Rajneesh Quotes

You must have heard about the beautiful Sufi legend of Majnu and Laila. It is not an ordinary love story. The word majnu means mad, mad for God. And laila is the symbol of God. Sufis think of God as the beloved; laila means the beloved. Everybody is a Majnu, and God is the beloved. And one has to open one’s heart, the eye of the heart.

You see my five fingers, but somebody can see the five gaps between my fingers. Ordinarily you will not see the gaps, you will see five fingers. But the gaps are more real: fingers may come and go, gaps will remain. Between sounds of music there are gaps of silence. The authentic music consists not of sounds,but of the gaps. Sounds come and go; those gaps remain. And music can make you aware of those gaps more beautifully than anything else; hence I have to say that music comes next to silence.

Courage is a love affair with the unknown.

Just the other day I came across a statement: A perfectionist is a person who takes great pains, and gives even greater pains to others. And the outcome is just a miserable world!

The so-called mahatmas and saints are all cowards. I have never come across a single mahatma—Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Buddhist—who can be said to be really a rebellious spirit. Unless one is rebellious, one is not religious. Rebellion is the very foundation of religion.

"All the buddhas of all the ages have been telling you a very simple fact:
Be — don´t try to become. Within these two words, be and becoming,
your whole life is contained. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance." Osho

There exists no God. What exists is godliness, and that godliness surrounds you. We are all in the same ocean.

The world is like a waiting room in a railway station; it is not your house.
You are not going to remain in the waiting room forever.
Nothing in the waiting room belongs to you – the furniture, the paintings on the wall .... You use them – you see the painting, you sit on the chair, you rest on the bed – but nothing belongs to you.
You are just here for a few ...minutes, or for a few hours at the most, then you will be gone.
Yes, what you have brought in with you, into the waiting room, you will take away with you; that’s yours. What have you brought into the world? And the world certainly is a waiting room.
The waiting may not be in seconds, minutes, hours, days, it may be in years; but what does it matter whether you wait seven hours, or seventy years?
You may forget, in seventy years, that you are just in a waiting room.
You may star t thinking perhaps you are the owner, perhaps this is the house you have built.
You may start putting your nameplate on the waiting room.

Falling in love you remain a child; rising in love you mature. By and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Not that you are in love - now you are love.

The ordinary society is like a paperweight on you: it won't allow you to fly.

The intelligent person will go inward first. Before going anywhere else, you will go into your own being. That is the first thing, and it should have the first preference. Only when you have known yourself can you go anywhere else. Then wherever you go you will carry a blissfulness around you, a peace, a silence, a celebration.

What is enlightenment? — the capacity to see oneself as one really is.

Remember one thing. That you should not leave the Earth until you have made it a little more beautiful. A little lovelier. A little more loving.

If you break down a seed you will not find the tree there; you can dissect it but you will not find a tree hidden there. And you can say there is no tree and people were just foolish saying that a great tree is hidden in this seed when there is nothing. This is what analysts have always been doing. You tell them that this flower is beautiful; they will take it to the lab and they will dissect it to find where the beauty is. They will come upon chemicals and other things, they will dissect it and analyze it, and they will label different fragments of the flower in many bottles — but there will not be a single bottle in which they will find beauty. No, they will come out of the lab and they will say, “You must have been under some illusion, you were dreaming — there is no beauty. We have dissected the whole flower, nothing has been left, and there is no beauty.” There are things which are known only in their wholeness; you cannot dissect them. They are greater than their parts, this is the problem — a basic problem for those who are in search of truth. Truth is greater than all the parts joined together. It is not just the sum of the parts, it is greater than the parts. A melody is not just the sum of all the notes, of all the sounds. No, it is something greater.

You become more divine as you become more creative. All the religions of the world have said God is the creator. I don’t know whether he is the creator or not, but one thing I know: the more creative you become, the more godly you become. When your creativity comes to a climax, when your whole life becomes creative, you live in God. So he must be the creator because people who have been creative have been closest to him. Love what you do. Be meditative while you are doing it – whatsoever it is