Ambition

 

 

A man constructs his own world. What I am, is my contribution to the world. And by that very offering I become a participant in the creation of the world, in the creation of my environment. In that respect every man is a creator. It is essential to understand that each individual is a contributor to the ugliness of the world, that each individual is equally responsible for whatever happens in the world – be it violence, anger, hatred or total annihilation by war. The responsibility for this condition rests on each and every pair of shoulders. Everyone is responsible. No matter how unimportant he may be, every man is responsible for every war, even the most major catastrophe. The collection of individuals is what constitutes a society. What else is society? The individual himself is society.

 

Man is drunk with ambition. Everyone would like to be something other than he is, but in this race to become something he forgets what he really is. To be something more than one is, is impossible. What is not in the seed cannot be in the tree, yet every individual is in search of what he is not. And this is the very cause of the illness of society. It is this desire that results in violence and anarchy.

 

For his natural evolution man requires nothing from outside. No searching, no tampering, no outer interference whatsoever is necessary. Man is gifted with a silent, mysterious and natural evolution, but this evolution is so natural that even the results of this growth are not visible on the outside.

 

In the process of trying to become what he is not, a man expends great effort – but in the end he accomplishes nothing at all. Tension, struggle and unhappiness are the results of this attempt to be what one is not.

 

When a man remains simply as he is there is no struggle, no conflict. Such a man is simply what he is. He is not in any kind of competition with anyone. There is no trace of any other personality in him; nothing has been imposed on him from outside. His heart is free of tension, free of competitiveness – and he evolves naturally. In this way, he stops expending has energies in pointless struggle and competition and becomes a great, natural reservoir of energy. It is this very stockpile of energy that directs his innate evolution. And then there is no tension in him whatsoever.

 

An individual who spends his life comparing himself to others does not live his life at all. Life is an inner phenomenon. It is not to be discovered by forgetting about oneself. When a man compares himself with others he feels envy, anger and aggression. That is not life; it is a living death. And it is unavoidable that a world populated by walking corpses has become as ugly as this one is now.

 

When a man tries to live with all this ambition and competitiveness he is unable to find any inner peace and, in the deeper levels of his subconscious mind, the conflicts and frustrations continue to multiply. And eventually, out of his despair, he begins to take revenge. He becomes destructive. The reaction of one who is unable to understand himself is destruction. The lack of self-understanding manifests itself as destruction, violence.

 

This is why I say that a world based on ambition can never be nonviolent, whether a man’s ambition is for this world or for the other world. Wherever there is ambition, there is aggression. Ambition itself is violence. And science has placed immense power in the hands of ambitious people. Destruction is inevitable unless religion can erase ambition from the hearts and minds of men.

 

Why is there all this ambition? Where does it come from?

 

Ambition is the result of an inferiority complex. Inside himself every individual feels weak, ineffectual. Inside he feels shallow and empty, as if he is nothing. He feels a kind of nonexistence, an emptiness. And it is this emptiness he is trying to escape.

 

In reality, he is not running towards something, he is trying to escape from something. But it is impossible to escape from one place without fixing one’s sights on another – and that is why he focuses on material objects. The root cause of man’s escapism is his inner emptiness, but outwardly it takes the form of trying to attain something, of trying to reach somewhere else. In fact he is running to escape from his self.

 

But to accept this as a fact is to expose our own escapism and so we indulge ourselves in theories about freedom from the wheel of birth and death. This self-deception is very deep-rooted and unless one breaks this chain of deceit he will never free himself from ambition.

 

If a man fails at one ambition he simply selects another, if he fails in the world he will create an ambition for God. A businessman who cannot free himself of worldly ambitions becomes a sannyasin – but it is the same ambition in a new garb. And is not ambition itself also an illusion?

 

The birth of religion in a man’s life only takes place at the moment he begins to look at and understand the reasons he is trying to escape. Realizing that the root of ambition lies in trying to escape one’s inner emptiness opens a new vista in a man’s life. Thinking one can flee from one’s inner emptiness is just another illusion, but being aware of one’s inner emptiness is religion. Escapism is illusion; awareness is religion.

 

The man who tries to escape finds the inner emptiness quite shallow, but the man who lives in awareness finds no shallowness there at all. What appears as shallow in one’s ignorance becomes deep, whole and profound in awareness. Trying to escape means increasing this feeling of shallowness, because you move further away from your self. And the further you go the more shallow you will feel. The degree of this feeling is your distance from your self. Remember, a man is as ineffectual as his ego is strong.

 

A man’s sense of emptiness increases as he tries to escape from his self – and the basic cause of this attempt to escape is fear. To escape is to accept your fear; to escape makes your fear secure. And whatever you accept, whatever brings you a sense of security ends up dominating you. As you try to escape, your fear does not decrease; on the contrary, it increases. Your fear grows to the same extent you lack understanding of your self. You feel more and more shallow, and this ultimately becomes very painful.

 

The man who does not try to escape from the self and who becomes aware of the self finds he has entered a whole new world. He does not feel shallow at all. He does not find his life empty. His whole life is one of unfathomable love and joy.

 

The man who is aware of the self finds no shallowness within himself whatsoever. He finds God there. There is no shallowness in the self. Shallowness is only to be found in one’s ignorance of the self. If you are unaware, that unawareness itself is your feeling of shallowness; if you are aware, there is no shallowness – just like there is no darkness in the presence of the sun.

 

The moment you become aware, nothing like shallowness exists. The moment you become the sun, there is nothing like darkness to be found anywhere. I say this after having become the sun; I say this after having been filled with the totality. Come, look at my hands. Are they not full? You too are the sun. Your hands are also full.

 

But you are asleep. Your eyes are closed. Because of your slumber you do not see that your hands are already full, and so trying to fill them you spend your life in dreams. But I ask you, how can you fill hands that are not empty? How can you fill an inner emptiness that is already full? This is why all your efforts are futile. And this futility, this failure, is the cause of all human agony.

 

A man who is in mental anguish wants to torture others. One who suffers wants to share his suffering with others. A man can only share what he possesses. It is impossible to live without sharing what you have. Flowers share their fragrance because fragrance is what they are; stars share their light because they are light themselves. A man shares his suffering if suffering is what he is.

 

But man can also share joy, because man can also become joy. And religion is the road to unimaginable joy. Religion is awareness of the self, and one who is aware of his self finds there is not shallowness in him at all. He is filled with unfathomable joy because now nothing remains to be achieved. In the self, one finds that whatever is worth achieving is already there.

 

The self is not shallow. The self is the fullness of joy. To be aware is to share one’s joy with others. The heart that scatters the fragrance of joy is a religious heart.

 

In the hands and hearts of truly religious people, science and its power could be a truly glorious thing. Such a collaboration, such a merger of science and religion, has long been awaited. Are you prepared to support that union? Each man must be a vehicle. Each individual must become an instrument. Such a partnership can bring a period of great glory to the earth. It is not an era that has been and gone, it is an era that is yet to come.

-Osho, "The Long, the Short and the All, #2"