The day effort ceased, I also ceased. Because you cannot exist without effort, and you cannot exist without desire, and you cannot exist without striving.
Advice is like food, and teaching is a menu.
Individuality is that which you bring into the world.
Love is the lotus, lust is the mud the lotus arises out of.
Look at the flowers-for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.
A man who loves himself takes the first step towards real love.
Meditation is a death – death of all that you are now. Of course there will be a resurrection, but that will be a totally new, fresh original being which you are not even aware is hidden in you.
When sadness comes, accept it. Listen to its song. It has something to give to you. It has a gift which no happiness can give to you, only sadness can give it.
Move as a total being, and accept things. Just for twenty-four hours, try it – total acceptance, whatsoever happens. Someone insults you, accept it; don’t react, and see what happens. Suddenly you will feel an energy flowing in you that you have not felt before.
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 not effort. Effort is tension, effort is work, effort is to achieve something. Zen is not something to achieve. You are already that. Just relax, relax so deeply that you become a revelation to yourself.
Any mundane activity can become meditative. Digging a hole in the garden, planting new roses in the garden – you can do it with such tremendous love and compassion, you can do it with the hands of a buddha.
Withdraw your awareness from everywhere and just let it rest within yourself, and you have arrived home.
All your seriousness is about sandcastles. And you yourself will leave them one day, trampling them down, and you will not look back. The people who take it seriously miss the beauty of playfulness.
Just look at life with more playful eyes. Don’t be serious. Seriousness becomes like a blindness. Don’t pretend to be a thinker, a philosopher. Just simply be a human being. The whole world is showering its joy on you in so many ways, but if you are too serious, you cannot open your heart.
Millions of people have decided not to be sensitive. They have grown thick skins around themselves just to avoid being hurt by anybody. But it is at great cost. Nobody can hurt them, but nobody can make them happy either.
Just being alive is such a gift, but nobody ever told you to be thankful to existence.
Meditation is simply a strange surgical method that cuts you away from all that is not yours and saves only that which is your authentic being.
When mind knows, we call it knowledge. When heart knows, we call it love. And when being knows, we call it meditation.
Once you become aware of your own body and its movements, you will be surprised that you are not your body. This is something of a basic principle, that if you can watch something then you are not it. You are the watcher, not the watched. You are the observer, not the observed. How can you be both?