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.
RajneeshRead
Millions of people have tried meditation and dropped out of it because they took it very seriously. Religion has been thought to be a very serious affair - it is not. One has to understand - at least those who are with me - that religion is a playfulness, a laughter. Take it easy; then things blossom without any tension. You are not taking it easy, you are making it difficult.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Meditation and religion should be approached with a lighthearted attitude for true understanding and enjoyment.
In this quote, Rajneesh emphasizes that both meditation and religion are often treated with unnecessary seriousness, which can hinder their benefits. He advocates for a playful approach, suggesting that relaxation and joy in practice allow for deeper insights and a more authentic connection to spirituality, free from tension and pressure.
Themes
MeditationReligionPlayfulnessLaughterTensionSeriousness
In practice
Example use cases
Use this quote during a mindfulness workshop to encourage participants to embrace meditation with a relaxed mindset.
More from Rajneesh
All quotes βThe 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.
RajneeshRead
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.
RajneeshRead
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.
RajneeshRead
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.
RajneeshRead
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 β but that is an outcome, a by-product, that is not the source. The source is that one is love.
RajneeshRead
Similar quotes
To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots.
Gordon BrownRead
Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.
Victor HugoRead
Men, however distinguished by external accidents or intrinsick qualities, have all the same wants, the same pains, and, as far as the senses are consulted, the same pleasures.
Samuel JohnsonRead
Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.
W. G. SebaldRead
The massive bulk of the earth does indeed shrink to insignificance in comparison with the size of the heavens.
Nicolaus CopernicusRead
He had the air of a spy in a melodrama, missing nothing, liking nothing, looking forward to the great day when everything would be turned upside down.
Kurt VonnegutRead