Parents are very much afraid, the society is very much afraid: if children are allowed to remain free, who knows? They may never come to the fold the parents belonged to, they may never go to the church -- Catholic, Protestant, this or that.

Who knows what is going to happen when they become intelligent on their own? They will not be within your control. And this society goes into deeper and deeper politics to control everybody, to possess everybody's soul.

That's why the first thing they have to do is to destroy trust -- the trust of the child in himself, the confidence of the child in himself. They have to make him shaky and afraid.

Once he is trembling, he is controllable. If he is confident he is uncontrollable. If he is confident he will assert himself, he will try to do his own thing. He will never want to do anybody else's thing. He will go on his own journey, he will not fulfill somebody else's desires for some trip. He will never be an imitator, he will never be a dull and dead person. He will be so alive, so pulsating with life, that nobody will be able to control him.

-Rajneesh

Trust is possible only if first you trust in yourself. The most fundamental thing has to happen within you first. If you trust in yourself you can trust in me, you can trust in people, you can trust in existence. But if you don't trust in yourself then no other trust is ever possible.

And the society destroys trust at the very roots. It does not allow you to trust yourself. It teaches all other kinds of trust -- trust in the parents, trust in the church, trust in the state, trust in God, ad infinitum. But the basic trust is completely destroyed. And then all other trusts are phony, are bound to be phony. Then all other trusts are just plastic flowers. You don't have real roots for real flowers to grow.

The society does it deliberately, on purpose, because a man who trusts in himself is dangerous for the society -- a society that depends on slavery, a society that has invested too much in slavery.

-Rajneesh

There is no need to choose. Why not live choicelessly? Why not live all that life makes available to you? Don't be a spiritualist and don't be a materialist: be both. Don't be a Zorba and don't be a Buddha; be both: Zorba the Buddha. Enjoy all that God has showered on you.

-Rajneesh

There are many doors to God's temple. Beauty is one, wisdom is another, love still another, and so on and so forth. Music can do it, poetry can do it, literature can do it. The flowers on the trees are beautiful -- what do you think of great poems? They are flowers of consciousness.

-Rajneesh

If you say "I am a Christian," you are identified with the Christian mind. If you say "I am a Hindu," you are identified with the Hindu mind. If you say "I am German," you are identified with the German mind. This identification has to be broken. You have to know that you are not the mind. And only in moments when the mind is not functioning -- when you are unoccupied, when there is a gap, stillness, silence, when the mind has ceased -- will you be able to know who you are, to know yourself as consciousness. Then you can use the mind...

I am not against the mind. I may appear to be, but the whole effort is to disconnect you from the mind so that you can know your separation from it, your freedom.

-Rajneesh