8.
I call the wheel of life – going round and around on the axle of ambition – hell. It is this fever of ambition that poisons life. Among the most serious diseases and mental troubles that man has known, there is no greater disease than ambition – because a mind which is disturbed by the winds of ambition is not destined to have peace, music, and bliss. Such a person is not at home in himself – and peace, music, and bliss are the outcome of being at home in oneself. A person who is not at home within himself is diseased. He is only healthy when he is at home there.
A young woman asked me, “What is the root cause of this ambition?”
I answered, “An inferiority complex, a feeling of poverty.”
Certainly, an inferiority complex and ambition appear to be opposites, but are they really contradictory? No. They are not contradictory but rather two ends of the same feeling. What is an inferiority complex at one end is ambition at the other. Inferiority becomes ambition in its attempt to free itself from inferiority. It is inferiority all dressed up. But even after putting on the most valuable clothes it is neither eliminated nor destroyed. It may be that it is hidden from others, but the self keeps seeing it constantly. When a person is covered with clothes he is not naked to others’ eyes, but he still is to himself.
That is the reason why those whose ambitious achievements dazzle the eyes of others will remain worried inside themselves and continue planning for greater successes. Their inner inferiority complex is not destroyed by success. Indeed, every new success comes to them as a new challenge for further successes. In this way, the successes that they had thought would be solutions prove only to be harbingers of newer problems. And this happens whenever one of life’s problems is dealt with in a wrong way: the solutions to the problems become, in themselves, greater problems.
It is important to remember that covering up a disease is no escape from it. In this way diseases do not go away; they just get nourished. The mind, in its attempt to cover up a troublesome inferiority complex, gets filled with ambition and forgets it. It is also easy to forget oneself in the feeling of ambition. Then, whether the ambition is worldly or for enlightenment makes no difference. Ambition is intoxicating. Its intoxication brings deep self-forgetfulness. But once a person becomes used to intoxication or to a dose of intoxication, he no longer becomes intoxicated so easily, and the mind will need stronger and stronger doses of intoxicants and new ones too, and ambitions will keep on increasing. There will be no end to them. They have a beginning, but no end.
And when a person gets bored with worldly ambitions, or when his death is approaching, so-called religious ambitions will begin. These are also illusory, and the reality is that they will be more deeply intoxicating, because it is not so easy to see when you have achieved a religious goal and so the fear of failing will also be less.
As long as a person tries to keep himself separate from his authentic self, he will suffer from the fever of ambition in some form or another. In striving to be different from his true self, he will try to cover it and forget it. But is covering up a fact and becoming free from it the same thing? Is forgetting something and giving it up the same thing? No. Forgetting an inferiority complex and becoming free from it are not the same. So this is a very unwise response because as you proceed with the treatment the disease will still be growing.
Every success of the ambitious mind is self-destructive, because it serves as fuel for the fire of ambition. Success is achieved, but the inferiority does not diminish so bigger successes become necessary and unavoidable. Basically, this is tantamount to increasing your inferiority complex.
The entire history of mankind is full of such diseased minds. What else do Tamberlaine, Alexander the Great and Hitler have? And please do not laugh at this comment, because it is not polite to laugh at the sick. It is also undesirable to laugh for another reason; and that is because the germs of their sickness are present in all of us. We are their inheritors – not only individuals, but the whole of humanity is sick with ambition. That is why this colossal disease escapes our attention.
In my opinion, an unavoidable characteristic of good mental health is a life free from ambition. Ambition is a disease and, therefore, it is destructive. Diseases are always the fellow-travelers of death. Ambition is destruction, it is violence, it is hatred coming out of a diseased mind, it is jealousy, it is a chronic struggle between man and man, it is war.
Even the ambition for enlightenment is destructive. It is violence against the self. It becomes enmity with the self itself. Worldly ambition is violence against others; ambition for enlightenment is violence against the self. Where there is ambition there is violence – it is another matter whether it is outward or inward. Violence, in every state or form, is always destructive. That is why only those understandings that arise from a healthy and calm mind can be creative.
A healthy mind is centered in the self: the urge to be something different will not be there. In the effort to be something different, the individual is not able to know himself – and not to know the self is the basic and central weakness from which all inferiority complexes are born.
There is no salvation from this weakness except getting to know the self. It is not through ambition, but only through knowing the self that we are freed from this desire, and for that to happen it is absolutely necessary to eliminate ambitions from the mind.
I am reminded of an anecdote about Tamberlaine and Baizad…
King Baizad was defeated in a battle and was brought before the conqueror, Tamberlaine. On seeing him, Tamberlaine suddenly started laughing out loud. Thereupon, the insulted Baizad proudly lifted his head and said, “Tamberlaine, do not be so arrogant about your victory in this battle. Remember, he who laughs at the defeat of others will one day have to shed tears at his own defeat.”
King Baizad had only one eye and Tamberlaine had only one leg. On hearing the words of the one-eyed Baizad, the lame Tamberlaine laughed twice as much again and said, “I am not so foolish as to laugh at this small victory. I am laughing at our condition, yours and mine! See, you are one-eyed and I am lame. I was laughing at the thought of why God grants kingdoms to you and me who are one-eyed and lame.”
I want to tell Tamberlaine, who is asleep in his grave, that this is not the fault of God. In fact, except for the lame and the one-eyed, no one else is eager for kingdoms. And isn’t this true? Isn’t it true that on the day man’s mind becomes healthy there will be no kingdoms? Isn’t it true that those who become healthy have always lost their kingdoms?
Whenever he finds any inferiority within himself man wants to run away. He starts running in exactly the opposite direction to it, and herein lies his mistake – because inferiority is no more than an indication of inner poverty.
Deep down, every person suffers from inner poverty. The same emptiness is felt by everyone. Attempts are made to fill up this inner emptiness with outer gains, but how can the pit of inner emptiness be filled from the outside? The outer is unable to do so for the very reason that it is on the outside, it cannot fill up the inner. After all, everything is on the outside – wealth, status, personality, power, religion, charity, renunciation, knowledge, God, salvation – so what is inside? Apart from poverty, emptiness, and nothingness, there is nothing inside. So if we run away from that nothingness we are running away from the real self: running away is running away from the essential being of the self.
The way is not to run away from it, but to live with it. For the person who has the courage to live and be alert, that emptiness is filled. For him, that emptiness itself proves to be his great salvation. In that nothingness everything exists. In that emptiness dwells existence, and that existence is godly.
- Osho, “The Earthen Lamps, No.8”