We start making every child ambitious, and ambition means you cannot love; ambition is anti-love. Ambition needs fight, ambition needs struggle, ambition needs you to use others as a means.
RajneeshRead
Each child is poisoned by the society through teaching him ambition. Ambition is a poison far more dangerous than any alcohol can ever be, far more dangerous than marijuana or LSD, because ambition destroys your whole life. It keeps you moving in a false direction. It keeps you imagining, desiring, dreaming, it keeps you wasting your life. Ambition means a subtle creation of the ego, and once the ego is created you are in the grip of darkness. And the whole social structure depends on ambition.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Ambition can harm individuals by leading them away from true fulfillment and toward a destructive ego.
In this quote, Rajneesh critiques the societal emphasis on ambition, suggesting that it serves as a harmful force that distracts individuals from genuine happiness and personal growth. By promoting ambition, society fosters a false sense of purpose that ultimately leads to dissatisfaction and ego-driven behavior, which he views as a form of poisoning that corrupts one's true essence and happiness.
Themes
AmbitionEgoSocietyLifeHappinessDarknessTeaching
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on personal development, this quote can be used to illustrate the pitfalls of societal pressures.
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Love is not a relationship, love is a state of being; it has nothing to do with anybody else. One is not "in love", one is love. And of course when one is love, one is in love – but that is an outcome, a by-product, that is not the source. The source is that one is love.
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