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.
Your ego may be just a soap bubble. Maybe for a few seconds it will remain, rising higher in the air. Perhaps for a few seconds it may have a rainbow, but it is only for a few seconds. In this infinite and eternal existence your egos go on bursting every moment. It is better not to have any attachment with soap bubbles.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that ego is fleeting and ultimately insubstantial, much like a soap bubble.
Rajneesh uses the metaphor of a soap bubble to illustrate the transient nature of ego and self-importance. While the ego may seem significant and can rise high for a brief moment, it is inherently fragile and bursts continuously, reminding us that attachment to ego can lead to suffering. Embracing the impermanence of our ego allows for a more profound understanding of existence, prompting a detachment from superficial identities and fostering inner peace.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about self-awareness and humility, one could refer to this quote to emphasize the importance of letting go of vanity.
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
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity.
The shallow, as intimated, consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
Compromise, n. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due.
The bulls are my best friends." I translated to Brett. "You kill your friends?" she asked. "Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don't kill me.
Comrades," he said, "here is a point that must be settled. The wild creatures, such as rats and rabbits–are they our friends or our enemies? Let us put it to the vote. I propose this question to the meeting: Are rats comrades?" The vote was taken at once, and it was agreed by an overwhelming majority that rats were comrades. There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.