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.
The disobedient child is continuously condemned. The obedient child is, on the other hand, continuously praised. But have you heard of any obedient child having become world-famous in any dimension of creativity? Have you heard of any obedient child who has attained the Nobel prize for anything - literature, peace, science? The obedient child becomes just the common crowd. All that is added to existence is added by the disobedient.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Disobedience often leads to creativity and greatness, while obedience can lead to conformity and mediocrity.
This quote highlights the tension between obedience and creativity, suggesting that while obedient individuals might receive praise and acceptance, it is often the disobedient ones who challenge the norms and contribute significantly to fields like literature, science, and peace. Rajneesh argues that greatness and innovation often emerge from those who dare to go against societal expectations, thus promoting a narrative that values uniqueness and independent thought over blind adherence to rules.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about the importance of thinking outside the box.
More from Rajneesh
All quotes →The 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Similar quotes
So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,_x000D_ _x000D_ The seasons' difference, as the icy fang_x000D_ _x000D_ And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,_x000D_ _x000D_ Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,_x000D_ _x000D_ Even till I shrink with cold, I smile.
And if we can accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?
...'I thought the rule was that all monks were shaved.' 'Oh, Soto says he is bald under the hair,'said Lu Tze. 'He says the hair is a separate creature that just happens to live on him.
I felt like a Tinker toy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.
I am not in England; I live in the Caribbean. So I am not hungover by prizes and awards because it does not happen very often.