Rajneesh Quotes

I believe it is our own misperceptions of who we really are that leads to every self-created hell you'll find in this world.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

I'm getting stronger as a person, but sometimes I just need to get over myself!

↑ top up position down The fact that I suspect I'm an asshole means I probably am not, because a real asshole doesn't think he's an asshole, does he? Therefore, by realizing that I'm an asshole, I am in fact negating that very realization, am I not? Descartes's Asshole Axiom: I think I am; therefor I'm not one.

We are what our thoughts have made us

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.

The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.

Humility is not renunciation of pride but the substitution of one pride for another.

You will never rise above the image you have of yourself in your own mind.

Only a man who cannot conquer his deficiencies feels the need to convince the world that he has none.

we are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.

The vain.- We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities other ascribe to us - in order to deceive ourselves.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

Our character is composed of our ideas and our feelings: and, since it has been proved that we give ourselves neither feelings nor ideas, our character does not depend on us. If it did depend on us, there is nobody who would not be perfect. If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

Ego is simply an idea of who you are that you carry around with you.

We do. Or re-create the ones we have, and project. My whole life is projection.

I surrounded myself with people who indulged my ego. They treated me as though I was Ziggy Stardust or one of my characters, never realising that David Jones might be behind it.

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.

The ablest man I ever met is the man you think you are.

When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a colouring book, with the inside not yet completed.