Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Love and respect yourself and never compromise for anything. And then you will be surprised how much growth starts happening of its own accord.. as if rocks have been removed and the river has started flowing.
Vegetarianism is a conscious effort, a deliberate effort, to get out of the heaviness that keeps you tethered to the earth so that you can fly - so that the flight from the alone to the alone becomes possible.
Zorba is beautiful, but something is missing. The earth is his, but the heaven is missing. He is earthly, rooted, like a giant cedar, but he has no wings. He cannot fly into the sky. He has roots but no wings.
Nobody asked you about being born, nobody is going to ask you when the time comes for you to be taken away. Then why be worried? Birth happened to you; death will happen to you; who are you to come in between?
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.
The whole art of ecstasy, meditation, samadhi, is: How to become one with the rhythm of the universe. When it exhales, you exhale. When it inhales, you inhale. You live in it, are not separate, are one with it.
The perfectionist is bound to be a neurotic, he cannot enjoy life, until he is perfect. And perfection as such never happens, it is not in the nature of things. Totality is possible, perfection is not possible.
An enlightened person is the richest person possible, but his richness comes from surrender, not from fight. He does not... he has not any conflict with the whole. He has fallen in harmony, he is in a harmonia.
The innocence of children is their wisdom, the simplicity of children is their egolessness. The freshness of the child is the freshness of your consciousness, which never becomes old, which always remains young.
What is wrong with enjoying yourself? What is wrong in being happy? If there is anything wrong it is always in your unhappiness, because an unhappy person creates ripples of unhappiness all around him. Be happy!
To be an individual is the hardest thing in the world, because nobody likes you to be an individual. Everybody wants to kill your individuality and to make a sheep out of you. Nobody wants you to be on your own.
Intelligence is dangerous. Intelligence means you will start thinking on your own; you will start looking around on your own. You will not believe in the scriptures; you will believe only in your own experience.
When you are self-conscious you are in trouble. When you are self-conscious you are really showing symptoms that you don't know who you are. Your very self-consciousness indicates that you have not come home yet.
Sin is a technique of the pseudo-religions. A true religion has no need of the concept at all. The pseudo-religion cannot live without the concept of sin, because sin is the technique of creating guilt in people.
For a prayer oriented religion the concept of a personal God is needed - to relate to. For meditation-oriented religions God is a useless hypothesis; it can be discarded easily into the dustbin. It is not needed.
Why wait for reasons to laugh? Life as it is should be reason enough to laugh. It is so absurd, it is so ridiculous. It is so beautiful, so wonderful! It is all sorts of things together. It is a great cosmic jokе.
Attachment is the root cause of all misery - and our mind is such that it starts clinging to each and everything. It starts becoming identified, attached, it does not know how to keep a distance; hence the misery.
Old age is your own creation: it can be a misery, it can be a celebration; it can be simply a despair, and it can also be a dance. It all depends how deeply ready you are to accept existence, whatsoever it brings.
Enlightenment is choicelessness. But don`t misunderstand me. Before that, you will have to move very cautiously, choosing the right against the wrong, choosing the truer so that you can reach to the ultimate truth.
All methods of meditation are nothing but methods to help you to remember the art of let-go. I say remember, because you knew it already. And you know it still, but that knowledge is being repressed by the society.
When your desires drop, the world is there, but it is a totally new world. It is so fresh, it is so colorful, it is so beautiful! But a mind attached to things cannot see it because eyes are closed with attachment.
The West has enough technology, enough science, enough affluence, enough money, but something of the inner is missing. There is no peace, no silence, no joy, no bliss, no meditativeness, no experience of godliness.
Become aware of your aloneness - which is a reality. And it is so beautiful to experience it, to feel it, because it is your freedom from the crowd, from the other. It is your freedom from the fear of being lonely.
Love can have the quality of the devil - that`s how it is there in the world, ninety-nine percent. Love can have the quality of God, and unless you make your love divine, it is not going to give you any contentment.
Bring everything up to the surface. Accept your humanity, your animality. Whatsoever is there, accept it without any condemnation. Acceptance is transformation, because through acceptance awareness becomes possible.
Spirituality is rebellion; religiousness is orthodoxy. Spirituality is individuality; religiousness is just remaining part of the crowd psychology. Religiousness keeps you a sheep, and spirituality is a lion's roar.
If you live with alertness, you live rightly. If you live in imitation, you live wrongly. To me there is only one sin: And that is not to be yourself. And to me there is only one virtue: And that is to know yourself.
Each individual`s way is going to be different. Never follow anybody. That is the greatest calamity that can happen to a man. Once you start following somebody else, you become a carbon copy. You become an imitation.
God is nothing but creativity. So wherever there is a sign of creativity, God has a signature there. He has already been there. Maybe even the poet does not know, but he has been touched by something from the beyond.
You don't seem to have guts. There is no need to surrender to each other. Surrender to love means: enjoy in the happiness of the other, rejoice in the being of the other; be in tune with each other, dance in harmony.
I am going to be contradictory to myself many times for the simple reason that I am trying to bring all the religions to a higher synthesis. Different approaches have to be joined together. I am creating an orchestra.
Experience life in all possible ways -- good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light, summer-winter. Experience all the dualities. Don't be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become.
Your desires are immense, almost infinite. Because of your desires life becomes a competition, and wherever there is competition, there is anxiety and angst; and at the end everybody is aware deep down there is death.
We ask for happiness but what we get is unhappiness. We all put our efforts into trying to be happy but we make a fundamental mistake: happiness is not related to the effort, happiness is related to not asking for it.
Respect man, love man. Respect his individuality, respect his differences. And that is possible only if you respect your individuality. That is possible only if you are grounded in your own being and you are unafraid.
Be a little aware before you are trapped! Marriage is a trap: you will be trapped by the woman and the woman will be trapped by you. It is a mutual trap. And then legally you are allowed to torture each other forever.
Once you start dropping thoughts, the dust that you have collected in the past, the flame arises - clean, clear, alive, young. Your whole life becomes a flame, and a flame without any smoke. That is what awareness is.
This has to be your first lesson in sannyas: accept yourself, love yourself, drop all guilt, don`t divide yourself. There is nothing higher, nothing lower; all of you is divine. The lowest is as divine as the highest.
When love moves to the fifth center then whatever talents you have, any creative dimension, is possible for you. This is the center of creativity. It is not only for songs, not only for music; it is for all creativity.
In a deep moment of love, thinking stops. The moment is so intriguing, the moment is so tremendously powerful, the moment is so intensely alive, that thinking stops. You are simply in awe, a great wonder surrounds you.
This is something basic to be understood - the ego must come to a peak, it must be strong, it must have attained an integrity - only then can you dissolve it. A weak ego cannot be dissolved. And this becomes a problem.
The moment love becomes a relationship, it becomes a bondage, because there are expectations and there are demands and there are frustrations, and an effort from both sides to dominate. It becomes a struggle for power.
Always go with the river of life. Never try to go against the current, and never try to go faster than the river. Just move in absolute relaxation, so that each moment you are at home, at ease, at peace with existence.
When you start meditating on your ego, on your thoughts, on your mind, you are suddenly separate, because whatsoever you meditate on, you are separate from it. That has become the object and you have become the subject.
Forget the dancer, the center of the ego. Become the dance. Then the dancer disappears and only the dance remains. Then the dancer is the dance. There is no dancer separate from dance, no dance separate from the dancer.
Many times people come to me to be reassured. They ask, they say, 'I'm feeling very happy and blissful. What do you say?' What is the need to say anything? The very need shows that the happiness is unreal and imaginary.
A witnessing consciousness lives in life but with tremendous non-attachment, with great non-possessiveness; it possesses nothing. It lives totally, it lives passionately, but still knowing that I don't possess anything.
Start with meditation, and things will go on growing in you—silence, serenity, blissfulness, sensitivity. And whatever comes out of meditation, try to bring it out in life. Share it, because everything shared grows fast.
You are the witness, to whom things happen but who remains a witness. Witnessing is the art of nonidentification, and nonidentification is all. Nonidentification is all there is to meditation. It is the whole meditation.
Zen is a kind of unlearning. It teaches you how to drop that which you have learned, how to become unskillful again, how to become a child again, how to start existing without mind again, how to be here without any mind.