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.
Society is just a structure with no soul. The soul is of the individual. One individual outweighs all societies. And, one individual's revolution outweighs all revolutions in the whole of history, because one man can become the womb for God to be reborn.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of the individual over societal norms, suggesting that personal transformation holds greater significance than collective movements.
Rajneesh's quote reflects the belief that society itself lacks inherent worth without the individuals that comprise it. He argues that true change and meaning arise from the individual, whose capacity for personal evolution or 'revolution' is more vital and impactful than any societal change. The notion of an individual being a 'womb for God to be reborn' suggests that personal realization can lead to profound spiritual transformations that surpass the collective efforts of society.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about personal growth and empowerment.
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
Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!
You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.
God gave you life and bestowed upon you his attributes; eventually you will return to him.
I would by all means have men beware, lest Æsop's pretty fable of the fly that sate [sic] on the pole of a chariot at the Olympic races and said, 'What a dust do I raise,' be verified in them. For so it is that some small observation, and that disturbed sometimes by the instrument, sometimes by the eye, sometimes by the calculation, and which may be owing to some real change in the heaven, raises new heavens and new spheres and circles.
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.