Rajneesh Quotes

When there is no mind, you are in yoga; when there is mind you are not in yoga. So you may do all the postures, but if the mind goes on functioning, if you go on thinking, you are not in yoga.

Mind can never be intelligent - only no-mind is intelligent. Only no-mind is original and radical. Only no-mind is revolutionary - revolution in action. The mind gives you a sort of stupor. Burdened by the memories of the past, burdened by the projections of the future, you go on living - at the minimum. You dont live at the maximum. Your flame remains very dim. 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.

When you meditate you have to try to quiet and calm the mind. There should be no thought within the mind. Right now you feel that if you can cherish twenty ideas at a time, then you are the wisest man on earth. The more thoughts that enter into our minds, the more clever we feel we are. But in the spiritual life it is not like that. If consciously we can make the mind calm and quiet, we feel that a new creation dawns inside us.

The meditation I am talking about is not a meditation on something. If you light a lamp and remove all the objects surrounding it, the lamp will still go on giving light. In the same way, if you remove all objects from your consciousness, all thoughts, all imagination, what will happen? – only consciousness will remain.

If you are in a state of intense presence you are free of thought, yet highly alert. If your conscious attention sinks below a certain level, thought rushes in, the mental noise returns, stillness is lost, you're back in time.

Leave your thoughtlessness behind you then you may begin to understand. Clear the emptiness around you with the waving of your hand.

When you are truly meditative, there is no time and space for you. Time and space is just a creation of the mind.

If you can control the rising of the mind into ripples, you will experience Yoga.

Meditation means how to be not a mind. How to be not a mind! Meditation means how to create the state of no-mindedness. It doesn't mean unconsciousness. It means conscious and still, without any disturbance in the consciousness; conscious with no ripples, with no waves, with no vibrations; conscious as a deep, calm, silent pool with no ripples on it, with no disturbances on the surface; just a calm silent pool with no breeze to disturb, just mirrorlike.

Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It is a way of entering into the quiet that is already there - buried under the 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day

The mind is constantly talking. If the inner talk can drop even for a single moment you will be able to have a glimpse of no-mind. That's what meditation is all about. The state of no-mind is the right state. It is your state.

Mind is madness. Only when you go beyond the mind, there will be meditation.

Meditation is not an act, it is a quality. Meditation is not something that you do - it is something that you become.

But I would assert that despite the wide variety of yoga options and individual preferences, there is one universal element: the union of consciousness and movement, breath and awareness.

There are certain ways in which I cultivate awareness, both through mindful yoga and taking care of my body and taking time to actually drop as deeply as possible into stillness, into whatever is unfolding in the present moment.

Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence. When the mind has settled, we are established in our essential nature, which is unbounded Consciousness. Our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind.

Mindfulness is a quality that's always there. It's an illusion that there's a meditation and post-meditation period, which I always find amusing, because you're either mindful or you're not.

When I am practicing yoga, I try to avoid music. But if I really have to listen to something, I listen to the Om chant.

Yoga and mediation exist whether we choose to acknowledge or practice. It's like a tree. You can walk by the tree and inhale the oxygen it provides consciously or unconsciously. You'll still be benefiting from the tree.

By meditation we try to slow down the mechanism of projections. If the mechanism is slowed down and even for a single moment you begin to be aware of the gap - imageless gap of the screen - you have the glimpse. Suddenly you know that you have lived in the dreams of your own creation; and whatsoever you have known as the world was not the world really, it was YOUR world.

It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.

Yoga is a method to come to a non-dreaming mind.

Om is the pointed piece and Dhyâna (meditation) is the friction.

Yoga is the cessation of mind.

It is not a question of sitting silently, it is not a question of chanting a mantra. It is a question of understanding the subtle workings of the mind. As you understand those workings of the mind a great awareness arises in you, which is not of the mind. That awareness arises in your being, in your soul, in your consciousness.