Rajneesh Quotes

If you try too much to change the outside, that shows that you are still attached. If a man tries to be detached, it shows attachment. Why bother about detachment if you are not attached? If a man escapes from women, it shows that sex is still the obsession. Otherwise, why escape from women if you are not obsessed?

It's only when you become love - in other words, when you have dropped your illusions and attachments - that you will "know." As you identify less and less with the "me," you will be more at ease with everybody and with everything.

To realize that you are not your thoughts is when you begin to awaken spiritually.

For many people, the first indication of a spiritual awakening is that they suddenly become aware of their thoughts. They become a witness to their thoughts, so to speak. They are not completely identified with their mind anymore and so they begin to sense that there is a depth to them that they had never known before.

You can enter yoga, or the path of yoga, only when you are totally frustrated with your own mind as it is. If you are still hoping that you can gain something through your mind, yoga is not for you.

When we cultivate mystical awareness or transcendent identity--which is a natural outgrowth of meditation and other practices--what happens is that we begin to take a witness position on our own lives, and that includes our minds. We break the illusion that we think our own thoughts, which is not always the case. Some ideas just arrive in our heads.

Wrong thoughts are inside us just because we identify ourselves with these thoughts. If we identify with something else, immediately they have to leave us.

Work done for the Self gives no bondage. Neither desire pleasure nor fear pain from work. It is the mind and body that work, not I. Tell yourself this unceasingly and realise it. Try not to know that you work.

So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.

If you begin to identify yourself with that inner awareness, and then you realize you're not really doing anything. As long as there's the thought, "I'm trying to wake up," that thought of "I" is still there.

So the single most vital step on your journey towards enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind.

Actions themselves form no bondage. Bondage is only the false belief,"I am the do-er."

Anxiety comes into existence only when we become identified with small things. And they all pass.

Desire disappears as you become more and more aware. When awareness is one hundred percent, there is no desire at all.

There is an intrinsic law: thoughts don't have their own life. They are parasites; they live on your identifying with them. When you say, 'I am angry,' you are pouring life energy into anger, because you are getting identified with anger. But when you say, 'I am watching anger flashing on the screen of the mind within me,' you are not anymore giving any life, any energy to anger.

The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.

The secret to peace-of-mind is to not identify with anything other than your true self.

Our ideas of self are created by identification. The less we cling to ideas of self, the freer and happier we will be.

Mental alertness is not awareness. Mental alertness only enhances your survival instincts. It does not take you towards liberation.

It is the witness alone that can work without any desire, without any idea of going to heaven, without any idea of blame, without any idea of praise. The witness alone enjoys, and none else.

The mind of one meditating on a single object becomes one-pointed. And one-pointedness of mind leads to abidance in the self. Real attainment is to be fully conscious, to be aware of surroundings and the people around, to move among them all, but not to merge consciousness in the environment. One should remain in inner independent awareness.

Create inner freedom through witnessing. Sannyas is only for the inner freedom. And live out of inner freedom.

If I say, if I talk about, 'I want to be enlightened...' it implies a future. And there isn't any.

We first have to find the way of freedom from involvement before we can introduce freedom in involvement.