Rajneesh Children Quotations

Children can be taught meditation more easily because they are not yet spoiled. When you have been spoiled the hard work is to help you to unlearn.

In countries where breast-feeding has stopped, more smoking will automatically be there. That's why the West smokes more than the East - because no mother is ready to give her breast to the child because the shape is lost. So in the West smoking is increasing more and more; even small children are smoking.

The playfulness that I talk about comes very slowly. You cannot just jump out of your seriousness which you have accumulated for lives. Now it has a force of its own. It is not a simple matter to relax; it is one of the most complex phenomena possible, because all that we are taught is tension, anxiety, anguish. Seriousness is the very core the society is built around. Playfulness is for small children, not for grown-up people. And I am teaching you to be children again, to be playful again. It is a quantum leap, a jump...but it takes time to understand.

The parents, the society, the state, the church, the educational system, they all depend on lies. As the child is born they start trapping it into lies. And the child is helpless. He cannot escape his parents, he is utterly dependent. You can exploit his dependence...and it has been exploited down the ages.

The world is not religious because religion is imposed upon us. The parents are in a hurry to impose; the church, the state, the country - everybody is in a hurry to impose a certain religion on the child. How foolish! How stupid! Religion needs maturity, great understanding, before one can choose.

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born.

When you practice Dynamic Meditation for the first time this will be difficult, because we have suppressed the body so much that a suppressed pattern of life has become natural to us. It is not natural! Look at a child: he plays with his body in quite a different way. If he is crying, he is crying intensely. The cry of a child is a beautiful thing to hear, but the cry of an adult is ugly. Even in anger a child is beautiful; he has a total intensity. But when an adult is angry he is ugly; he is not total. And any type of intensity is beautiful.

It is a strange thing ,that every child is born with a closed hand , and every body dies with an open hand !

To be a sannyasin means you will be allowing freedom to the children, you will not impose anything on them, you will not impose your ideas; you will NOT like them to become imitators. Sannyas is just symbolic of a great freedom!

Very few people are accepted as creative: A few painters, a few poets - one in a million. This is foolish! Every human being is a born creator. Watch children and you will see: all children are creative. By and by, we destroy their creativity.

Meditation is the art of cleaning your mirror from all the dust that the society, the religion, the educational system has poured on you, to take away everything that has not been born with you, to bring you to your absolute innocence as you were born as a child.

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.

The child is naturally meditative. He is a sort of samadhi; he's coming out of the womb of existence. His life river is yset absolutely fresh, just from the source. He knows the truth, but he does not know that he knows.... His knowledge is not yet aware. It is innocent. It is simply there, as a matter of fact. And he is not separate from his knowledge; he is his knowledge. He has not mind, he has simple being.

Meditation for me is not a children's play, it is a deep transformation. How to know this transformation? It is being reflected every moment in your relationships. Do you try to possess someone? Then you are violent. How can one possess someone? Are you trying to dominate someone? Then you are violent. How can one dominate anyone? Love cannot dominate, love cannot possess.

Miss the present and you live in boredom. BE in the present and you will be surprised that there is no boredom at all. Start by looking around a little more like a child. Be a child again! That's what meditation is all about: being a child again - a rebirth, being innocent again, not-knowing.

Zen says that if you drop knowledge - and within knowledge everything is included; your name, your identity, everything, because this has been given to you by others - if you drop all that has been given by others, you will have a totally different quality to your being: innocence. This will be a crucifixion of the persona, the personality, and there will be a resurrection of your innocence. You will become a child again, reborn.

If you are really feeling happy, you are feeling happy even if the whole world contradicts you. If the whole world agrees that you are not happy, then too it doesn't matter. Your happiness is real. It cannot be canceled by anybody's opinion. But if your happiness is unreal, it can be canceled by anybody. Even a small child can cancel it. You will be constantly looking towards people. You will be smiling, trying to show that you are happy so that they can say, 'Yes. You are very happy. You look very happy.'

When you are happy you are ordinary, because to be happy is just to be natural. To be miserable is to become extraordinary. Nothing is special in being happy - trees are happy, birds are happy, animals are happy, children are happy. What is special in that? It is just the usual thing in existence. Existence is made of the stuff called happiness. Just look! - can't you see these trees?...so happy. Can't you see the birds singing?...so happily. Happiness has nothing special in it. Happiness is a very ordinary thing.

First the body has to become utterly relaxed, like a small child, then only start with the mind. Move scientifically: first the simplest, then the complex, then the more complex. And then only can you relax at the ultimate core.

The really intelligent person keeps his childhood alive to his last breath.He never loses it-the wonder the child feels looking at the birds,looking at the flowers,looking at the sky...Intelligence also has to be,in the same way,childlike.

But everybody is afraid of death; that too is contagious. Your parents are afraid of death, your neighbors are afraid of death. Small children start getting infected by this constant fear all around. Everybody is afraid of death. People don't even want to talk about death.

To be motherly is a totally different phenomenon. It is something absolutely human; it transcends animality. It has nothing to do with biology. It is love, pure love, unconditional love. When a mother loves unconditionally - and only a mother can love unconditionally - the child learns the joy of unconditional love. The child becomes capable of loving unconditionally. And to be able to love unconditionally is to be religious. And it is the easiest thing for a woman to do. It is easy for her because naturally she is ready for it.

Every child is born with tremendous love for himself. It is the society that destroys that love, it is the religion that destroys that love - because if a child goes on growing in loving himself, who is going to love Jesus Christ? Who is going to love the president, Ronald Reagan? Who is going to love the parents?

Parents appreciate the child who agrees; they condemn the child who disagrees.

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.

Life is a mystery; that means it cannot be solved. And when all efforts to solve it prove futile, the mystery dawns upon you. Then the doors are open; then you are invited. As a knower, nobody enters the divine; as a child, ignorant, not knowing at all- the mystery embraces you. With a knowing mind you are clever, not innocent. Innocence is the door.

You have to be grateful to existence that it has chosen you to be a passage for a few beautiful children. But you are not to interfere in their growth, in their potential. You are not to impose yourself upon them. They are not going to live in the same times, they are not going to face the same problems. They will be part of another world. Don´t prepare them for this world, this society, this time, because then you will be creating troubles for them. They will find themselves unfit, unqualified.

If you are a parent, open doors to unknown directions to the child so he can explore. Don't make him afraid of the unknown,give him support.

If you really want to drop the guilt you will have to drop your parental voices within, the priestly voices within. You will have to get rid of your parents and your conditioning. Life has been in such a trap up to now that even a small child starts feeling guilty. We have not yet been able to develop an education which can help people to grow without feeling guilty. And unless that education happens man will remain ill, ill at ease.

Parents create guilt. That is the greatest sin against humanity. To create guilt in a child is criminal because once the guilt is created, the child will never be free of it. Unless he is very intelligent it will be impossible for him to get rid of it; something of it will remain around him like a hangover.

Seriousness is a disease.

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.

Attachment is misery, but from the very beginning the child is taught for attachment. The mother will say to the child, "Love me; I am your mother." The father will say, "Love me; I am your father" - as if someone is a father or a mother so he becomes automatically lovable.

Identification with the body, with the mind, with our possessions, with our families, with our friends - any kind of identification takes you outwards. All your possessions will be outwards: your wife, your husband, your children, your body - your body is outside you; your mind - your mind is outside you. The only thing that is not outside you is the witnessing. Just the watchfulness - that is your buddha. Identification means losing witnessing, falling into the trap of attachment. That is our misery, that is our slavery.

When Patanjali says "non-attachment", he is not anti-love. Really, he is for love. Non-attachment means be natural, loving, flowing, but don't get obsessed and addicted. Addiction is the problem. Then it is like a disease. You cannot love anybody except your child - this is addiction. Then you will be in misery. Your child can die; then there is no possibility for your love to flow. Even if your child is not going to die, he will grow. And the more he grows, the more he will become independent. And then there will be pain. Every mother suffers, every father suffers.

These firecrackers outside and these lights outside cannot make you rejoice. They are only for children; for you, they are just a nuisance. But in your inner world there can be a continuity of lights, songs, joys. Always remember that society compensates you when it feels that the repressed may explode into a dangerous situation if it is not compensated. Society finds some way of allowing you to let out the repressed. But this is not true celebration, and it cannot be true.

"The first awareness of the child comes with his ego. He becomes aware of the "I", not of the Self. Really, he becomes aware first of the "thou". The child first becomes aware of his mother. Then, reflectively, he becomes aware of himself. First he becomes aware of objects around him. Then, by and by, he begins to feel that he is separate. This feeling of separation gives the feeling of ego, and because the child first becomes aware of the ego, ego becomes a covering on the Self. "

The child is born with a Self but not with an ego. The child develops the ego. As he becomes more and more social and related, ego develops. This ego is just on your periphery where you are related with others - just on the boundary of your being. So ego is the periphery of your being, and Self is the center. The child is born with a Self, but unaware. He is a Self, but he is not conscious of the Self.

Egolessness is contentment. Egoless, you don't expect anything, and just a small child smiles at you, but it is so beautiful. What else could you need? Suddenly you see a flower and the flower sends its perfume to you. What else could you need? What more could you want? The whole sky goes on filling with stars, the whole life becomes a celebration because now everything is beautiful. Without expectation everything fulfills - just to breathe is enough, just to breathe is such a bliss.

Zen's greatest contribution is to give you an alternative to the serious man. The serious man has made the world, the serious man has made all the religions. He has created all the philosophies, all the cultures, all the moralities; everything that exists around you is a creation of the serious man. Zen has dropped out of the serious world. It has created a world of its own which is very playful, full of laughter, where even great masters behave like children.

A small child has no ambitions, he has no desires. He is so absorbed in the moment - a bird on the wing catches his eye so totally; just a butterfly, its beautiful colors, and he is enchanted; the rainbow in the sky... and he cannot conceive that there can be anything more significant, richer than this rainbow. And the night full of stars, stars beyond stars... Innocence is rich, it is full, it is pure.

The disobedient child is continuously condemned. The obedient child is, on the other hand, continuously praised. But have you heard of any obedient child having become world-famous in any dimension of creativity? Have you heard of any obedient child who has attained the Nobel prize for anything - literature, peace, science? The obedient child becomes just the common crowd. All that is added to existence is added by the disobedient.

She feels so contented in giving birth to a child, in helping the child to grow; and that's why she does not need any other kind of creativity. Her creative urge is fulfilled. But man is in trouble: he cannot give birth to a child, he cannot have the child in his womb. He has to find a substitute, otherwise he will always feel inferior to the woman. And deep down he does feel that he is inferior. Because of that feeling of inferiority man tries to create paintings, statues, dramas, he writes poetry, novels, explores the whole scientific world of creativity.

The whole blame goes to the parents. They have lived as ambitious beings; they have destroyed themselves. Now they go on giving their heritage to their children - their unfulfilled desires, their incomplete ambitions. In this way diseases pass on from one generation to another.

Each child is poisoned by the society through teaching him ambition. Ambition is a poison far more dangerous than any alcohol can ever be, far more dangerous than marijuana or LSD, because ambition destroys your whole life. It keeps you moving in a false direction. It keeps you imagining, desiring, dreaming, it keeps you wasting your life. Ambition means a subtle creation of the ego, and once the ego is created you are in the grip of darkness. And the whole social structure depends on ambition.

Every child is born sane, and then, slowly slowly, we civilize him - we call it the process of civilization. We prepare him to become part of the great culture, the great church, the great state to which we belong. Our whole politics is stupid, and then HE becomes stupid. Our whole education is ugly. Our politics means nothing but ambition, naked ambition - ambition for power. And only the lowest kind of people become interested in power.

We start making every child ambitious, and ambition means you cannot love; ambition is anti-love. Ambition needs fight, ambition needs struggle, ambition needs you to use others as a means.

Any judgment is past oriented, and existence is always herenow, life is always herenow. All judgments are coming from your past experiences, your education, your religion, your parents - which may be dead, but their judgments are being carried by your mind and they will be given as a heritage to your children. Generation after generation, every disease is being transferred as a heritage. Only a non-judgmental mind has intelligence, because it is spontaneously responding to reality.

A meditator cannot smoke, for the simple reason that he never feels nervous, in anxiety, in tension. Smoking helps - on a momentary basis - to forget about your anxieties, your tensions, your nervousness. Other things can do the same - chewing gum can do the same, but smoking does it the best. In your deep unconscious, smoking is related with sucking milk from your mother's breast. And as civilization has grown, no woman wants the child to be brought up by breast-feeding - naturally; he will destroy the breast. The breast will lose its roundness, its beauty.

Small children smoking, and the mother is not aware that it is because the breast has been taken away. In all primitive communities a seven-year-old child, or even an eight or nine-year-old child, will continue breast-feeding. Then there is a satisfaction and smoking will not be so necessary. That's why in primitive communities men are not so much interested in women's breasts; there is no problem that somebody will attack them. Nobody looks at the breasts.

Out of your awareness you cannot become soldiers in a war because you will be able to see, with clear eyes, that you are going to kill people - people who have done no harm to you personally, people just like you. They have their children, their wives, their mothers, their old fathers to take care of - and you are killing the person just to get a gold medal. Your gun will slip out of your hand, and that will be an act of awareness. And you will feel tremendously blissful that it happened; even if you are being shot your death will be a glory, a peace, an adventure, a journey into a new world.

Just for a few tiny buds on your tongue you are killing live animals, with no sensitivity, with no awareness, with no love. It seems impossible; how can a man who has known love be capable of doing such things? A man who loves his wife, who loves his children goes on eating meat? Impossible.

Spirituality belongs to the eternal, and religion belongs to the temporal. Religion belongs to people's behavior. It is really what Pavlov, Skinner, Delgado and others call a conditioning of the behavior. The child is brought up by Christians - then he is conditioned in one way, he becomes a Christian.

During the first seven years, every society tries to condition the mind - and conditioning means nothing but hypnosis: forcing authority, law, tradition, religion, scripture, the priest, the church, into the innermost unconscious of the child so that from there you can control him.

Freedom is the basic thing. Consciousness grows in freedom and starts dying, becomes paralyzed and crippled, when things are forced. And up to now, this has been done. This is the greatest crime that parents have always committed against children. They go on forcing the child.

Every child is simple, just a clean slate. Then the parents start writing on his slate - what he has to become. Then the teachers, the priests, the leaders - they all go on emphasizing that you have to become somebody; otherwise, you have wasted your life. Just the opposite is the case. You are a being. You need not become anybody else. That is the meaning of simplicity: remaining at ease with one's being, and not going on any track of becoming - which is unending.

Every child has to disobey the father. Unless a child disobeys the father he never becomes mature. It is nothing, original, it is very simple and natural. It is very psychological. There comes an age when every child has to say NO to the parents. If he does not say no to the parents he will not have a spine; he will be spineless. If he cannot say no to the parents, he will be a slave his whole life. He will never attain to individuality.

The parents have to learn that the child should not be insulted, humiliated, condemned. If you want to help him, love him more. Appreciate what is good in him rather than emphasizing what is bad. Talk about his goodness. Let the whole neighborhood know how nice and beautiful a boy he is. You may be able to shift his energy from the bad side to the good side, from the dark side to the lighted side, because you will make him aware that this is the way to get respect, this is the way to be honored. And you will prevent him from doing anything that makes him fall down in people's eyes.

Every child is so helpless - just to survive he has to be political, he has to accept whatsoever the parents are saying.

Each child is made neurotic by the parents, by the society; and we know that we are doing it, and we know that others have done the same to us. Stop doing it to yourself and stop doing it to others. Become alert. Just be real. I emphasize reality more than truth. Because truth has been used by the anti-life people so much, it has wrong associations. Be real. If you are real, one thing will start disappearing from your heart, and that is guilt.

One should think in terms of whether one is loving or not. The question of the object of love does not arise. With your wife, you love your wife; with your children, you love your children; with your servants, you love your servants; with your friends, you love your friends; with the trees, you love the trees; with the ocean, you love the ocean. You are love. Love is not dependent on the object, but is a radiation of your subjectivity - a radiation of your soul. And the vaster the radiation, the greater is your soul.

Meditation is how to drop knowledge. Meditation means how to become ignorant again. Meditation means how to become a child again, a rose bush, a rock. Meditation means how just to be and not to think.