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.
People go on postponing everything that is meaningful. Tomorrow they will laugh; today, money has to be gathered... more money, more power, more things, more gadgets. Tomorrow they will love - today there is no time. But tomorrow never comes, and one day they find themselves burdened with all kinds of gadgets, burdened with money. They have come to the top of the ladder - and there is nowhere to go except to jump in a lake.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote warns against postponing meaningful experiences for material pursuits, highlighting the emptiness of such delays.
Rajneesh emphasizes the danger of prioritizing material wealth and power over rich, meaningful experiences and relationships. He suggests that people often defer love and joy to a vague 'tomorrow,' which never arrives, ultimately leading to a life filled with burdens rather than fulfillment. The metaphor of reaching the top of a ladder only to find no place to go underscores the futility of chasing superficial goals at the expense of genuine connections.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech, one might quote this to encourage the audience to prioritize experiences over material gains.
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
You never know the biggest day of your life is your biggest day, not until it’s happening. You don’t recognize the biggest day of your life, not until you’re right in the middle of it. The day you commit to something or someone. The day you get your heart broken. The day you meet your soul mate. The day you realize there’s not enough time because you wanna live forever. Those are the biggest days. The perfect days.
O polished perturbation! golden care! That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide To many a watchful night.
Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn't be about the money.
A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.
Each time I think I've created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private space.
But if you're gonna dine with them cannibals Sooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten . . .