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
Love is born in sexuality but sexuality is not love. The lotus is born in the mud, but the lotus is not just mud. And if mud remains mud of course there are bound to be tears on the cheeks.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the distinction between love and mere physical attraction, suggesting that true love transcends sexuality.
Rajneesh emphasizes that while sexuality may give rise to love, it is not the entirety of love itself. He uses the metaphor of the lotus, which grows from mud but is not defined by it, indicating that love must evolve beyond its foundational physical aspects to achieve its true beauty and depth. If one remains solely in the realm of physicality, sadness and tears are inevitable, as they miss out on the higher essence of love.
Themes
LoveSexualityLotusMudRelationshipsDistinction
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a discussion about the nature of love and relationships.
More from Rajneesh
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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