Mind is just in the middle. You are nothing but a mess. If you can go beyond it, intelligence grows in you; if you go below it, any intelligence that you had disappears.
Laughter is such a healthy exercise. Somebody is laughing – that’s perfectly good exercise, join him. Somebody is being playful – if you have time, join him.
I want my people to understand that because only man is capable to laugh, that means laughter is the highest point of consciousness, the highest point of understanding, the highest point of evolution. That’s why I have started calling laughter “the prayer time.”
I want my people to laugh like a lion’s roar. Then even laughter becomes a tremendous experience, because it is intelligence at its peak.
Let go, and move closer to existence in silence and peace, in meditation.
Meditation simply means a state of no-thought, awareness without the process of thought, just pure, mirror-like awareness, with no thoughts passing in the mind.
Our mind is a machine, it is not a mystery. And the mind always wants to know the how, the why. And because of this persistent inquiry about how and why, it goes on missing all that is beyond the boundaries of machines. Life is beyond the boundaries of machines.
Mind is memory, not intelligence.
This mind is a prison. It cannot find any freedom anywhere. It must die before freedom comes to you. But we have taken the mind as us, we are identified with it. This death of mind never happens to us, it never occurs to us.
The mind is just like a crowd; thoughts are the individuals. And because thoughts are there continuously you think the process is substantial. Drop each individual thought and finally nothing is left. There is no mind as such, only thinking.
The mind creates so many temptations – so alluring they are, so magnetic is their power – that unless you are in the power-field of someone whose magnetism is far more powerful than any other kind of temptation, it is impossible to reach. That is the meaning of disciplehood.
Past and future are two aspects of the same coin. The name of the coin is mind.
Wherever you go, your mind will go with you. Your knowledge will go with you, your prejudices will go with you, your scriptures will go with you. Your idea that you are a Hindu or a Mohammedan will go with you. So what are you renouncing?
The mind always wants to choose. The mind lives through choice. If you don’t choose the mind drops. This is the way of Lao Tzu. How to drop the mind? – don’t choose! That’s why he never prescribes any meditation, because then there is no need for any meditation.
To be aflame with silence, with joy, is wisdom. It is not through logic but through love. It is not through words but through a wordless state called meditation or a state of no-mind, satori, samadhi.
Zen is the most scientific method to inquire into your consciousness. It takes you beyond mind into a space called no-mind. No self, but pure awareness, and you have a taste of eternity and immortality.
To love God means to surrender, to trust, to be ready to die into Him, because dying in God is the beginning of a new life; it is resurrection. Love has to become such an intense flame that it bums you out, that you are not left behind, that you are consumed in it. If you are not, the Guest comes.
The terrorism is not in the bombs, in your hands; the terrorism is in your unconscious.
Ambition is violence, the very effort to succeed in the world is violent.
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.