlessness. With seeking, reach to a state of no-seeking. With mind, arrive at no-mind.
17. The only way to achieve something in the interior world is let-go — a kind of effortlessness, a relaxation. It is not a doing; it is nondoing. It is not action; it is inaction. And it seems difficult because everybody from the very beginning is told, “Do something; don’t just go on sitting there! Something is always better than nothing.” In the inner world these are not the laws. Nothing is better than everything. In the inner world, don’t do anything: just sit there! That will work because whenever you are doing something, you are involved with something else; when you are not doing anything then you relax in yourself. Where to go? Even going is not allowed, because it is part of action. So just simply get centered in yourself, and in those moments when you get centered in yourself is the possibility of liberation, the first glimpse of the world of inner sky, of inner stars.
18. One cannot attain the truth through any activity. Activity is needed to attain things of the world. Of you want to attain the inner truth you have to learn the art of no action, of effortlessness. And meditation is nothing but effortlessness, it is inaction. It is sitting silently doing nothing. It is not a doing, remember.
19. There are things which happen through effort, and there are things which happen only through effortlessness. There are things which will never happen through effort, and there are things which will never happen through effortlessness. All that is mundane happens through effort; all that is worldly happens through effort. And all that is sacred, other-worldly, happens through effortlessness.
20. If you are going towards the easy, the ego starts dying. And when there is no ego left, you have arrived to your reality — the right, the truth. And truth and right have to be natural. Easy means natural; you can find them without any effort. Easy is right means natural is right, effortlessness is right, egolessness is right.
21. When Zen masters say “effortlessness” they are referring to the state when your enlightenment is well rooted. Now there is no need of any effort; now you can be relaxed and at ease, it will grow on its own accord. It will bring much foliage, and many flowers, and many blessings.

Osho Quotes on Jesus Christ

1. If Jesus had been born in India he would not have been crucified, no. That has never been our practice here, because we have known even more dangerous people — Jesus is nothing. We have known Krishna. In fact, there is every possibility that CHRIST is a distorted form of KRISHNA. Jesus must have given something of the quality of Krishna. In Bengali, Krishna is KRISTO; in many European languages Christ is Cristo. CHRIST seems to be a form of KRISHNA; Christ is not Jesus’ name. Jesus Christ means Jesus the Krishna — something of Krishna was in him. Being in love with Mary Magdalene; something like Krishna in love with Radha.
2. Love is the message not only of Jesus Christ, but of all the awakened ones of all the ages. It has been so in the past and it is going to be so in the future too because love is the method to transform the lower o you into the higher, the base metal into gold. Love is alchemy. It is the basic methodology of transforming consciousness.
3. It is almost impossible to understand Jesus through the priests. The only pure way, the only possible way, is to go in, return inside. There you will meet Christ-consciousness. The only way to understand Christ is to become a Christ. Never be a Christian — be a Christ! Never be a Buddhist — be a Buddha! Never be a Hindu — be a Krishna! And if you want to be a Krishna, Christ or Buddha, then you need not go into the scriptures and you need not ask the scholars: you will have to ask the mystics how to go in.
4. Whatsoever you have been hearing about Jesus is not about Jesus, the real man; it is about the Jesus that Christians have invented, decorated to be sold in the market. The Christian Jesus is a commodity to be sold; Christ himself is a revolution. You will have to be transformed through him; he is the baptism of fire. You can be a Christian conveniently… but you can never be a REAL Christian conveniently. If you are REALLY following Jesus, there is bound to be trouble.
5. Never be a Christian if you really want to come closer to Christ. Your very Christianity will become a barrier, because the very dogma kills truth, the very creed kills love. Love needs no creed, no dogma, no bibles. Love is simply there, undefined, vulnerable, open… flowing in all directions. Love Jesus, and in that love nothing will be excluded.
6. Jesus became Christ on the cross, when he said, “Thy will be done. not mine.” That day he became a tree, he became a big, vast tree. Thousands could take shelter under him now. The tree bloomed, it filled the whole earth with fragrance.
7. Don’t be bothered about Christianity. Christianity has nothing to do with Christ. Jesus is available to all. Jesus is for those who are ready to transform themselves; Jesus is an art of inner transformation, of rebirth. Listen to his invitation. He still goes on saying,’Come, follow me.’
8. Thou art the Christ. What does this word’Christ’ mean? It has nothing to do with Jesus. Buddha is also a Christ, Krishna is also a Christ. And there is every possibility that the word’Christ’ comes from’Krishna’. In Bengali, Krishna is called’Cristo’. There is every possibility that Christ is a form of the same root, Krishna. What does’Krishna’ mean? The word means ‘that which attracts’. Krishna is one who has become capable of attracting the divine in him. Christ is also the same. It means the drop has become capable of attracting the ocean in him. Christ is a meeting-point of the drop with the ocean, of the finite with the infinite, of the horizontal with the vertical. Where the horizontal and the vertical meet, that point of meeting is Christ.
9. One does not become a Christian by becoming a member of a church — one becomes a Christian only by love. Jesus defines god as love, so all those who know what love is are Christians, but they are not followers of Christ. Christ was never a follower of anybody else; if he had been a follower the Jews would not have killed him — he was authentically himself. Buddha was not a follower of anybody; he was authentically himself. Lao Tzu was not a follower of anybody.
10. Jesus lived only three years as Christ. For thirty years he was in preparation, in meditation, in search. After thirty years when he attained his satori, he went to the marketplace and started giving the message that he had attained. It took three years for it to become known to people that this man had attained. They killed him immediately.
11. Jesus could say from the cross the last words: “Father, forgive these people because they don’t know what they are doing.” This is love, this is trust, and this is what is needed to become a real sannyasin. It is possible for every human being, and the moment it becomes possible you are really born….
12. The fools love very much to worship Jesus, but the contemporaries of Jesus crucified him. It is a very strange world. There is not even a mention of the name of Jesus in his contemporary literature. Except for his own disciples, nobody had even taken note of him. It is strange …such a man, whom the contemporaries could not tolerate alive — when he was only thirty-three they crucified him — but they have not even mentioned his name. Yet after two thousand years, half the world is Christian …strange! And if Jesus Christ comes today, the same Christians will crucify him again.
13. Mind is always a Judas, it can never become a Christ. Judas was the most knowledgeable disciple of Jesus. All the other apostles were illiterate; he was the most cultured. And it is natural, not accidental, that he betrayed Jesus. The heady people are always betrayers: they don’t know the beauty, the grace, of love, of commitment. They are traitors — the head is a traitor.
14. If you can create a tremendous longing, that very longing will function as a body for Christ. He will become alive for you! If you really love Christ and you are ready to die for him, he is living for you, because you will become his body. You will start functioning as HIS body. But that is a tremendous work. Very rarely has a person been able to do it: a St. Francis, a Teresa, an Eckhart. Very rarely. Down the centuries, twenty centuries after Jesus, not more than five people have been able to do that. In four centuries, one person only. It is very rare.
15. It can happen only through love. That is why Jesus says god is love; he makes them synonymous. Love, and love without any conditions — -that’s the only way to come closer to Christ-consciousness. In the East we call it Buddha-consciousness — it is the same phenomenon.
16. Love is the message of all the Christs. I am not using the singular word ‘Christ’, I am using the plural ‘Christ’ because to me Jesus is only one of the Christs. Lao Tzu is also a Christ, Buddha too, Mohammed, Zarathustra, Socrates — these are all Christs. Christ is a state of ultimate consciousness, just as Buddhahood is: Christ is synonymous with Buddhahood. And the message of all the Christs is love. It is through love that reality is revealed. It is through love that we become aware of the tremendous beauty of existence. It is through love, and only through love, that one enters into the temple of god.
17. It has not been told to you for centuries, in fact just the opposite has been taught: “Don’t love yourself, it is selfish,” they say. “Love others!” Even Christians who think they are following Christ have misinterpreted his tremendously significant statement. He says: “Love your enemies like yourself.” They have taken only half part of it; they say, “Love your enemies,” but they have forgotten the basic condition. Jesus says, “Love your enemies like yourself ‘ but if you don’t love yourself, in what way you are going to love your enemies? What will be the criterion? First you have to love yourself, then you can even love your enemies — what to say about friends? what to say about lovers?
18. If you start living in God you become intolerable to the so-called society. The society lives in hypocrisy. It cannot tolerate truth. Truth has to be crucified. It can love the Church but it cannot love Christ. It can love the Vatican pope but it cannot love Jesus. When Jesus is gone then it is good — you can go on worshipping him. When Mansoor is gone you can go on talking about him. But when he is there he is a fire. Only those who are ready to be consumed by the fire will be ready to fall in love with Mansoor.
19. Jesus is a divine fact. God is standing in front of them and they are asking whether he is really the God. What was the trouble that they could not believe in him — because Jesus could not follow all the predictions of the old prophets. Nobody is there to follow anybody else’s predictions. And this is the foolishness: Jews rejected Christ because they thought he didn’t follow all the predictions; Christians go on proving that he followed all the predictions. That’s why they accept him. Look at the foolishness — it is the same. Nobody looks at Jesus directly. Jews reject him, but the argument is the same: that he does not follow all the predictions that the scriptures say a Christ has to follow. Christians say that he does follow them. The argument is the same; the mind is the same. They don’t differ. Both are missing. They may be standing opposite each other, but their attitude is the same. Nobody is looking at Christ; nobody is following the footprints to the Celestial City. They have come back home to continue the fight.
20. Jesus is a rebel, but even his followers misunderstood him — they thought he was a revolutionary; they organized. Then Christ disappeared, and Christianity was left behind. Christianity is the corpse, the corpse of Christ.
21. With a Christ everything changes, because with a christ, humanity has progressed much. Love becomes more human a quality than anger and violence. And when man begins to think in terms of love, he has to change his god again. Then Jesus says that God is love. Mm? That was the problem between Jesus and Jewish priests, because their god was angry, their god was jealous, their god was violent; and this man was saying that God is love — a different god comes into the world. We go on changing our god, because we go on changing. But our god always remains a perfection of ourselves, nothing else.
22. This is what I mean when I say `float’, when I say `flow with the river’. Allow His creativity to flow through you. Don’t impose any pattern on Him; don’t impose your will. If you can allow yourself to be totally possessed, there is no misery and you are no more a human being. The Jesus within you has become Christ the very moment you allow total possession. Then the Jesus disappears and the Christ appears. Christ is the principle; Jesus is the son of the carpenter Joseph. Jesus disappeared at a certain moment and Christ entered. `Christ’ simply means that now the man is no longer man, the man is God-possessed. Just like when somebody goes mad and you say, “The man is maddened,” you can say “The man is ‘goddened’.” Now the man is no more there.

Osho Quotes on Thoughts

1. Just remain here, and you will be surprised. If you are just now here, all thoughts disappear, because all thoughts are either of the past or of the future. No thought is of the present.
2. Drop the mind! Stop thinking! Become more alert! See the trees and listen to the birds, with no screens of thoughts hindering the path. Meet directly! Truth is immediate, radiant, herenow. It is not that truth has to be discovered — only you have to become aware. Truth is already here.
3. Truth is the ultimate guest. You will have to empty yourself utterly, only then can truth come in. Thoughts are a pre-occupation. People who are too much in thoughts remain in a private kind of world. They have their own world of thoughts and dreams and projections and desires. They go on rushing here and there, but they don’t look at the trees, the greenery, the flowers, the birds, the people, the children; they can’t see anything.
4. In a deep moment of love, thinking stops. The moment is so intriguing, the moment is so tremendously powerful, the moment is so intensely alive, that thinking stops. You are simply in awe, a great wonder surrounds you. Or in deep meditation, when the moment of silence has come and you are absolutely silent, still — no flickering, no wavering, no trembling, the flame of your consciousness is straight — then thinking stops. Then you are outside the grip of the mind. Otherwise, everything is a mind trip.
5. Remember, thoughts are also just like birds: they are moving on their own. And sometimes it happens that people who are around you, their thoughts enter into your sky, your thoughts go on entering into their sky. That’s why sometimes you feel that with some man suddenly you become sad; with some other man suddenly you feel an upsurge of energy and happiness and delight. Just looking at somebody, being near to him, something changes in your mood.
6. Change your inclination from the mind to the heart. That is the first change. Think less, feel more. Intellectualize less, intuit more. Thinking is a very deceptive process, it makes you feel that you are doing great things. But you are simply making castles in the air. Thoughts are nothing but castles in the air.
7. Get out of your head and get into your heart. Think less, feel more. Don’t be too much attached to thoughts; get deeper into sensations. Just see the change: it is only a change of gestalt. You are lost in your thoughts, you cannot hear the birds singing. Then you change the gestalt. Just the focus changes, it is a shift. You are no more worried by the thoughts: suddenly all the birds are there singing, the flowers blooming, the sunrays passing through the trees and the wind playing around with the old dead leaves. Just a shift.
8. The present moment is so narrow that there is no space to think about. You can be, but thoughts cannot be. How can you think? If you think, it means it is already past, the moment has gone. Or you can think if it has not come yet, it is in the future.
9. These are the three layers: thoughts, the outermost; and being, the innermost; and feeling, in between, the bridge. Move from thoughts to feelings and from feelings to being, and start living from being. That does not mean that you don’t have any feelings — you will have feelings, but those feelings will follow being; they will have the flavor of being, the heartbeat of being. It does not mean that you will not be able to think — you will be able to think far more intelligently, but now your thinking will have the juiciness of your feelings and the light of your being; your thoughts will be luminous.
10. If you know a silent moment when there is no thought, you will be able to see that these thoughts are not realities. They are made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. They are waking dreams. You don’t have to fight with them, you have just to watch silently. As your watching becomes deeper, they will start disappearing. And in their place arises the experience of no-mind, of emptiness.
11. All thinking is out of fear. The more you become afraid, the more you think. Whenever there is no fear, thinking stops. If you have fallen in love with someone, there are moments with your beloved or your lover when thinking stops. Just sitting by the lake, doing nothing, holding hands, looking at the moon or the stars, or just gazing into the darkness of the night, sometimes thoughts stop because there is no fear. Love dispels fear just as light dispels darkness.
12. Right listening means you have becomes just your ears — the whole being is listening. No thinking inside, no thoughts, no thought process, only listening. Try it sometimes; it is a deep meditation in itself. Some birds are singing — the crows — just become listening, forget everything — just be the ears. The wind is passing through the trees, the leaves are rustling; just become the ears, forget everything — no thought process, just listen. Become the ears. Then it is right listening, then your whole being is absorbed into it, then you are totally present.
13. The ego can exist only in a goal-oriented vision; the mind can exist only in the future. The purpose brings future in; the goal creates the space for thoughts to move, desires to arise. And then naturally there is hurry, because life is short. Today we are here and tomorrow we are gone — maybe the next moment.
14. Meditation is clarity, absolute clarity, of vision. You cannot think about it. You have to drop thinking. When I say, ‘You have to drop thinking,’ don’t conclude in a hurry, because I have to use language. So I say, ‘Drop thinking,’ but if you start dropping, you will miss, because again you will reduce it to a doing. ‘Drop thinking’ simply means: don’t do anything. Sit. Let thoughts settle themselves. Let mind drop on its own accord. You just sit gazing at the wall, in a silent corner, not doing anything at all. Relaxed. Loose. With no effort. Not going, anywhere. As if you are falling asleep awake — you are awake and you are relaxing but the whole body is falling into sleep. You remain alert inside but the whole body moves into deep relaxation.
15. Understand the very motivation of all ideas, thoughts, desires. It is a seed-like thing. Watch inside — why can’t you be herenow? Why is it always that you are thinking of somewhere else? Why can’t you be happy as you are? Why are you thinking that tomorrow you will be happy? How can you be happy tomorrow if you are not happy today?. — because tomorrow is going to be born out of the moment. Out of this moment the next moment is going to be born. Today is going to become the parent of tomorrow. If you are unhappy today, you will be more unhappy tomorrow. You will have learned, by that time, many more tricks to be unhappy. You are practicing it, and you hope tomorrow to be happy? Then you are in a hopeless rut. You desire for tomorrow? — then you are continuously missing all that is here, and that is the only reality there is. If you can even for a single moment put aside desiring, then the projector stops, and the dreaming stops, and you are able to face reality.
16. Don’t give much energy to thoughts, that’s suicidal; you are poisoning yourself. Whenever thinking starts, if it is unnecessary — and ninety-nine percent of it is unnecessary — immediately bring yourself back to reality. Anything will help: even the touch of the chair you are sitting on, or the touch of the bed you are lying on. Feel the touch — it is more real than your thoughts about God, it is more godly than your thoughts about God because it is a real thing. Touch it, feel the touch, be the touch, be here and now. You are eating? — taste the food well, the flavor. Smell it well, chew it well — you are chewing reality! Don’t go wandering in thoughts. You are taking a bath? — enjoy it! The shower is falling on you? — feel it! Become more and more a FEELING center rather than a thinking center.
17. Meditation is fire — it burns your thoughts, your desires, your memories; it burns the past and the future. It burns your mind and the ego. It takes away all that you think that you are. It is a death and a rebirth, a crucifixion and a resurrection. You are born anew. You lose your own identity totally, and you attain to a new vision of life.
18. When the mind is with thoughts, the lake is with ripples; when the mind is without thoughts, the lake is without ripples. God is reflected perfectly when there is no ripple in you. Forget all about God — the only thing to be done is how to become ripple-less, how to become thoughtless, how to drop this constant obsession with thinking. It can be dropped — it is because of your cooperation that it continues. It is your energy that you go on giving to it that keeps it alive. It is just like a man on a bicycle: he goes on pedaling — it is his energy that keeps the cycle going on. Once he stops pedaling, the cycle may go a little further because of the past momentum, but then it has to stop.
19. Thinking is borrowed. All your thoughts are given by others to you. Watch — can you find a single thought that is yours, authentically yours, that you have given birth to? They are all borrowed. The sources may be known or unknown, but they are all borrowed. The mind functions like a computer, but before the computer can give you any answer you have to feed it. You have to supply all the information; then it will give you the answer. That’s what mind has been doing. Mind is a biocomputer. You go on collecting data, knowledge, information, and then when a certain question arises your mind supplies the answer out of that collection. It is not a real response; it is just out of the dead past. What is understanding? — understanding is pure intelligence. That pure intelligence is originally yours; you are born with it. Nobody can give you intelligence. Knowledge can be given to you, not intelligence. Intelligence is your own sharpened being. Through deep meditation one sharpens one’s being; through meditation one drops borrowed thoughts, reclaims one’s own being, reclaims one’s originality, redaims one’s childhood, innocence, freshness. Out of that freshness, when you act, you act out of understanding. And then the response is total, here-now; and the response is because of the challenge, not because of the past.

swami rajneesh:

existence is giving you fresh roses every minute
live it totally and next moment…another fresh rose…
life is so full of abundance
so many treasures…every second !
so vast…

totality will become your very lifestyle
living totally will become your very taste
and total living does not mean running here and running there…
doing this and doing that…

total living can be totally silent…vertically alert and stillness…stopped
total living may not need a single movement on your behalf
when you are total
everything stops

you are not going anywhere…you are enjoying the stop…
you do not even move your hand
but you live totally because you are stopped
so do not misunderstand thinking that you are living totally
because you are running here and running there

when you understand total living
everything will become still and stopped
you will become so silent
somebody will say…are you living totally ?
you are not even moving…
where is the totality in you ?
the totality is present
hidden within that present moment that is within you
and you know it !
you know that inside you something is buzzing like electricity
and the outside person says you did not go on holiday to goa ?
and then london and then to new york ? you are not total !

totality means…not a single movement
because you have come to such a peaked state
that totality has stopped you
so live as totally as possible…
no need to move even a finger !
it is a vertical totality…
so deep…so high into the sky…
vertical totality

it is not running around horizontally
from here to there…from there to here…
people think that is total living
but they are running away from life
your present herenow is life

the more you run here and there to be total
you are running away from life
you are moving astray from the vertical stillness
and the vertical movement

source – from swami rajneesh ebook “ZERO” – free download

swami rajneesh quotes

1) catch this simple thread of silence within you
and follow its silent voice
such a simple message !
you do not need anybody
to understand this simple message

2) keep the innocence…the nobodiness…
the vulnerability…the sensitivity…
let these be the taste and the flavour of your inner sky
you do not need to fight a battle
this is a love affair
it is not a battle with the other…with existence

3) the inner journey is the simplest journey possible
all your senses are leading you outside
all your five senses are making you move outward
the inner journey does not need anything
just close all the windows of outer movement
and move inward
you do not need anything special
and the moment you learn to move inward
it is a simple knack

4) pure innocence is the way of the inner

5) my first statement
the only statement i have ever written…
dissolved into your lotus feet o my beloved master

6) truth is so silent
it does not even want to say a word
it is reflected in tears…in silence…not in loudspeakers !

7) surrendering to a buddha
you are no more ordinary
the inner in you has recognized
your own inner buddhahood
and only a warrior…a being of light…
knows how to surrender

8 ) life is short
be alert
invest all your energies
in these vertical moments of the present

9) the inner journey…
you will take with you
you cannot carry anything else
and the clock is ticking fast

10) existence is giving you fresh roses every minute
live it totally and next moment…another fresh rose…
life is so full of abundance
so many treasures…every second !

11) this is the message of all masters
to learn how to be in the present
to dive in
to find your inner freedom
and you deserve it
you deserve it !
you deserve your inner buddha
it is your treasure
do not forget it for a moment

swami rajneesh ebook “ZERO” free download

Osho Quotes on Perfection

1. In life, only mad people ask for perfection. The perfectionist is another name for someone who is getting ready to become mad.
2. Change your basic philosophy of that of an achiever. Relax into your being. Don’t have any ideals, don’t try to make something out of yourself, don’t try to improve upon God. You are perfect as you are. With all your imperfections you are perfect. If you are imperfect, you are perfectly imperfect — but perfection is there. Once this is understood, where is the hurry? Where is the worry? You have already slowed down. And then it is a morning walk with no destination, going nowhere. You can enjoy each tree and each sunray and each bird and each person that passes by.
3. Perfectionism is a neurosis. It is an illness. And the more you try to become perfect, the more frustrated you will become. The goal of perfection has led the whole of humanity towards madness; the earth has almost become a madhouse. I don’t teach perfection. What do I teach? I teach wholeness, not perfection. Be whole; be total; but don’t think about perfection.
4. A person remains incomplete unless he becomes enlightened. You cannot expect perfection from a person before enlightenment, but you can expect perfection in a skill. You cannot expect perfection in the being, but in the doing it can be expected, there is no problem about it. An archer can hit the target without ever missing it — and may not be in it. He has learned the technique, he has become a mechanism, a robot. It is simply done by the head and the hand.
5. Meditation has nothing to do with perfectionism, but perfection comes as a by-product. As you become silent it follows you, wherever you go it is there — and it is not something dead, hanging around you. It is growing. That is the most miraculous thing about it, because we always think of perfection as the dead end.
6. Why this obsession with perfection? Then you will be tense, anxious, nervous, always uneasy, troubled, in conflict. The English word ‘agony’ comes from a root which means: to be in conflict. To be constantly wrestling with oneself — that is the meaning of agony. You will be in agony if you are not at ease with yourself. Don’t demand the impossible, be natural, at ease, loving yourself, loving others. And remember, a person who cannot love himself because he goes on condemning, cannot love anybody else either. A perfectionist is not only a perfectionist about himself, he is about others also. A man who is hard on himself is bound to be hard on others. His demands are impossible.
7. If you love the woman, you love the woman with all her limitations, with all her imperfections; she loves you with all your imperfections and limitations. But this is what — particularly to the Indian mind — is very significant: perfection. And to demand perfection is a kind of neurosis. It will drive the other neurotic, and as far as you are concerned, you are already neurotic. If you ask perfection in any human being you will create trouble for yourself and for the other, and your life will be nothing but misery. The real man of understanding and intelligence accepts the imperfections of the other and still loves. Love is great enough; it can even love people who have no character, people who are not pure according to your ideas, people who sometimes go astray, people who sometimes commit small sins. Love is big enough to accept all this and to transform it too.
8. A perfectionist is neurotic. And not only is he neurotic, he creates neurotic trends around him. So don’t be a perfectionist, and if somebody is a perfectionist around you escape away from him as fast as you can before he pollutes your mind. All perfectionism is a sort of deep ego trip. Just to think of yourself in terms of ideals and perfection is nothing but to decorate your ego to its uttermost. A humble person accepts that life is not perfect. A humble person, a really religious person, accepts that we are limited, that there are limitations.
9. Ego wants to be the first, ego wants to put everybody below itself; hence it takes itself seriously. Hence it is perfectionist: it demands perfection, which is impossible. Nobody is perfect; nobody can exist for a single moment if he is perfect. Imperfection is the way of life, because it is possible to grow only if you are imperfect. If you are perfect there is no more growth, no more evolution. If you are perfect you are stuck. Perfection means death; imperfection means flow, growth, movement, dynamism. The ego demands perfection of oneself and of others too. It asks for the impossible, and because the impossible cannot be achieved it can go on living. It is not happy with the ordinary; it wants the extraordinary, and life consists only of the ordinary. But the ordinary is beautiful, the ordinary is exquisite. There is no need of anything extraordinary. The ordinary life is sacred, but the ego condemns it as mundane. It demands extraordinary life. Hence all the religions go on inventing stories about their founders which are all untrue: Moses separating the sea, Jesus walking on the water… all these stories are inventions, lies, created by the followers just to prove that their master is extraordinary; he is not an ordinary human being.
10. Buddha says: Meditation is enough to solve your problems, but something is missing in it — compassion. If compassion is also there, then you can help others solve their problems. He says: Meditation is pure gold; it has a perfection of its own. But if there is compassion then the gold has a fragrance too — then a higher perfection, then a new kind of perfection, gold with fragrance. Gold is enough unto itself — very valuable — but with compassion, meditation has a fragrance.
11. Meditation makes one perfect — not a perfectionist, remember. A perfectionist is a neurotic. Meditation makes you perfect, but not a perfectionist. Perfection comes just like a shadow to meditation: you need not bother about it, you need not care about it. it is simply there, it will follow you. The perfectionist has an idea of a goal ahead of him and the meditator has no idea of perfection; perfection follows him from the beyond like a shadow. That is the difference between a perfectionist and a perfect man. Perfection is behind the perfect man and ahead of the perfectionist. Because it is ahead it drives him nuts. he is trying to become it, he is sacrificing his present for the future and once you become accustomed of sacrificing your present for the future your whole life will be rained; not only this but your future lives will be ruined.
12. Meditation is not a static thing. It is a balance. You will have to attain it again and again and again. You will become more and more capable of attaining it, but it is not going to remain forever, like a possession in your hands. It has to be claimed each moment — only then is it yours. You cannot rest, you cannot say, ‘I have meditated and I have realised that now there is no need for me to do anything more. I can rest.’ Life does not believe in rest; it is a constant movement from perfection to more perfection. Listen to me: from perfection to more perfection. It is never imperfect, it is always perfect, but always more perfection is possible.
13. Perfection is a goal somewhere in the future, totality is an experience herenow. Totality is not a goal, it is a style of life. If you can get into any act with your whole heart, you are total. Totality brings wholeness and totality brings health and totality brings sanity. The perfectionist completely forgets about totality. He has some idea how he should be, and obviously time will be needed to reach that idea. It can’t happen now — tomorrow, day after tomorrow, this life, maybe next life… so life has to be postponed.
14. The ego remains imperfect and goes on demanding perfection. My whole message is to see the truth, to see the hell that ego creates in the name: of perfection, uniqueness — and to let it drop. Then there is a tremendous beauty — no ego, no self, just a deep emptiness. And out of deep emptiness is creativity, out of that nothingness arises bliss, SATCHITANANDA, truth. Being, bliss, all arise out of that absolute purity. When the ego is not, you are a virgin. Christ was born out of a virgin; your nothingness is that Mother Virgin, Mother Mary.
15. The moment you desire something you are saying that “I am wiser than the whole.” You are saying that “You don’t know what has to be done and I have come to advise you.” You are telling the whole that “The way things are is not right: they should be according to me.” Prayer is just the opposite of desire. Prayer means, “The way things are is absolutely perfect, they are as they should be. Hence, I have nothing except a deep gratitude.” Real prayer is bowing to existence in tremendous thankfulness because whatsoever is, the way it is, is the most perfect way it can ever be. A prayerful heart knows that the universe is perfect each moment; it is moving from perfection to more perfection. The world is not moving from imperfection to perfection, remember: it is moving from perfection to more perfection. That’s the understanding of the prayerful heart. But we are full of desires.
16. You are human, in a certain time, in a certain space, with certain limitations. Accept those limitations. Perfectionists are always on the brink of madness. They are obsessed people — whatsoever they do is not good enough. And there is no way to do something perfectly — perfection is not humanly possible. In fact, imperfect is the only way to be. So what do I teach you here? I don’t teach you perfection, I teach you wholeness. That is a totally different thing. Be whole. Don’t bother about perfection. When I say be whole, I mean be real, be here; whatsoever you do, do it totally. You will be imperfect but your imperfection will be full of beauty, it will be full of your totality. Never try to be perfect otherwise you will create much anxiety. So many troubles are there already; don’t create more troubles for yourself.
17. I don’t teach perfection. Perfection simply creates neurosis in people. Perfectionists are neurotics; they drive themselves crazy in trying to be perfect, because they are trying to do the impossible. I teach totality; I teach wholeness, not perfection. Be total in whatsoever you are doing. Be total. If you are angry, then be totally angry. If you are in love, then be totally in love. If you are sad, then be totally sad. Don’t be halfhearted in anything. That is a totally different approach towards life.
18. The path of Buddha is of total surrender: total surrender to the dhamma, to tao, to the universal law, to God. These are different names for the same phenomenon. We are living in a cosmos, not in a chaos. Everything is as perfect as it can be; nothing can be improved upon. The very idea of trying to improve upon things is sheer stupidity. Those who have known, they have known the absolute perfection of existence. Then what is left? To dissolve in the whole and celebrate!

Osho quotes and insights on Tension

1. The mental stress and tension the West is suffering from today is the direct result of too much thinking. The anxiety and anguish of the West comes from thinking stretched to its ultimate; it is suffering under the crushing weight of the mind.
2. It seems tension has nothing to do with anything outside you, it has something to do within you. Outside you always find an excuse only because it looks so idiotic to be tense without any reason. Just to rationalize, you find some reason outside yourself to explain why you are tense. But tension is not outside you, it is in your wrong style of life. You are living in competition — that will create tension. You are living in continuous comparison — that will create tension. You are always thinking either of the past or of the future, and missing the present which is the only reality — that will create tension. It is a question of simple understanding; there is no need of any competition with anybody. You are yourself, and as you are, you are perfectly good. Accept yourself. This is the way existence wants you to be. Some trees are taller; some trees are smaller. But the smaller trees are not tense — neither are the taller trees full of ego. Existence needs variety. Somebody is stronger than you; somebody is more intelligent than you — but in something, you also must be more talented than anybody else.
3. One should never go against one’s nature. That is the only sin, according to me, to go against one’s nature; and the only virtue is to go with your nature in total harmony. And never compare yourself with others; everybody is different, and everybody’s liking is different. Once you start comparing, thinking that, “Somebody is going deeper into things, moving more slowly, and I am moving faster,” then tension will arise in you: “Perhaps I am hurrying too much.” All these tensions arise out of comparison. Remember one thing: You have to be in tune with your own nature, not in tune with anybody else. So always feel within yourself. If it is pleasant, do it. If it feels tense, forced, then it is not for you. Don’t do it. Always go with the river of life. Never try to go against the current, and never try to go faster than the river. Just move in absolute relaxation, so that each moment you are at home, at ease, at peace with existence.
4. A real education will not teach you to compete; it will teach you to cooperate. It will not teach you to fight and come first. It will teach you to be creative, to be loving, to be blissful, without any comparison with the other. It will not teach you that you can be happy only when you are the first. That is sheer nonsense. You can’t be happy just by being first. And in trying to be first you go through such misery that you become habituated to misery by the time you become the first. By the time you become the president or the prime minister of a country you have gone through such misery that now misery is your second nature. You don’t know now any other way to exist; you remain miserable. Tension has become ingrained, anxiety has become your way of life. You don’t know any other way; this is your very style. So even though you have become the first you remain cautious, anxious, afraid. It does not change your inner quality at all. A real education will not teach you to be the first. It will tell you to enjoy whatsoever you are doing, not for the result but for the act itself. Just like a painter or a dancer or a musician….
5. Our vision is small; existence is infinite. So whatsoever we can decide will be of no significance. In fact, it will create all kinds of hindrances. If existence is going to the south and we plan to go to the north, then there will be a tension between you and existence. This is the cause of so many people around the world living in anxiety, anguish, tension, disappointment, frustration. The reason is, that in the first place they started expecting, hoping, desiring, planning. Existence is not at fault. Existence is not deposing their proposals. Existence is simply going on its own way; and my experience is to just go with existence. I call it the “let-go way.” So wherever the river takes….
6. The ideal means you are not that which you should be. It creates tension, anxiety, anguish. It divides you, it makes you schizophrenic. And the ideal is in the future and you are here. And how can you live unless you are the ideal? First be the ideal, then start living — and that never happens. That cannot happen in the very nature of things. Ideals are impossible; that’s why they are ideals. They drive you crazy and make you insane. And condemnation arises, because you always fall short of the ideal. Guilt is created. In fact, that is what the priests and the politicians have been doing — they want to create guilt in you. To create guilt they use ideals; that is the simple mechanism. First give an ideal, then guilt comes automatically.
7. In the past man always lived such an unburdened, tension less life. The only reason was: everybody was capable of going into prayer. It was natural. People would go and talk to the mountains or to the rivers or to the sun or to the moon… these are all faces of God! manifestations of him. Alive, throbbing, pulsating, right now.
8. The mind tries in every way to remain unconscious as much as possible. Down the ages, every society and every culture has condemned alcohol and other intoxicating drugs, but to no effect — they have survived and they go on growing more and more influential. The reason is: mind wants to drown itself in unconsciousness, which is its only relaxation. Otherwise there is always tension.
9. Whatsoever we go on giving to the mind, we are only concerned that it must remain occupied; that’s all. Occupation in itself becomes an aim. One should not be unoccupied, so go on reading anything, go on listening to anything, go on seeing anything, go on… do something with the mind! So whatsoever is around, we are vulnerable to it. This is fatal, because then you create a very confused mind-body, very confused — with contradictions, with infinite contradictions. And that’s the reason there is so much anguish, so much tension, and so much misery inside. That’s the reason the mind is just mad.
10. The West has just the opposite idea — of a small life. It created great tension and anxiety, but it created technology, scientific developments, richness, comfort, luxuries; it created everything. But the man inside was lost, because he was always running. He was never where he was; he was always going for something else. And that goal where you can stop never comes. So in the West people have means of speed, and they are going fast. But don’t ask them, “Where are you going?” Don’t waste their time in asking such stupid questions! All that matters is that they are going fast; it does not matter where they are going and why they are going.
11. Idea of a short life is a dangerous idea. That’s why even though the East is very poor, there is no despair, there is no anguish. The West is rich, but the richness has not brought anything to its spirituality, or its growth; on the contrary, the West is very tense. It should be more relaxed, it has all the comforts of life. But the basic problem is that deep down the West knows that life is such a short thing; we are standing in a queue, and every moment we are coming closer to death. Since we were born, we started the journey towards the graveyard. Every moment life is being cut — becoming shorter and shorter. This creates a tension, an anguish, an anxiety. All the comforts, all the luxuries, all the riches become meaningless, because you cannot take them away with you. You will have to go into death alone. The East is relaxed. First, it does not give death any importance; it is just a change of form. Second, because it is so relaxed, you become aware of your inner riches, which will be going with you — even beyond life. Death cannot take them away. Death can take everything that is outside you and, if you have not grown your inner being, naturally there will be fear that you cannot save anything from death; it will take everything that you have. But if you have grown your inner being, if you have found peace, blissfulness, silence, joy, which are not dependent on anything outside, if you have found your garden of being and seen the flowers of your own consciousness, the question of fearing death does not arise at all.
12. What really went wrong is man has never been, hitherto, accepted in his totality. That has been the misery in the West; that has been the misery in the East. The West has chosen only the body part and has forgotten about the soul. The Western culture is the culture of the without, and the Eastern culture is the culture of the within. The East tries to live only as a soul, and the West tries to live only as a body. The West is rich, affluent, and will become more and more affluent, richer and richer. It has worked hard to make the world beautiful. The West knows how to live, but because the soul has been neglected, there is great tension inside. The West is poor inside — rich on the outside, poor on the inside. The East has tried to meditate, to pray, to search for the inner truth, and has neglected the outside. So the outer has become very poor; the inner has a richness.
13. Man has completely forgotten the inner dimension, he has become obsessed with the outer. He goes on and on changing toys, more money, more power, more prestige. These are all toys. You can play with them but meanwhile you are wasting precious time. They can keep you occupied but they will also keep you in deep anguish, in tension, in anxiety, for the simple reason that the world outside is a world of competition, it is struggle. You are not alone there; millions and millions of people are searching for the same things. All are after money, so everybody is at each other’s throat. It is a violent struggle, a war — sometimes in the open, sometimes underground. Life on the outside remains feverish; it is a kind of delirium, an insanity. There is no rest, no peace, no bliss, no relaxation, unless one enters inside, then one enters a totally different world. There you are alone. There is no question of conflict, there is nobody to fight anybody, no question of competition. There is nothing to achieve, nothing to lose, nothing to gain; a great calmness descends upon you. That is the meaning of Sauro; Sauro means in the shade. To be outside yourself is to be under the hot sun, it is to be continuously under fire. To be in is to be in the shade — cool, calm, collected.
14. If you are only attentive then sooner or later you will be tired of it. You cannot be attentive for twenty-four hours; you will need holidays. You will need alcohol, drugs, to drop out of that attentiveness. That’s what is happening in the West. People have become more attentive; attentiveness has been cultivated. The whole educational mechanism forces you to become more attentive. Those who are more attentive succeed, those who are less attentive fail. It is a very competitive world — if you want to succeed you have to be very attentive. But then it tires you. Then the tension becomes heavy on the head, then it drives you neurotic. Then madness becomes a very very natural by-product of it. Many more people go neurotic in the West than in the East. The reason is clear: in the West, attentiveness has been practised, down through the ages. It has paid much. The technology, the scientific progress, affluence — all that has come through being attentive. In the East, people have remained in a relaxed state. But if you are relaxed without being attentive, it becomes lethargy. It becomes passivity, it becomes a kind of dullness. Hence the East has remained poor, unscientific, non-technological, starving.
15. The higher your centre of breathing is, the more tense you are; the lower the point of your breath, the more you are relaxed. If your breathing is from tanden, there will be no tensions in your life. This is the very reason why children are free from tension. Observe your breath in a moment of relaxation. You will find it coming from tanden. When you are filled with tension and anxiety, observe your breath. It will become short, and it will come from the chest. Short breath is an indication that you are far removed from your original nature. There is a reason why we breathe from the chest. A very wrong concept has pervaded in the world. According to this, the chest should be well developed and large, and the abdomen should be flat, almost against the back. This mad tendency has created a terrible disturbance within the human body. In order to inflate the chest, the breath has to fill the chest and not be allowed to go down further. This brings about the dangerous state of segregation of the animal level and the mental level.
16. The more tension-ridden the mind, the more momentary the intercourse. Ejaculation takes place quicker when the mind is tense. The greater the tension, the quicker the ejaculation, because a tension-ridden mind is not looking for intercourse but for release. In the West sex serves no greater purpose than a sneeze. A tension is thrown out, a load is unburdened. When the energy is thrown out a load is unburdened. When the energy is thrown out you feel dissipated. To relax is one thing, to feel dissipated is quite another. Relaxation means the energy is within and you are resting, and to feel dissipated means energy is thrown out and you lie exhausted. You are weakened with the loss of energy and you think you are relaxing. So as tension increased in the West sex became a release from tension, a freedom from the pressure of an internal energy. There are thinkers in the West who are not ready to consider sex as being any more valuable than a sneeze. The nose tickles, you sneeze, and so the mind is relieved. In the West they are not ready to give sex any more recognition than this. They are correct also, because what they are doing with sex is no more than this. In the East people are slowly coming to this point, because the East is also becoming tense. Somewhere, in some distant mountain cave, we might find a man who is not tense. He lives in a world of mountains and streams, trees and woods, and is as yet untouched by civilization.
17. In the West you eat almost five times. The eastern mind cannot conceive of it. What are you doing — five times? Two times is enough! Buddhists cannot believe it — five times? Once is enough! But the West is so active, so hectic, that the energy is being dissipated. Everybody is boiling and destroying their energy. There is so much worry and tension that everybody is almost always on the verge of breakdown.
18. Even by continuously talking, violence is released. Women talk more than men because men can be violent in other ways while women cannot be. That is the only reason. They talk more! They talk continuously, they talk madly, because man has other possibilities for expressing violence — in the office, with the car, etc. Have you observed a man who is angry driving his car? He is releasing his anger through the accelerator. The car will speed up He is releasing anger, and the car is just a medium. Fifty percent of car accidents are not because of cars but because of drivers. not because of traffic but because of mental tension.
19. Everybody is confused, otherwise all would have been Buddhas! The whole world is confused. Confusion is intrinsic to the human mind. The confusion has a very fundamental reason, there is an ontology to confusion. Man comes from the animals and man has to become god, that is the confusion. Half belongs to the world of the animals, the unconscious part, and the other half is trying to become conscious, absolutely conscious, hence the tension. Both go on trying to manipulate you, and you are never sure who you are — whether to go this way or to go that way. In being pulled between these two the confusion arises.
20. To be born as a human being is just the beginning, and then you have to come to this point where all discipline can be dropped. Then you have become a God, then you have become as spontaneous as nature, then there is no tension, then you don’t have any character, then you are as innocent as a child. Your awareness is perfect now, your awareness is enough now. Nothing else is needed.
21. Hell is hot, fire. But I tell you, you are providing your own coal. This is how things are: If you move against nature you will be in misery. Misery means moving against nature, and misery is a good indication — if you understand. It shows that somewhere you are going wrong, that’s all. Put things right! Misery is a help. Anguish, anxiety, tension, are indications that somewhere something is going wrong. You are not with the total. Somewhere you have started your own private movement — and then you will be in misery.