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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Positive thinking may suppress negativity but does not lead to true transformation or awareness.
In this quote, Rajneesh emphasizes that merely adopting a technique of positive thinking does not result in genuine personal growth or self-awareness. Instead, it often involves suppressing negative traits rather than addressing them authentically, suggesting that true awareness comes from acknowledging all aspects of ourselves without judgment or forced positivity.
Themes
Positive ThinkingAwarenessTransformationPersonalityChoice
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational talk about personal growth.
More from Rajneesh
All quotes →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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Perfect people don't exist. And perfect people, if they existed, would be very boring. It is imperfection that keeps life interesting.
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