Great Throughts Treasury

"When do you cut a piece of wood to build a bungalow, cottage forget. Piece of wood sawdust dryer."

"When sadness comes, just sit by the side and look at it and say, 'I am the watcher, I am not sadness,' and see the difference. Immediately you have cut the very root of sadness. It is no more nourished. It will die of starvation. We feed these emotions by being identified with them"

"When I am gone I hope there may still be courageous people in the world to criticize me, so that I don't become a hindrance on anybody's path. And those who will criticize me will not be my enemies; neither am I the enemy of those whom I have criticized. The working of the enlightened masters just has to be understood."

"When I say be creative I don't mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem."

"When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises."

"When two lovers are making love, and if they are both no-selves, nothingness, then a spontaneous pleasurable sensation happens. Then their body energy, their whole being, loses all identity; they are no more themselves - they have fallen into abyss. But this can happen only for a moment: again they regain, again they start clinging. That's why people become afraid in love."

"When we struggle for human rights, for freedom, for dignity, when we feel that it is a ministry of the church to concern itself for those who are hungry, for those who have no schools, for those who are deprived, we are not departing from God?s promise. He comes to free us from sin, and the church knows that sin?s consequences are all such injustices and abuses. The church knows it is saving the world when it undertakes to speak also of such things."

"When you become a sannyasin, I initiate you into freedom, and into nothing else... I am destroying your ideologies, creeds, cults, dogmas, and I am not replacing them with anything else."

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

"When you love, love as if the person is a god, not less than that. Never love a woman as a woman and never love a man as a man."

"When you love, you have to become nobody. If you remain somebody, then love never happens. When you love a person - even for a single moment love happens and flows between two persons- There are two nothingness, not two persons. If you have ever had any experience of love, you can understand it."

"When you pray purify your intelligence and it becomes your wisdom. Purify yourself completely and you become one with whole. And to be on with the whole is the ultimate benediction, the blissfulness, the experience for which thousands of people have been searching down the ages on wrong paths. This world has to be loved, this world has to be respected, this world has to be your temple, your mosque your church. This world has to be your gratefulness, your gratitude. Enlightenment is not something of another world. Enlightenment happens now and here."

"When you become good at the art of letting sufferings go, then you'll come to realize what you were dragging around with you. And for that, no one else other than you was responsible."

"When you talk through the heart is no need for any language when you speak of your head can only language to express what she says."

"When you give up, the whole universe will support you, nothing will disagree with you, because you're not disagree with anything"

"When you want to love God, you have to be without mask. You have to drop all deceptions. You have to be authentically whatsoever you are; to be choiceless, whatsoever you are. In that primal innocence, God descends."

"Whenever I meet prostitutes, they never speak of sex. They inquire about the soul, and about God. I also meet many ascetics and monks, and whenever we are alone they ask about nothing but sex. I was surprised to learn that ascetics, who are always preaching against sex, seem to be captivated by it. They are curious about it and disturbed by it; they have this mental complex about it, yet they sermonize about religion and about the animal instincts in man. And sex is so natural."

"Wherever you feel death, feel it. Don?t escape. Death is beautiful; death is the greatest mystery, more mysterious than life. Through life you can gain the world, the futile world- meaningless, worthless. Through death you can gain the eternal. Death is the door."

"Whenever you meditate and you come upon beautiful spaces, immediately pray to existence: ' Let my joy be showered over every being - conscious, unconscious. I don't want any personal claim over it.'"

"Wherever you are afraid, try to explore, and you will find death hiding somewhere behind. All fear is of death. Death is the only fear source."

"Who knows if the one whose hands are bloodied with Father Grande's murder, or the one who shot Father Navarro, if those who have killed, who have tortured, who have done so much evil, are listening to me? Listen, there in your criminal hideout, perhaps already repentant, you too are called to forgiveness."

"With me, illusions are bound to be shattered. I am here to shatter all illusions. Yes, it will irritate you, it will annoy you that's my way of functioning and working. I will sabotage you from your very roots unless you are totally destroyed as a mind, there is no hope for you."

"Why are women considered inferior to men in all parts of the world? Because this method was the only way to restrict and even if the women slaving equal to men for the cause that problem; must be normalized to accept the idea that it was inferior to the man"

"Who am I? is not really a question because it has no answer to it; it is unanswerable. It is a device, not a question."

"Without trust, love is not possible."

"You are carrying a masterpiece hidden within you, but you are standing in the way. Just move aside, then the masterpiece will be revealed. Everyone is a masterpiece, because God never gives birth to anything less than that. Everyone carries that masterpiece hidden for many lives, not knowing who they are and just trying on the surface to become someone."

"Would that the many bloodstained hands in our land were lifted up to the Lord with horror of their stain to pray that he might cleanse them. But let those who, thanks to God, have clean hands -- the children, the sick, the suffering -- lift up their innocent and suffering hands to the Lord like the people of Israel in Egypt. The Lord will have pity and will say, as he did to Moses in Egypt, I have heard my people's cry of wailing. It is the prayer that God cannot fail to hear."

"You cannot be a story if totally incomplete, will be free from life. The human experience is always open - and this means that it is incomplete. The belief is always incomplete."

"You are just now, here, neither coming nor going. Everything passes by you; your consciousness reflects it but it does not get identified. When a lion roars in front of a mirror, do you think the mirror roars? Or when the lion is gone and a child comes dancing, the mirror completely forgets about the lion and starts dancing with the child--do you think the mirror dances with the child? The mirror does nothing, it simply reflects. Your consciousness is only a mirror. Neither do you come, nor do you go. Things come and go. You become young, you become old; you are alive, you are dead. All these states are simply reflections in an eternal pool of consciousness."

"You don?t have any problems ? only this much has to be understood. This very moment you can drop all problems. because they are your creations. Have another look at your problems: the deeper you look, the smaller they will appear. Go on looking at them and by and by they will start disappearing. Go on gazing and suddenly you will find there is emptiness ? a beautiful emptiness surrounds you. Nothing to do, nothing to be, because you are already that."

"You become more divine as you become more creative. All the religions of the world have said God is the creator. I don't know whether he is the creator or not, but one thing I know: the more creative you become, the more godly you become. When your creativity comes to a climax, when your whole life becomes creative, you live in God. So he must be the creator because people who have been creative have been closest to him. Love what you do. Be meditative while you are doing it whatsoever it is"

"You can use reading as a food for the ego. It is very subtle. You can become knowledgeable; then it is dangerous and harmful. Then you are poisoning yourself, because knowledge is not knowing, knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom has nothing to do with knowledge. Wisdom can exist in total ignorance also. If you use reading just as a food for the mind, to increase your memory, then you are in a wrong direction. But reading can be used in a different way; then reading is as beautiful as anything else in life"

"You don't want to lose your old friend - the misery - You have invested too much into false - Hence the fear to be exposed - to be true - to be naked as you are."

"You cannot understand a thing, you begin to abuse it because it insults you. You cannot understand it! You? You cannot understand it? That is impossible. Something must be wrong with the thing itself. One begins to abuse, one begins to talk nonsense, and then he feels, Now it is okay."

"You exist in time, but you belong to eternity- You are a penetration of eternity into the world of time-You are deathless, living in a body of death- Your consciousness knows no death, no birth- It is only your body that is born and dies-But you are not aware of your consciousness-You are not conscious of your consciousness-And that is the whole art of meditation; becoming conscious of consciousness itself."

"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."

"You feel good, you feel bad, and these feelings are bubbling from your own unconsciousness, from your own past. Nobody is responsible except you. Nobody can make you angry, and nobody can make you happy."

"You must have heard about the beautiful Sufi legend of Majnu and Laila. It is not an ordinary love story. The word majnu means mad, mad for God. And laila is the symbol of God. Sufis think of God as the beloved; laila means the beloved. Everybody is a Majnu, and God is the beloved. And one has to open one?s heart, the eye of the heart."

"You need power only to do something harmful. Otherwise love is enough, compassion is enough."

"You say that in heaven there is eternal beauty. The eternal beauty is here and now, not in heaven."

"You live in a world surrounded by rules and regulations and what happened? Look at the current state of humanity. It is a neurotic world, a large mental hospital. It is the result of all your rules, idealism, perfectionism and morality. It is the result of your commandments ... the world has become a stronghold of neurotic, in a huge asylum. And you're still afraid of hellfire. It's a vicious circle."

"You will find meaning in life only if you create it. It is a poetry to be composed. It is a song to be sung. It is a dance to be danced."

"You see my five fingers, but somebody can see the five gaps between my fingers. Ordinarily you will not see the gaps, you will see five fingers. But the gaps are more real: fingers may come and go, gaps will remain. Between sounds of music there are gaps of silence. The authentic music consists not of sounds, but of the gaps. Sounds come and go; those gaps remain. And music can make you aware of those gaps more beautifully than anything else; hence I have to say that music comes next to silence."

"Your seed has been covered with so many layers of culture, etiquette, education, religion, country, that you have completely forgotten that you are here to grow, that you have become a lush green bush full of flowers, fragrance, dancing in the wind and in the rain and in the sun."

"You should live in the world but remain untouched by it. You should remain in the world, but the world should not remain in you."

"Your whole idea about yourself is borrowed-- borrowed from those who have no idea of who they are themselves."

"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."