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.
More from Rajneesh
All quotes βThe technique of positive thinking is not a technique that transforms you. It is simply repressing the negative aspects of your personality. It is a method of choice. It cannot help awareness; it goes against awareness. Awareness is always choiceless.
RajneeshRead
Only those persons who have lived, really lived, are ready, welcoming, receptive, thankful to death. Then death is not the enemy. Then death becomes the fulfillment.
RajneeshRead
Creativity has two possibilities. One is that it arises out of your silence, love, understanding, your clarity of vision, your intimate friendliness with existence - then creativity is healthy. But if it does not arise out of meditation, out of silence and peace and understanding and love, then there is a danger. It may be arising out of your confused mind. It may be arising out of your insanity.
RajneeshRead
There is no separate art of life. If you know how to allow poetry, if you know how to allow dance, if you know how to allow love - if you know how to ALLOW, then you know the art of life. In the allowing, in the let-go, in the surrender, is the art of life. How not to be and to let God be - that is the only art of life.
RajneeshRead
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 β but that is an outcome, a by-product, that is not the source. The source is that one is love.
RajneeshRead
Similar quotes
Man's grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable.
Blaise PascalRead
The satisfaction derived from the fleeting things of life is not lasting; and our wants remain unfulfilled. There is thus a general sense of dissatisfaction accompanied by all kinds of worries.
Meher BabaRead
Islam has always been part of America
Barack ObamaRead
There are more important things than finding the murderer. And justice is a fine word, but it is sometimes difficult to say exactly what one means by it. In my opinion, the important thing is to clear the innocent. - Hercule Poirot
Agatha ChristieRead
Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
D.T. SuzukiRead
I think what's really happening is that a dialogue opens up between the ego and these larger, more integrated parts of the psyche that are normally hidden from view.
Terence MckennaRead