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.
Spirituality is rebellion; religiousness is orthodoxy. Spirituality is individuality; religiousness is just remaining part of the crowd psychology. Religiousness keeps you a sheep, and spirituality is a lion's roar.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Spirituality encourages individual thought and freedom, while religiousness often adheres to societal norms and conformity.
In this quote, Rajneesh contrasts spirituality with religiousness, suggesting that true spirituality embodies personal rebellion against established norms, promoting individuality and self-expression. Conversely, he views religiousness as a mechanism of conformity, where individuals follow doctrines and societal expectations, resembling 'sheep' rather than embracing their inner 'lion' that symbolizes strength and independence.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about the importance of following one's own path instead of succumbing to societal pressures.
More from Rajneesh
All quotes βThe 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 β but that is an outcome, a by-product, that is not the source. The source is that one is love.
Similar quotes
I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.
When all other rights are taken away, the right of rebellion is made perfect.
People may come to our communities because they want to serve the poor; they will only stay once they have discovered that they themselves are poor.
When a government betrays the people by amassing too much power and becoming tyrannical, the people have no choice but to exercise their original right of self-defense β to fight the government.
O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!
On this ancient and miraculous world, where such beautiful natural and living things have evolved, something has gone wrong when life itself is used as a manufacturing process.