Rajneesh Quotes

Meditation teaches us to focus and to pay clear attention to our experiences and responses as they arise, and to observe them without judging them.

Let your ears hear without trying to hear. Let the mind think without trying to think and without trying to stop it. That is practice.

Meditation is not something you do in the morning and you are finished with it, meditation is something that you have to go on living every moment of your life. Walking, sleeping, sitting, talking, listening - it has to become a kind of climate. A relaxed person remains in it. A person who goes on dropping the past remains meditative.

Here is the Divine Dichotomy... The way to 'get there' is to 'be there'. Just be where you choose to get!' It's that simple.

Meditation is not contemplation because it is not thinking at all - consistent, inconsistent, crazy, sane. It is not thinking at all; it is witnessing. It is just sitting silently deep within yourself, looking at whatsoever is happening inside and outside both. Outside there is traffic noise, inside there is also traffic noise - the traffic in the head. So many thoughts - trucks and buses of thoughts and trains and airplanes of thoughts, rushing in every direction. But you are simply sitting aloof, unconcerned, watching everything with no evaluation.

Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, or unconditional friendliness, a simple, direct relationship with the way we are.

Don't judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction. Don't make a personal problem out of them. You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.

Meditation state is a place of deep relaxation where you can pinpoint the things you do and to set a paradigm switch from effect to cause. So how to be a cause in your own life.

Meditation is really letting go of all the thought processes or 'mind traffic' that gets in the way of just whatever is between you and space and consciousness.

To meditate is to observe yourself, for you are totally responsible for your body, mind, thought.

The only way you will ever awaken is through silence, not through analyzation of facts. Not by sorting out good and bad, but through simple silence, letting go. Letting go of all thoughts, all the hurts, all the dogmas and concepts. Letting go of these things daily.

Creativity is secondary, meditation is basic and fundamental; everything should come out of your meditation. Then it will give you a beatitude, your being a new song, and it will help others to experience something of it. It will depend on their meditativeness.

So meditation is not really mind-effort. Real meditation is not effort at all. Real meditation is just allowing the mind to have its own way, and not interfering in any way whatsoever - just remaining watchful, witnessing. It silences, by and by, it becomes still. One day it is gone. You are left alone.

Go deep into meditation. and be meditation I mean silence, awareness, witnessing. You can meditate any time of the day, you can meditate working, walking, doing things. Meditation is not something separate from life; it should not be separate, otherwise it remains a little artificial. Meditation should be spread all over life. You should walk in meditation, you should sit in meditation; that means silently, fully aware. Slowly slowly it becomes your very flavour, then the bridge is created.

Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don't take your thoughts too seriously.

Meditation is not a withdrawal from life. Meditation is a process of understanding oneself.

Only the human heart can live in present moment awareness. The human mind cannot, because its essential nature is to ponder the past and plan the future. This is why all wise beings encourage us to go beyond the mind into the timeless, boundless transcendence of heart-centered awareness.

When you are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it. The mind itself is a wonderful tool. Dysfunction sets in when you seek your self in it and mistake it for who you are.

Meditation isn’t about what’s happening; it’s about how you relate to what’s happening.

Whenever you meditate, there are glimpses. Then the mind comes in and says, 'Be happy! Look, I have done it.' And immediately the contact is lost.

When you listen to the voice in your head, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.

The real meditation is how you live your life.

Meditation means undoing what the society has done to you. It has reduced you to a machine; you have to de-automatise yourself, you have to become a man again. You have to come out of this state of unconsciousness, of mechanicalness. You have to come out of this sleep. It is possible only through meditation. There is no other way, there has never been, there will never be. The only way to reduce a man to a machine is take away his consciousness force him to function unconsciously. And just the opposite is the way of meditation: give him back his consciousness.

When you are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it.

[T]hat is the true function of meditation: to create a space in you where you can be rich, infinitely rich, utterly peaceful, absolutely ecstatic.