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The body sleeps, the heart sleeps, the mind sleeps - but you remain alert because you are nothing else but alertness. Everything else is a false identification. Awareness is your nature. The body is your abode. The mind is your computer. Awareness;s you, is your very being.
Rajneesh
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Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote highlights the distinction between the physical and mental states and emphasizes the importance of awareness as the essence of one's true self.

In this quote, Rajneesh emphasizes that while the body and mind may fall into states of rest or inactivity, true consciousness or alertness remains constant. He suggests that the essence of a person lies in their awareness, which transcends the physical and mental identities that can often lead to a false sense of self. By recognizing awareness as our fundamental nature, we can better understand our existence beyond mere bodily functions or thoughts.

Themes

AwarenessAlertnessConsciousnessMindIdentification

In practice

Example use cases

During a mindfulness workshop, one may quote this to explain the essence of being present.

More from Rajneesh

We start making every child ambitious, and ambition means you cannot love; ambition is anti-love. Ambition needs fight, ambition needs struggle, ambition needs you to use others as a means.
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The technique of positive thinking is not a technique that transforms you. It is simply repressing the negative aspects of your personality. It is a method of choice. It cannot help awareness; it goes against awareness. Awareness is always choiceless.
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Only those persons who have lived, really lived, are ready, welcoming, receptive, thankful to death. Then death is not the enemy. Then death becomes the fulfillment.
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Creativity has two possibilities. One is that it arises out of your silence, love, understanding, your clarity of vision, your intimate friendliness with existence - then creativity is healthy. But if it does not arise out of meditation, out of silence and peace and understanding and love, then there is a danger. It may be arising out of your confused mind. It may be arising out of your insanity.
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There is no separate art of life. If you know how to allow poetry, if you know how to allow dance, if you know how to allow love - if you know how to ALLOW, then you know the art of life. In the allowing, in the let-go, in the surrender, is the art of life. How not to be and to let God be - that is the only art of life.
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Love is not a relationship, love is a state of being; it has nothing to do with anybody else. One is not "in love", one is love. And of course when one is love, one is in love – but that is an outcome, a by-product, that is not the source. The source is that one is love.
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