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Our education is oriented toward ambition. And our entire society is ambitious, and an ambitious society cannot help but be corrupt. Ambition is developed in every person, but not everyone is capable of satisfying it. One could say, for example, that anyone can become president, but at the same time, only one person can be president. When you are taught that anyone can be president, ambitions arise: if anyone can be president, then why not me? But since in reality only one person can be president, a mad race begins. Any means are used—even dishonorable ones.
Ambition corrupts; an ambitious mind will inevitably be corrupt. Ambition is the seed of madness. And yet, our education is oriented toward ambition. Your fathers say: "Become this or that!"—and a fever arises, you fall ill. Only one person can be president, but thousands of unlucky people are gripped by ambition. They can no longer be reasonable—they become mad. Because such enormous tension has been created, you sell yourself: you will use any means to achieve your goal.
It is contagious. Someone else uses dishonorable means, and you think that if you do not use them yourself, you will be left behind. So you have to use the same dishonorable means. Then someone next to you sees that you are acting dishonorably, and they too must act dishonorably. It becomes a matter of survival. But within this structure, within this society, only this is possible. If you study the foundations of our society, you will see that vice is a natural product of our upbringing, our education, our development.
Our social structures are extremely complex, and successful people can hide their corruption. It is noticeable only if someone fails. If you have succeeded, no one will know that you were dishonorable; success hides everything. You only need to succeed, and you will become an example of virtue, the embodiment of everything good, pure, and innocent. This means you can succeed by any means, but you must succeed. And as soon as you have succeeded, as soon as you have achieved success, everything you did will be considered right.
Our entire history confirms this.
A man is considered a thief only if he is a petty thief. If he is a great thief, he becomes Alexander the Great, a hero. No one sees that there is no qualitative difference between thieves, that the difference is only quantitative. No one will call Alexander the Great a great thief because our measure of virtue is success: the more successful you are, the more virtuous. Means are taken into account only if you are a loser; then you will be called both dishonorable and a fool.
How can an incorruptible society be created with such an attitude? It is absurd to ask a person to be moral in such an immoral situation. In an immoral society, an individual cannot be moral. If he tries to be moral, his morality will make him selfish, and the ego is just as immoral and vicious as everything else.
This situation is a human creation. We created a society with a mad craving for wealth, power, politics; we continue to sustain this, and then we ask why vice exists. Where there is ambition, vice is a logical consequence. It is impossible to stop corruption until the basic structure that encourages ambition is destroyed.
Ambition manifests even in the society of so-called saints. Saints will encourage you toward ambition in the manifestation of compassion; they will say: "Become better than others. Be virtuous so that you may go to heaven and be beloved by God, while others burn in hell." The poison of ambition can easily be used to make a person virtuous.
But in reality, such virtue will be fake. A man can be ambitious and dishonorable—this is natural and logical—but he cannot be ambitious and virtuous. It is impossible. If a man wants to be virtuous, he must not think in terms of comparison, because the flowering of true virtue occurs only when there are no comparisons.
Comparison hinders virtue because comparison creates division, creates violence. As soon as you say: "I am humbler than you"—you have become aggressive. You used a subtle, sophisticated way to stab another in the back. You killed him. This is a lethal weapon—and far more subtle than the weapons of politicians or capitalists. If you say: "I am better than others, I am a greater righteous person than the rest"—your goal may differ from that of politicians, but you are on the same path of ambition. Not only criminals and sinners are vicious; so-called virtuous people, "saints," are also vicious—in a more subtle way.
Our entire society is vicious. It creates sinners with ambitions and saints with ambitions. And they are interdependent because they are on one axis—the axis of ambition. A person who understands this will fall completely out of society. He will be neither sinner nor saint, he will not fit into any category, and it will be difficult for you to assess who he is or what kind of person he is. We need a society that is not ambitious.
God has nothing to do with this, but if you are ambitious, even God becomes part of your ambitions. You will strive toward him; you will try to achieve God.
An ambitious person is incapable of comprehending the divine. He is never relaxed, never loving, because ambition is violence. A person who does not know what peace and love, silence and serenity are, can never know what the divine is. Because the divine cannot be known intellectually; it can only be felt.
When you are calm, completely relaxed, striving for nothing, when the mind is quiet and at peace with itself, then you know what existence is. Then you know the bliss and beauty of the divine. Not that beauty which is opposed to ugliness; there are no opposites, and there are no comparisons. Simply the world becomes beautiful, existence itself is beautiful. Then a cactus is as beautiful as a rose. Then every individuality is beautiful, incomparable.
Then for the first time you begin to love. Not with that love which is opposite to hate. That love is not actually love, but a softened form of hate, a less intense form of hate, its opposite pole: love exists on one pole and hate on the other, and you constantly oscillate between them. Your hate means a smaller dose of love. Your love means a smaller dose of hate.
The question may arise whether there is a way beyond love and hate... Beyond this duality stands the one who is no longer ambitious, not tense, who is relaxed, strives for nothing, seeks absolutely nothing, who simply exists. He knows divinity and simultaneously knows love. Love is a consequence of the harmony of your existence with the infinite; it is like a shadow, it follows after.
Buddha never sought love; love simply came to him. Jesus never thought about love; he lived love. Love cannot be sought directly—it is such a subtle fragrance that you will not be able to detect it. Love comes following the realization that all is one, like a reward for understanding that the divine is present in both your friends and your enemies.
You are not separate, not separated from existence; you are part of all that exists. You are merged with existence not mechanically, but organically, just as a whale is organically connected to the ocean and always one with it, just as my hand is organically one with me. Once you realize this—you can know love.
But this realization comes only if you are not ambitious. Only an unambitious mind is religious. It does not matter what your ambitions are—be it wealth, power or fame, or even liberation, or divinity. If you are ambitious, it means that your mind strives for something, chases after something. It is occupied with achievement; it does not want to be simply itself.
Ambition is tension, and tension prevents the encounter with the divine. But if the encounter happens, you are no longer there. The encounter with the divine completely purifies you, completely absorbs you. Only then does love come. The death of your ego is the birth of love.
Usually, we mistake for love something opposite to hate. But he who knows the truth understands that love is the opposite of the ego. The true enemy of love is not hate; the true enemy of love is the ego. And hate and what we usually understand as love are two sides of the same coin.
Love comes when you are not there, when there is no ego. And the ego is gone, you are gone, when you are not ambitious. The moment of absence of ambition is the moment of meditation. In the moment of absence of ambition, when you strive for nothing, ask for nothing, pray for nothing, when you are completely satisfied with who you are, comparing yourself to no one—in such a moment you touch the deepest source of the divine. And you do not just touch it; you are immersed in it, you are one with it.
Then love flows. Then you can only be loving—nothing else remains for you. Then love is no longer the opposite of hate. There is neither love as we knew it nor hate; both have disappeared. Now a completely different quality grows within you, love in a completely new dimension.
Now your love is a certain state of mind, not a relationship. It is directed at no one. One cannot say that you love someone; rather, you are simply loving. There is no other person, no beloved; you simply love everything that comes into contact with you. You yourself are love; you live in love. It has become your fragrance."
Osho
Ambition corrupts; an ambitious mind will inevitably be corrupt. Ambition is the seed of madness. And yet, our education is oriented toward ambition. Your fathers say: "Become this or that!"—and a fever arises, you fall ill. Only one person can be president, but thousands of unlucky people are gripped by ambition. They can no longer be reasonable—they become mad. Because such enormous tension has been created, you sell yourself: you will use any means to achieve your goal.
It is contagious. Someone else uses dishonorable means, and you think that if you do not use them yourself, you will be left behind. So you have to use the same dishonorable means. Then someone next to you sees that you are acting dishonorably, and they too must act dishonorably. It becomes a matter of survival. But within this structure, within this society, only this is possible. If you study the foundations of our society, you will see that vice is a natural product of our upbringing, our education, our development.
Our social structures are extremely complex, and successful people can hide their corruption. It is noticeable only if someone fails. If you have succeeded, no one will know that you were dishonorable; success hides everything. You only need to succeed, and you will become an example of virtue, the embodiment of everything good, pure, and innocent. This means you can succeed by any means, but you must succeed. And as soon as you have succeeded, as soon as you have achieved success, everything you did will be considered right.
Our entire history confirms this.
A man is considered a thief only if he is a petty thief. If he is a great thief, he becomes Alexander the Great, a hero. No one sees that there is no qualitative difference between thieves, that the difference is only quantitative. No one will call Alexander the Great a great thief because our measure of virtue is success: the more successful you are, the more virtuous. Means are taken into account only if you are a loser; then you will be called both dishonorable and a fool.
How can an incorruptible society be created with such an attitude? It is absurd to ask a person to be moral in such an immoral situation. In an immoral society, an individual cannot be moral. If he tries to be moral, his morality will make him selfish, and the ego is just as immoral and vicious as everything else.
This situation is a human creation. We created a society with a mad craving for wealth, power, politics; we continue to sustain this, and then we ask why vice exists. Where there is ambition, vice is a logical consequence. It is impossible to stop corruption until the basic structure that encourages ambition is destroyed.
Ambition manifests even in the society of so-called saints. Saints will encourage you toward ambition in the manifestation of compassion; they will say: "Become better than others. Be virtuous so that you may go to heaven and be beloved by God, while others burn in hell." The poison of ambition can easily be used to make a person virtuous.
But in reality, such virtue will be fake. A man can be ambitious and dishonorable—this is natural and logical—but he cannot be ambitious and virtuous. It is impossible. If a man wants to be virtuous, he must not think in terms of comparison, because the flowering of true virtue occurs only when there are no comparisons.
Comparison hinders virtue because comparison creates division, creates violence. As soon as you say: "I am humbler than you"—you have become aggressive. You used a subtle, sophisticated way to stab another in the back. You killed him. This is a lethal weapon—and far more subtle than the weapons of politicians or capitalists. If you say: "I am better than others, I am a greater righteous person than the rest"—your goal may differ from that of politicians, but you are on the same path of ambition. Not only criminals and sinners are vicious; so-called virtuous people, "saints," are also vicious—in a more subtle way.
Our entire society is vicious. It creates sinners with ambitions and saints with ambitions. And they are interdependent because they are on one axis—the axis of ambition. A person who understands this will fall completely out of society. He will be neither sinner nor saint, he will not fit into any category, and it will be difficult for you to assess who he is or what kind of person he is. We need a society that is not ambitious.
God has nothing to do with this, but if you are ambitious, even God becomes part of your ambitions. You will strive toward him; you will try to achieve God.
An ambitious person is incapable of comprehending the divine. He is never relaxed, never loving, because ambition is violence. A person who does not know what peace and love, silence and serenity are, can never know what the divine is. Because the divine cannot be known intellectually; it can only be felt.
When you are calm, completely relaxed, striving for nothing, when the mind is quiet and at peace with itself, then you know what existence is. Then you know the bliss and beauty of the divine. Not that beauty which is opposed to ugliness; there are no opposites, and there are no comparisons. Simply the world becomes beautiful, existence itself is beautiful. Then a cactus is as beautiful as a rose. Then every individuality is beautiful, incomparable.
Then for the first time you begin to love. Not with that love which is opposite to hate. That love is not actually love, but a softened form of hate, a less intense form of hate, its opposite pole: love exists on one pole and hate on the other, and you constantly oscillate between them. Your hate means a smaller dose of love. Your love means a smaller dose of hate.
The question may arise whether there is a way beyond love and hate... Beyond this duality stands the one who is no longer ambitious, not tense, who is relaxed, strives for nothing, seeks absolutely nothing, who simply exists. He knows divinity and simultaneously knows love. Love is a consequence of the harmony of your existence with the infinite; it is like a shadow, it follows after.
Buddha never sought love; love simply came to him. Jesus never thought about love; he lived love. Love cannot be sought directly—it is such a subtle fragrance that you will not be able to detect it. Love comes following the realization that all is one, like a reward for understanding that the divine is present in both your friends and your enemies.
You are not separate, not separated from existence; you are part of all that exists. You are merged with existence not mechanically, but organically, just as a whale is organically connected to the ocean and always one with it, just as my hand is organically one with me. Once you realize this—you can know love.
But this realization comes only if you are not ambitious. Only an unambitious mind is religious. It does not matter what your ambitions are—be it wealth, power or fame, or even liberation, or divinity. If you are ambitious, it means that your mind strives for something, chases after something. It is occupied with achievement; it does not want to be simply itself.
Ambition is tension, and tension prevents the encounter with the divine. But if the encounter happens, you are no longer there. The encounter with the divine completely purifies you, completely absorbs you. Only then does love come. The death of your ego is the birth of love.
Usually, we mistake for love something opposite to hate. But he who knows the truth understands that love is the opposite of the ego. The true enemy of love is not hate; the true enemy of love is the ego. And hate and what we usually understand as love are two sides of the same coin.
Love comes when you are not there, when there is no ego. And the ego is gone, you are gone, when you are not ambitious. The moment of absence of ambition is the moment of meditation. In the moment of absence of ambition, when you strive for nothing, ask for nothing, pray for nothing, when you are completely satisfied with who you are, comparing yourself to no one—in such a moment you touch the deepest source of the divine. And you do not just touch it; you are immersed in it, you are one with it.
Then love flows. Then you can only be loving—nothing else remains for you. Then love is no longer the opposite of hate. There is neither love as we knew it nor hate; both have disappeared. Now a completely different quality grows within you, love in a completely new dimension.
Now your love is a certain state of mind, not a relationship. It is directed at no one. One cannot say that you love someone; rather, you are simply loving. There is no other person, no beloved; you simply love everything that comes into contact with you. You yourself are love; you live in love. It has become your fragrance."
Osho