Rajneesh Quotes

You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion.

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

NOW is the only reality. All else is either memory or imagination.

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

I think it would be shocking for me to pretend not to have any past. And also, it would be a lie.

If I'm gonna tell a real story, I'm gonna start with my name.

The two basic topics which fascinate me are 'What is reality?' and 'What constitutes the authentic human being?'

Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

I know that we live after death and again and again, not in the memory of our children, or as a mulch for trees and flowers, however poetic that may be, but looking passionately and egocentrically out of our eyes.

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

All autobiography is fiction.

The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.

The past is our very being.

I am all that there is of the most real.

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.

And now listen carefully. You in others-this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life-your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you-the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.

How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.

A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

Memory really matters...only if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, if it enables us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become.

The mind turned inwards is the Self; turned outwards, it becomes the ego and all the world. Cotton made into various clothes we call by various names. Gold made into various ornaments, we call by various names. But all the clothes are cotton and all the ornaments gold. The one is real, the many are mere names and forms.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.