Osho on ambition

Your life is just a hope; it is not a reality. It can be a reality.

This neurosis that you call society, civilisation, culture, education, this neurosis has a subtle structure. The structure is this: It gives you symbolic ideas so that reality by and by is clouded, becomes clouded, you can’t see the real, and you start becoming attached to the unreal. For example, society tells you to be ambitious; it helps you to become ambitious. Ambition means living in hope, living in the tomorrow. Ambition means today has to be sacrificed for tomorrow.

Today is all ther is; now is the only time you are, the only time you ever will be. If you want to live, it is now or never.

But society makes you ambitious. From childhood, when you go to school and you are taught ambition, you are poisoned: grow rich, become powerful, become somebody. Nobody tells you that you already have the capacity to be happy. Everybody says that you can hve the capacity to be happy only if you fulfil certain conditions – that you have enough money, a bug house, a big car, and this and that – only then can you be happy.

Happiness has nothing to do with these things. Happiness is not an achievement, it is your nature. Animals are happy without any money. Animals have no political power – they are not prime ministers and presidents – but they are happy. The trees and flowers are happy; otherwise they would have stopped blooming.

Only man is not happy, because man lives in ambition and not in reality.  Ambition is a trick. It is a trick to distract your mind. Symbolic life has been substituted for real life.

Children also learn that money is more important then love. If you don’t have love, nothing to be worried about, but you must have money. In life he will become greedy. He will go after money like a maniac. He will not bother about love. He will say, “First things first. I should first have a big balance in the bank. I must have this much money; only then can I afford love. “

One day you may have money and then suddenly you will feel empty – because all the years were wasted in accumulating money. And they are not only wasted; all those years were years of no love, so you have practiced no love. Now the money is there but you don’t know now to love. You have forgotten the very language of FEELING, the language of love, the language of ecstasy.