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
With your ego you cannot know. Only in an egolessness, in a deep abyss, in the absence of the ego, does the perception happen - then you become a mirror. With the ego you will always interpret, you cannot know the truth. With the ego you will always be there interpreting in subtle ways, and your interpretation is not the truth. You are the medium of all falsification. Through you everything becomes false. When you are not there, the true reflects.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Egolessness allows for true understanding, while the ego distorts perception.
This quote emphasizes that a person's ego acts as a barrier to genuine knowledge and understanding. Rajneesh suggests that only by transcending the ego can individuals perceive the truth; when we are consumed by our self-identity and biases, our interpretations are flawed and deceptive. The absence of ego allows for untainted perception, reflecting reality accurately, akin to a clear mirror.
Themes
EgoPerceptionTruthKnowledgeAwareness
In practice
Example use cases
During a seminar on personal growth, a speaker quoted this to highlight the importance of self-awareness.
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
Light-skinned privilege is largely through a white lens. It is exploited by oppressive forces... It was always a facade.
Kendrick SampsonRead
We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea - organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the nation.
Potter StewartRead
Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
We don't have to expect everything from those who govern us; that would be juvenile.
Pope FrancisRead
Guns go home with the soldiers, but landmines are designed to kill - mindlessly, out of control, for years.
Jody WilliamsRead
Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade - and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal commodity.
George SorosRead