Rajneesh Firsts Quotations

The first thing to be understood: effort is needed, but effort alone is not enough - effort and then effortlessness, effort plus effortlessness. Effort precedes, and then effortlessness follows. Effortlessness is the peak of effort, it comes only when you have reached the peak

First you have to do all that you can do, and then you have to learn non-doing. The doing of the non-doing is the greatest doing, and the effort of effortlessness is the greatest effort.

The characteristic of the first sort of religion is imitation. It insists on imitation: imitate Buddha, imitate Christ, imitate Mahavir, but imitate. Imitate somebody. Don`t be yourself, be somebody else. And if you are very stubborn you can force yourself to be somebody else. You will never be somebody else. Deep down you cannot be. You will remain yourself, but you can force so much that you almost start looking like somebody else.

In fact everything can become a sort of meditation, because in everything there are two dimensions - just as there are in the first breath: the outer and the inner.

That's the moment of enlightenment. That is the moment that you become for the first time an unconditioned, sane, really free human being.

When you are in the present without thinking, you are for the first time spiritual.

The more desires you have, the more misery you will create for yourself. Misery is a consequence of desiring - and you go on desiring. In fact, you think that if your desires are fulfilled your miseries will disappear. In the first place they are never fulfilled; in the second place, if they are fulfilled, nothing is fulfilled by their fulfillment. You remain as empty as you have always been - or even more, because up to now you were occupied with a certain desire; now even that is fulfilled. A deep deep emptiness comes to you.

Choicelessness is the alchemy of transformation, of inner mutation. A new being is born who has nothing to do with the past, who is absolutely discontinuous with the past. He has no desire. And when there is no desire, for the first time you live

First examine what is constantly there in your mind, what is being repeated again and again. You don't have many thoughts. If you examine minutely you will see that you have only a few thoughts repeated again and again - maybe in new forms, new colors, new garments, new masks, but you have only a very few thoughts.

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?

If you understand, if you see, if you can feel and experience that you are not separate from existence, that you are one with it, all fear of death disappears because there is nobody to die inside you. In the first place there is nobody at all, existence lives through you.

In my vision, the thing that man needs first and foremost is a meditative consciousness.

When you are no more, only then for the first time will you be.

Yes, when you see for the first time, a great laughter arises in you - the laughter about the whole ridiculousness of your misery, the laughter about the whole foolishness of your problems, the laughter about the whole absurdity of your suffering.

People can live tremendously rich, blissful, ecstatic lives. But the first thing is, we have to accept our responsibility.

Being is primary and doing is secondary for them. Celebration comes first and work takes a back seat in their lives. Work is preparatory to celebration.

First, meditation, and then out of meditation comes creativity of its own accord.

What exists is a godly existence, a divine existence. God not as a person but as a presence certainly exists. But to understand that presence, you have to understand your own inner presence first, because it is from there that you can take off, it is from there that you can have the first glimpse of what godliness is. If you have not known yourself you will never know God.

You have to pull all your energy back to the present moment. And the moment the whole energy becomes a pool, here and now, the explosion of light happens and you are, for the first time, absolutely yourself - an eternal being, an immortal being, who knows nothing of death, who has never come across any darkness.