Your freedom and your love have to grow hand in hand, in deep embrace, in a kind of dance, helping each other. And then the total man is born, who lives in the world and is not of the world at all. Then the man is born in whom extremes meet and merge and become complementaries; then the man is rich. Just to love without freedom is to be impoverished, or just to be free without love is to live in loneliness, sadness, darkness.

Freedom is needed for love to grow, love is needed so that freedom can be nourished. Remember constantly not to choose between these two. Both have to be absorbed together, digested together. Love has to become your circumference, your action, and freedom has to become your being, your center, your soul.

-Rajneesh

Atisha has an important message to deliver to you. That is the message of all the buddhas, of all the enlightened people of the world. They say: Love and freedom are not separate things, you cannot choose. Either you will have to have both, or you will have to drop both. But you cannot choose, you cannot have one.

Love is the circumference, freedom is the center.

-Rajneesh

Man's greatest longing is for freedom. Man IS a longing for freedom. Freedom is the very essential core of human consciousness: love is its circumference and freedom is its center. These two fulfilled, life has no regret. And they both are fulfilled together, never separately.

People have tried to fulfill love without freedom. Then love brings more and more misery, more and more bondage. Then love is not what one has expected it to be, it turns out just the opposite. It shatters all hopes, it destroys all expectations and life becomes a wasteland -- a groping in darkness and never finding the door.

Love without freedom naturally tends to be possessive. And the moment possessiveness enters in, you start creating bondage for others and bondage for yourself -- because you cannot possess somebody without being possessed by him. You cannot make somebody a slave without becoming a slave yourself. Whatsoever you do to others is done to you.

This is the basic principle to be understood, that love without freedom never brings fulfillment.

-Rajneesh

There are people who live on finding something wrong with you. Their whole trade secret is to find something wrong with you. They cannot accept you as you are; they will give you ideals, ideas, ideologies, and they will make you feel guilty and they will make you feel worthless, dirt. In your own eyes, they will make you feel so condemned that you will forget all about freedom.

In fact you will become afraid of freedom, because you will see how bad you are, how wrong you are -- and if you are free, you are going to do something wrong, so follow somebody. The priest depends on it, the politician depends on it. They give you right and wrong, fixed ideas, and then you will remain guilty forever.

I say to you: There is nothing right and nothing wrong. I don't want you to depend on me, and I don't give you any fixed ideas. I simply give you indications, hints, which have to be worked out by you. And the hint that I give to you is awareness. Become more aware, and it is a miracle....

-Rajneesh

I teach awareness -- not labeling, not categorizing. I teach awareness. I teach you to be fully aware in every situation, and act out of your awareness.

-Rajneesh