When I say be creative I don't mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.

Joy arises only in creating joy for others; there is no other way. The more people you can make happy, the more you will feel happy. This is the real meaning of service.

Joy is not dependent on circumstances; it is your own. It is not a titillation produced by things; it is a state of peace, of silence-a meditative state. It is spiritual.

There are a few things that can be done only by experiencing them. Love is one of them. There is no way to learn it; you have to do it. And by trial and error one learns.

Learn to laugh. Seriousness is a sin, and it is a disease. Laughter has tremendous beauty, a lightness. It will bring lightness to you, and it will give you wings to fly.

If you suffer it is because of you, if you feel blissful it is because of you. Nobody else is responsible - only you and you alone. You are your hell and your heaven too.

Unless a man learns how to create, he never becomes a part of existence, which is constantly creative. By being creative one becomes divine; creativity is the only prayer.

If you feel you are the body type, then running can be very beautiful for you: a four, five mile run every day. And make it a meditation. It will transform you completely.

The real honesty is a responsibility to the present moment. It needs tremendous awareness. You have to be honest to the present moment, not to the past, not to the future.

Only the inner silence is yours. No-one gave it to you. You were born with it and you will die with it. Thoughts have been given to you. You have been conditioned to them.

There are a few activities which are immensely valuable: laughter is one of these activities. Singing, dancing, are also of the same quality, but laughter is the quickest.

Laughter is the very essence of religion. Seriousness is never religious, cannot be religious. Seriousness is of the ego, part of the very disease. Laughter is egolessness.

Millions of people are suffering: they want to be loved but they don't know how to love. And love cannot exist as a monologue; it is a dialogue, a very harmonious dialogue.

The disciple is not hankering for knowledge; he wants to see, not to know. He wants to be. He is no longer interested in having more knowledge; he wants to have more being.

Misery has only one meaning, that things are not fitting with your desires - and things never fit with your desires, they cannot. Things simply go on following their nature.

The freedom from something is not true freedom. The freedom to do anything you want to do is also not the freedom I am talking about. My vision of freedom is to be yourself.

Seriousness is a sickness; your sense of humor makes you more human, more humble. The sense of humor - according to me - is one of the most essential parts of religiousness.

I am here; be nourished by me. Eat me, drink me; be nourished by me. Let me become a part of your being, then I will be available forever and forever. There is no other way.

The modern mind has lost all capacity to wonder. It has lost all capacity to look into the mysterious, into the miraculous - because of knowledge, because it thinks it knows.

Drop dreaming and you are there where you have really been always, but you were never aware. All meditation techniques are just antidream efforts, just dream-negating devices.

Trust is an absurd phenomenon, logically absurd. That's why logic always says love is blind, although love has its own eyes, far more deep-going...still, to logic it is blind.

I can understand; you are really in a mess and there is no way out. I have heard that there are three rings of love: the engagement ring, the wedding ring and the suffer-ring.

You come to the master only in deep humbleness, because learning is possible only in humbleness. You have come to surrender, not to perform, not to manipulate, not to impress.

Devotion is love overflowing. Even when there is nobody, it is overflowing - to things, to tables, to chairs, to walls. It is just overflowing, it is not a question of to whom.

This is going to be a hard task for you, first to attain and then to lose - because you can lose only something which you possess. If you don't possess it, how can you lose it?

So the patient went to the mountains, and do you know what? Next day a telegram arrived for the psychiatrist. The patient said in the telegram, 'I am feeling very happy - why?'

Any object of desire is bound to bring frustration. Any expectation is bound to turn into frustration. Expectation is the beginning of frustration, the very seed. Beware of it!

A man who is afraid of death will be afraid of life also, because life brings death. If you are afraid of the enemy and you close your door, the friend will also be prohibited.

If you really want to create peace on the earth, create peace in your heart, in your being. That is the right place to begin with... and then spread and radiate peace and love.

The sannyasin knows what it means to be an emperor, because he simply gives; he enjoys giving, he loves sharing. And the miracle of life is: the more you give the more you have.

How to find joy? Let your ambition disappear; ambition is the barrier. Ambition means an ego trip: "I want to be this, I want to be that - more money, more power, more prestige."

People expect too much. People who expect heaven always fall into hell - that is the law. Expect heaven and hell is certain. Don't expect heaven and there will never be any hell.

Awareness means you come with an inner light, you move fully alert. Each step is taken in awareness - the walking, the coming, the sitting - everything is done in full awareness.

This moment! - this here-now - is forgotten when you start thinking in terms of achieving something. When the achieving mind arises, you lose contact with the paradise you are in.

Medicine heals the body, meditation heals the soul. Medicine is outwardly, meditation is inwardly. And man is whole only when medicine and meditation are together in deep harmony.

God is the very creative energy of existence - creativity rather than a creator. He is not the poet but the poetry, not the dancer but the dance, not the flower but the fragrance.

Whenever there is love the woman blossoms. Without love, the woman shrinks. The men who love power never fall in love. Even if they fall in love they keep themselves at a distance.

Deep love creates deep fear. It looks like death because the I disappears, the you disappears - and it is a sort of death. And when you die, only then do you enter into the divine.

And desires are never here and now - they are non-existential. They are just mental, in the mind. And they cannot be fulfilled because their very nature is to move into the future.

You and your brain are two things. The brain is your machinery just like everything else is your machinery. This hand is my mechanism; I use it. My brain is my mechanism; I use it.

Dance as if this is the last dance. Dance with abandon, holding nothing back. That will bring transformation to your being, and a possibility of transformation for other people too.

Coming to the master is coming in search of your innocence, in search of your lost childhood, in search of your originality... in search of your individuality, in search of freedom.

This watchfulness, this witnessing is the ultimate secret of creating a religious life, of creating a life of transcendence, a life of spirituality, of enlightenment, of buddhahood.

For Zen, man is the goal; man is the end unto himself. God is not something above humanity, God is something hidden within humanity. Man is carrying God in himself as a potentiality.

To be a criminal needs great unconsciousness. Meditation destroys your unconsciousness, opens the doors of light and suddenly what you were doing in the darkness starts disappearing.

Zen is a totally different kind of religion. It brings humanness to religion. It is not bothered about anything superhuman; its whole concern is how to make ordinary life a blessing.

There are very few joys in life greater than spontaneity. Spontaneity means to be in the moment; it means acting out of your awareness, not acting according to your old conditionings.

If you go and watch the way the primitive tribes live, you will know what work is in relation to celebration. They work the whole day so they can sing and dance with abandon at night.

Hidden behind man is God. Just give him a little way, a little passage, to come through you. That is creativity. Allowing God to happen is creativity. Creativity is a religious state.

It is not that the intellect sometimes misunderstands. Rather, the intellect always misunderstands. It is not that the intellect sometimes errs, it is that the intellect is the error.

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