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?
Joy is not dependent on circumstances; it is your own. It is not a titillation produced by things; it is a state of peace, of silence-a meditative state. It is spiritual.
I am not interested in communicating something to you, I am interested in communion. Communication means my mind talking to your mind. Communion means I am not a mind, you are not a mind – just your heart melting into my heart, no words.
Never belong to a crowd; Never belong to a nation; Never belong to a religion; Never belong to a race. Belong to the whole existence. Why limit yourself to small things? When the whole is available.
Fighting with anybody is very dangerous because you become like your enemy.
There is no greater magic than meditation. To transform the negative into the positive. To transform darkness into light-that is the miracle of meditation.
The inner emptiness is the door to God.
Life reflects, life resounds, life echoes whatsoever you throw at life.
Fools laugh at others. Wisdom laughs at itself.
Only the inner silence is yours. No-one gave it to you. You were born with it and you will die with it. Thoughts have been given to you. You have been conditioned to them.