God has given you a life to be lived, and lived spontaneously, with no pattern. Don't become a slave and don't become an imitator. Love yourself, respect yourself, and try to live your life the way you feel it. And even if you are a failure you will be contented. And imitating somebody else, even if you succeed, you will remain empty inside, filled with straw and nothing else. Alas!

The person who will succeed in imitating Christ will be the person who has completely destroyed his possibility of growing. He has been playing, he has not been living. And howsoever intelligently you try to imitate, imitation is unintelligent. Intelligence never tries to imitate.

-Rajneesh

What is wrong in imitating the great ideals taught down the centuries?

It is not a question of great ideals or petty ideals, it is a question of imitating. What you imitate is immaterial; the important thing is that you imitate. If you imitate you become a carbon copy. If you imitate you have betrayed your authentic being. If you imitate you are no more your being, you are no more your soul, you are no more yourself. You have committed suicide - and this suicide is far more suicidal than when you destroy your physical body. This is destroying your very psychology.

Imitation means you will not live according to your own spontaneity, you will live according to somebody else as your image; you will follow somebody else's character, behavior, way of life.

-Rajneesh

The haggard young man went to his psychiatrist and com plained of a recurring bad dream. "Every night," he said, "I dream of a sign on a door and I push it and push it, but I can't open it."

The doctor took notes frantically. "And what does the sign say?"

"Pull."

You can go on pushing, your whole life, but if the sign says pull...

God says live, love, live dangerously, love dangerously, and you remain frozen in fear. How will you enter into the temple of God?

-Rajneesh

Just see how you are made with being and non-being. Something in you is present: that is your sexuality. That's why in deep sexual experience the past and future disappear and you are utterly present to the present moment and it becomes a moment of meditation. So is the case with death: if death suddenly is encountered, the mind stops, all past and future disappear again.

If you have been in an accident, when you see that another car is coming and there is no way to avoid it and the accident is going to happen - just a few seconds more and you are gone - in those few seconds all thoughts disappear. Suddenly there is silence, utter silence. Silence that you have been seeking your whole life and were not able to attain, is attained. It comes from nowhere. Death makes you again present to the moment; it brings you to the moment.

These are the two most potential experiences. Please, don't be afraid and don't avoid them.

-Rajneesh

It is through sex that life arises, it is through death that life disappears. Sex is the door from where life enters, and death is the door from where life disappears. These two doors have to be explored in their totality. And those who have looked into it have found that these two doors are not two; it is one door. From one side it is entrance, from the other side it is exit.

The so-called monk, the so-called old idea of sannyas are all escapisms, cowardly, utterly cowardly.

Running away, however, is never a solution. It is rather a form of weakness and cowardice. Minor forms of this weakness are called neuroses, and the acute forms of this weakness are called psychoses.

And your so-called religions have been teaching you only these two things: neurosis and psychosis.

Neurosis is a mild form, a mild dose of cowardliness, of not facing life as it is, and psychosis is the acute. The fully grown neurosis becomes psychosis; then you start escaping to the monastery, then you drop out of life - but this is not the way to go beyond. The way beyond goes through life, and life is utterly beautiful. Sex and death, both are beautiful.

-Rajneesh