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
What exists is a godly existence, a divine existence. God not as a person but as a presence certainly exists. But to understand that presence, you have to understand your own inner presence first, because it is from there that you can take off, it is from there that you can have the first glimpse of what godliness is. If you have not known yourself you will never know God.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Understanding oneself is key to experiencing a divine presence.
This quote emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and introspection in spiritual growth. Rajneesh argues that to truly comprehend the divine or the concept of God, one must first explore and understand their own inner self, as this self-exploration provides the foundational insight needed to perceive a higher existence.
Themes
Self-AwarenessDivine PresenceSpiritualityIntrospectionGodliness
In practice
Example use cases
In a meditation retreat, this quote can inspire participants to focus on their inner journey.
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.
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 – but that is an outcome, a by-product, that is not the source. The source is that one is love.
RajneeshRead
Similar quotes
My worth to God in public is what I am in private.
Oswald ChambersRead
Government is a necessary evil
Thomas PaineRead
Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.
Salman RushdieRead
I believe that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality. They are not just parts somehow related to each other, but an inseparable whole while functioning. A brain without a body could not think.
Moshe FeldenkraisRead
Once in our world, a Stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.
C. S. LewisRead
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
Frederick DouglassRead