Career? What does that mean? That you will live safe and you will die safe? That you will live with much money and you will die a rich man? But what about your inner contentment? If your soul remains crippled and paralyzed, what is the point of gaining the whole world?

The real thing is to have the joy, the joy of life, that you lived courageously in your own way and whatsoever was asked as a price, you paid it. And whenever you attain something through paying for it, it is more valuable. If you can get it cheap, it loses all value.

-Rajneesh

Religion lives only while there is a living Master. Once the Master is gone, you have scriptures, words, memories, nostalgia, but the spirit has left. You only have the cage, the bird has flown.

That's how all the traditions have been created. When Jesus was there, there was life in what he was saying. Those words had fire. His passion was in his words; his heart was beating in his words.

Those words were hot. Now turn the pages of the Bible - those words are just ashes, just utterly cold. There is nothing left. You will have to again find a living Master. (full text)

-Rajneesh

The real seeker cannot search for God, because to start a search for God means you have already accepted that God is. You have already concluded. How can you start a search from a conclusion?

You are already prejudiced. You are a believer, not a seeker. The seeker cannot search for God, because he does not know.

He can only search into existence, not for god. He can inquire into the reality that surrounds him, not for God. Yes, but when you go deep into reality you find God. God cannot be the beginning of your search; it is the end, the climax, the culmination. God is the discovery. How can you begin with God?

-Rajneesh

Existence is not problematic; it is mysterious, it is miraculous. You dive deep into it. Celebrate it Make a festival out of it. Sing, dance, love, pray, paint, create music - but don't try to solve it. The musician is much closer than the philosopher; so is the poet much closer than the philosopher; so is the dancer even closer than the musician and the poet. Why is the dancer so much closer? Because in the dance you dissolve: the dancer disappears and only the dance remains. Dance is one of the deepest meditations possible.

In India we have conceived of God as the dancer, Nataraj. That's very significant, because when a painter paints, immediately he becomes separate from the painting. If the painting remains in his being, he is one with it. When it is yet hidden, just a seed, just a thought, a dream, then the painter is one with his painting. The moment he has painted it, poured it on the canvas, he has become separate from it. Duality has arisen. So is it the case with the poet, so is it the case with the musician.

Only the dancer has something unique: the dancer remains one with the dance. Even when he starts dancing, the unity is not broken, there is no duality. Utter oneness. In fact, when the dancer is thinking about the dance there is a duality - the idea of the dance and the dancer - there is a subtle duality. The moment he starts dancing even that duality disappears. Then the dancer is the dance. There is no dancer separate from the dance, no dance separate from the dancer. This is Unio Mystica.

God is a dancer. That means he has not painted the world; otherwise he would have become separate from it. It is not his poetry; it is not his music. It is his dance. He is in it, he is it - right this very moment, these green trees, and the sun pouring its gold through them, and the call of the bird, and you here sitting in silence, just being with me for no particular reason, just enjoying this moment, this silence. This is it.

-Rajneesh

You must have heard the ancient Indian parable that five blind men went to see an elephant. They touched the elephant from all sides. Somebody touched his legs and thought that the elephant is like a pillar, obviously, and so on, so forth; and they all started quarreling. Everybody was proposing a philosophy about the elephant and nobody had seen the elephant. They were all blind, but a part of the elephant had been touched by each. But the part is not the whole, and if you start calling the part the whole you are falling into one of the greatest lies possible. It is the greatest lie because it contains a little portion of truth in it. It is a half-truth, a partial truth, and a partial truth is more dangerous than a total lie because it can deceive people. You can be deceived through it, and you can deceive others, because it contains a little ingredient of truth.

They all started fighting and quarreling. That's what philosophers have been doing; this is the story about philosophers.

And each philosopher has touched a part - because the totality is not conceivable through the intellect. The totality is conceivable only when you dissolve your ego, your intellect, your heart, everything into it - when you disappear into the ocean like a dewdrop falling into the ocean. Then you know the whole of it, then you see, then you experience. Otherwise everybody comes to touch a small portion of this infinite universe, and then he starts claiming, "This is the truth." That's how systems of philosophy arise.

-Rajneesh