All the buddhas of all the ages have been telling you a very simple fact: Be -- don't try to become. Within these two words, be and becoming, your whole life is contained. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance. But you have been taught to become this, to become that. And the mind is so cunning, and the ways of the ego are so subtle that it even turns God, nirvana, enlightenment, truth, into goals; it starts asking how to achieve them. They are not to be achieved, they cannot be achieved; the achieving mind is the only barrier. They are already here. You have to drop the achieving mind, you have to forget journeying from this point to that, you simply have to relax and be, and all is attained.

Lao Tzu calls it wu-wei, action without action. You have not moved a single inch, and you have arrived; this is wu-wei. You have not gone anywhere, you have not even thought of going anywhere, and you are already there. Suddenly the recognition comes, "I never lost the home, I only fell asleep and started dreaming about achieving."

Those who give you goals are your enemies. Those who tell you what to become and how to become it, are the poisoners. The real master simply says, "There is nothing to become. You are already that, it is already the case. Stop running after shadows. Sit silently and BE. Sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself.

-Rajneesh

If you are in the moment, in the present, the ego has no possibility of surviving even for a single moment. The present is and the ego is not, like light is and darkness is not. Bring light in, and darkness disappears. Even to say that it disappears is not right, because it was not there in the first place, so how can it disappear? It was a pure absence. The absence of light, that's what darkness is.

The absence of the present, that's what the ego is. Not to be herenow, that's what the ego is -- not to be herenow, to be somewhere else, seeking and searching for a faraway goal, looking at a faraway distant star. The farther away the goal, the bigger the ego.

Hence people who are not worldly have bigger egos than the so-called poor worldly people. Spiritual people have bigger egos, naturally; their goal is very far away, distant, beyond death, above the seven skies. God is their goal, or moksha or nirvana -- goals which look almost impossible.

-Rajneesh

Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples -- the first thing, the very very first thing, "Find out what your greatest characteristic is, your greatest undoing, your central characteristic of unconsciousness." Each one's is different.

Somebody is sex-obsessed. In a country like India, where for centuries sex has been repressed, that has become almost a universal characteristic; everybody is obsessed with sex. Somebody is obsessed with anger, and somebody else is obsessed with greed. You have to watch which is your basic obsession.

So first find the main characteristic upon which your whole ego edifice rests. And then be constantly aware of it, because it can exist only if you are unaware. It is burnt in the fire of awareness automatically.

-Rajneesh

The mind tends to discuss the defects of others. It helps the ego to feel good. Everybody is such a sinner; when everybody is such a sinner, comparatively one feels like a saint.

When everybody is doing wrong, it feels good that "At least I am not doing that much wrong."

Hence people talk about others' defects; not only do they talk about them, they go on magnifying them. That's why there is so much joy in gossiping. When the gossip passes from one hand to another hand, it becomes richer. And when it passes back again, something will be added to it. By the evening, if you come to know the gossip that you started in the morning, you will be surprised. In the morning it was just a molehill, now it is a mountain. People are very creative, really creative and inventive.

-Rajneesh

Change your inclination from the mind to the heart. That is the first change. Think less, feel more. Intellectualize less, intuit more. Thinking is a very deceptive process, it makes you feel that you are doing great things. But you are simply making castles in the air.

Thoughts are nothing but castles in the air.

Feelings are more material, more substantial. They transform you. Thinking about love is not going to help, but feeling love is bound to change you. Thinking is very much loved by the ego, because the ego feeds on fictions. The ego cannot digest any reality, and thinking is a fictitious process. It is a kind of dreaming, a sophisticated dreaming. Dreams are pictorial and thinking is conceptual, but the process is the same. Dreaming is a primitive kind of thinking, and thinking is a civilized kind of dreaming.

Change from the mind to the heart, from thinking to feeling, from logic to love.

-Rajneesh