I know about nothing. What to say about women? -- I don't even know about men! So don't be worried about that. If you know what a woman is or what a man is, beware of your knowledge, because that is not real knowing; it is just opinion that you have gathered. Yes, man has been propagating ideas against women; now women are propagating ideas against men. It is the same foolish thing! And we go on doing this: we go on moving from one extreme to another extreme.

-Rajneesh

You ARE here with a paradoxical person, with a person who is trying to convey something mysterious to you -- not knowledge -- who is trying to pour his experience of wonder and awe into your beings -- it is more like wine than like knowledge -- who is trying to make you intoxicated, who is trying to transform you into drunkards. Yes, for the rational person it will look like nonsense.

-Rajneesh

An enlightened person is one who has no barrier between him and existence. And knowledge is a barrier. Knowledge divides you from existence; it keeps you separate. Not knowing unites you. Love is a way of innocence. Innocence is a bridge: knowledge is a wall. Who has ever heard of knowledgeable people becoming enlightened? They are the farthest away from enlightenment. Enlightenment grows only in the soil of innocence.

Innocence means childlike wonder, awe. The enlightened person is one who is continuously wondering -- because he knows nothing, so everything becomes again a mystery. When you know, things are demystified; when you don't know, they are RE- mystified. The more you know, the less wonder is in your heart. The more you know, the less you feel the great experience of awe. You cannot say "AH, THIS!" You cannot be ecstatic. The knowledgeable person is so burdened that he cannot dance, he cannot sing, he cannot love. For the knowledgeable there is no God, because God only means wonder, awe, mystery. That's why, as knowledge has grown in the world, God has become further and further away.

Friedrich Nietzsche could declare that God is dead because of his knowledgeability. He was certainly a great philosopher, and philosophy is bound to come to the conclusion that there is no God because God simply means the mysterious, the miraculous. And knowledge reduces every miracle to ordinary laws; every mystery is reduced to formulas.

Ask the knowledgeable person "What is love?" and he will say, "Nothing but chemistry, the attraction between male and female hormones. It is no more important than a magnet attracting iron pieces; it is the same -- like negative and positive electricity. Man and woman are bio-electricity."

Then everything is destroyed. Then all love and all poetry and all music are reduced to nonsense. The lotus is reduced to the mud. The lotus certainly grows out of the mud, but the lotus is not the mud. It is not the sum total of its parts; it is more than the sum total of the parts. That MORE is God, that MORE is poetry, that MORE is love. But science has no place for the "more." Science reduces every phenomenon to a mechanical thing. And do you know what "science" means? "Science" means knowledge; the actual word "science" means knowledge.

-Rajneesh

A Master is only a promise: a promise of something that can happen, a promise of your potential becoming actual, a promise of a flowering. But right now you are only a seed, and the seed cannot believe in the promise; it is very difficult for the seed to believe in the promise. The seed would like to remain a seed and yet be a flower. So we go on clinging to the familiar beliefs, systems of thought, ideology. And still we want to be reborn!

It is like a child who wants to cling to the womb and yet wants to be born. That is impossible. Either he has to be in the womb and die in the womb -- because after nine months to be in the womb is going to be sure death -- or he has to take the risk, the adventure, of going into the unknown.

-Rajneesh

Man is more interested in convenience than in truth, more interested in comfort than in truth, more interested in security than in transformation.

If that is your state too you are going to miss me, because my interest is not security; I will force you more and more into insecurity. My interest is not convenience; I will force you more and more into rebellion. My interest is only one: truth, because it is truth that liberates; everything else becomes a bondage.

-Rajneesh