Rajneesh Quotes

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

Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.

Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.

As long as you look for a Buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the Buddha.

Meditation means keeping one mind. You must understand - what is life? What is death? If you keep one mind, there is no life, no death. Then if you die tomorrow, no problem; if you die in five minutes, no problem.

There is no fundamental difference between the preparation for death and the practice of dying, and spiritual practice leading to enlightenment.

The mind is the Buddha, and the Buddha is the mind.

Your nature is the Buddha.

I'm not speaking as someone who has reached satori or anything else. I'm a student.

The truth is that you can only come to know God when you give up the past and the future in your mind and merge totally into the now, because God is always here now.

When a human being becomes so still that they begin to lose awareness of their gender, and they are simply looking into that abyss where there is no notion of self whatsoever, the world disappears. And that's really the only place to go. It's the only place to remain.

At the Cruiserweight Classic finale, I said... I don't know if people had looked it up, or if they had heard it before, but it was an old Zen proverb. 'Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, you chop wood, carry water.' It can be interpreted a lot of ways, but for the most part it's about staying in the moment.

Enlightenment is the understanding that this is all, that this is perfect, that this is it. Enlightenment is not an achievement, it is an understanding that there is nothing to achieve, nowhere to go.

If you want to travel the Way of Buddhas and Zen masters, then expect nothing, seek nothing, and grasp nothing.

Zen is the only religion in the world that teaches sudden enlightenment. It says that enlightenment takes no time, it can happen in a single, split second.

The mind is the world and the no-mind is freedom from the world. The mind is misery and no-mind is the end of misery and the beginning of ecstasy.

Zen is everywhere.... But for you, Zen is right here.

Enlightenment is nothing but your consciousness being concentrated on a single point - now and here.

The process of meditation does not take you to some new world; it only introduces you to the world where you have been for lives upon lives. The process of meditation does not add anything to you; it only takes away what is wrong, cuts it away, sheds it off.

Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.

Enlightenment is understanding that there is nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nobody you have to be except exactly who you're being right now.

Awareness, beholding the mind, is the most essential method to have a breakthrough. And once you have gone just a step beyond the mind, you have entered the world of nirvana, you have entered the world of light and eternal life. You have attained to spiritual integrity, freedom, and tremendous ecstasy which the mind cannot even dream about.

Pray all the time, read all the scriptures in the world, and worship all the gods there are ...but unless you realize the Truth, there is no freedom.

This is the pathless path - returning to where you were initially before you got lost. The deepest truth in you is where the journey leads - shedding, like taking off layers of an onion, until you come to your essence. The key to the spiritual journey is not acquiring something outside of yourself. Rather it is shedding the veils to come back to the deepest truth of your being.

Zen is not effort. Effort is tension, effort is work, effort is to achieve something. Zen is not something to achieve. You are already that. Just relax, relax so deeply that you become a revelation to yourself.