All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas. It is like water and ice: Apart from water, no ice, outside living beings, no Buddhas. Not knowing it is near they seek it afar, what a pity!

All the Buddhas of all the ages have been telling you a very simple fact: Be -- don't try to become. Within these two words, be and becoming, your whole life is contained. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance.

Unless you have found your natural inclination your life is going to be a long, long tragedy, from the cradle to the grave. The only people who have been blissful in the world are the people who have lived according to their own intuition and have rebelled against any effort by others to impose their ideas. Howsoever valuable those ideas may be, they are useless because they are not yours. The only significant idea is that which arises in you, grows in you, blossoms in you.

All that is great cannot be possessed – and that is one of the most foolish things man goes on doing. We want to possess.

If you take the responsibility for your life you can start changing it. Slow will be the change, only in the course of time will you start; moving into the world of light and crystallization, but once you are crystallized you will know what real revolution is. Then share your revolution with others; it has to go that way, from heart to heart.

Be less of a judge and you will be surprised that when you become a witness and you don't judge yourself, you stop judging others too. And that makes you more human, more compassionate, more understanding.

Become more and more innocent, less knowledgeable and more childlike. Take life as fun – because that's precisely what it is!

Drop guilt! – because to be guilty is to live in hell. Not being guilty, you will have the freshness of dewdrops in the early morning sun, you will have the freshness of lotus petals in the lake, you will have the freshness of the stars in the night. Once guilt disappears you will have a totally different kind of life, luminous and radiant. You will have a dance to your feet and your heart will be singing a thousand and one songs.

Drop the fear. Fear was taken up by you in your childhood, unconsciously. Now consciously drop it and be mature. Then the life can be a light which goes on deepening as you go on growing.

Ecstasy is our very nature; not to be ecstatic is simply unnecessary. To be ecstatic is natural, spontaneous. It needs no effort to be ecstatic, it needs great effort to be miserable. That's why you look to tired, because misery is really hard work; to maintain it is really difficult, because you are doing something against nature.

When you are not doing anything at all – bodily, mentally, on no level – when all activity has ceased and you simply are, just being, that's what meditation is. You cannot do it, you cannot practice it; you have only to understand it.

Don't seek, don't search, don't ask, don't knock, don't demand – relax. If you relax, it comes. If you relax, it is there. If you relax, you start vibrating with it.

The true creativity comes out of sitting silently. When you are so totally quiet that there is no thought, no wave in the ocean of your being, out of this silence comes a different kind of creativity.

Love is our deepest longing. Just as the body needs food the soul needs love – it is nourishment, spiritual nourishment. Without the food, air and water, the body will deteriorate; without love the soul starts shrinking.

A man who loves himself takes the first step towards real love... More

Our love is a relationship. And when love is a relationship, it creates misery. When love is a state of being, it creates bliss. A Buddha is also in love, but he is not trying to love you. Simply because of the way he is, love spreads. Love becomes a perfume and goes to the far comers of the earth.

Love is a natural kind of meditation. And meditation is a supernatural kind of love.

Laughter is the best medicine. If you can laugh when you are ill you will get your health back sooner. If you cannot laugh, even if you are healthy, sooner or later you will lose your health and you will become ill.

Laughter brings inner energy to the fore. When you really laugh, for those few moments you are in a deep meditative state. Thinking stops. It is impossible to laugh and think together. When you really laugh, suddenly, the mind disappears.

Either America must be hushed up or America will be the end of the world.