People listen only to that which they want to listen to; otherwise they fall asleep. At least they can think of a thousand other things, and that too is a kind of sleep because they are no longer listening.

I have to be hard! I have to be as hard as possible because your sleep is deep and it has to be shattered. I have to hit your head with a hammer, otherwise you are not going to wake up. For centuries you have been asleep; sleep has become your nature. You have forgotten what awareness is, what to be awake means.

-Rajneesh

Truth brings many troubles. It is bound to be so because people live in lies, and when you bring truth into the world, their lies, their lives rooted in lies, react. A great antagonism is bound to happen. And people as they are, in their unconsciousness, cannot live without lies.

-Rajneesh

Gurdjieff used to say, sometimes to very prominent people, famous in some way or other -- great authors, painters, poets, politicians, the people who dominate this world, the great egoists.... He used to say to these people a very significant thing -- remember it. Suddenly he would say to them, "You have a very good facade."

Now to say to a politician, to a president of a country or to a prime minister or to a king, "You have a very good facade," is to invite trouble. And Gurdjieff lived his whole life in trouble. But there is no other way.

-Rajneesh

Man is unconscious; he understands the language of unconsciousness and whenever somebody talks from the peaks of consciousness it becomes utterly ununderstandable, unintelligible. He is so far away! By the time his words reach the dark valleys of our unconscious we have distorted them to such an extent that they have no reference at all to the origin any more.

The Master looks sometimes mad, sometimes irrational, sometimes stubborn. But the only reason that he cannot behave like you, that he cannot be part of the crowd mind, is that he has become awakened and the crowd is fast asleep.

-Rajneesh

An intelligent person does not function out of his past experience; he functions in the present. He does not react, he responds. Hence he is always unpredictable; one can never be certain what he is going to do.

A Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew were talking to a friend who said he had just been given six months to live.

"What would you do," he asked the Catholic, "if your doctor gave you six months to live?"

"Ah!" said the Catholic. "I would give all my belongings to the Church, take communion every Sunday, and say my 'Hail Marys' regularly."

"And you?" he asked the Protestant.

"I would sell up everything and go on a world cruise and have a great time!"

"And you?" he said to the Jew.

"Me? I would see another doctor."

That is intelligence!

-Rajneesh