Ambition : The seed of insanity from Osho
Ambition corrupts, the ambitious mind is bound to be corrupt. Ambition is the seed of insanity. Yet our whole education is ambition-oriented. Your father says, "Become someone!" and the fever is created -- you become diseased. Only one person can be president, and thousands of people who will be unsuccessful are aflame with the same ambition. Then you cannot be sane -- you become insane. Because so much tension is created you become corrupt: you will use any means to achieve your goal.
It is infectious. If you see that someone else is using corrupt means you know that if you don't use them you will be left behind. So you have to use equally corrupt means. Then someone else sees you being unscrupulous, so he has to be unscrupulous. It becomes a question of survival. Nothing else is possible within this framework, this structure. If you look to the very roots of society you will see that corruption is a natural outgrowth of our conditioning, our education, our cultivation.
The complexity of our social structure is such that those who succeed can hide their corruption. Corruption is seen only when someone fails. If you succeed no one will know that you have been corrupt; success will hide everything. You have only to succeed and you will become a pinnacle of goodness -- you will become everything that is good, pure, innocent. That means you can succeed in any way you like, but you must succeed. Once you succeed, once you are successful, nothing that you may have done is wrong.
This has been true throughout history. A person is only a thief if he is a small thief. If he is a great thief, then he becomes an Alexander the Great, a hero. No one ever sees that there is no qualitative difference between the two, that it is only a quantitative difference. No one will call Alexander the Great a great thief because the measure of your goodness is success: the more successful you are, the more good. Means are only questioned if you are a failure; then you will be called both corrupt and a fool.
If this is the attitude, how is it possible to create an uncorrupt society? To ask a person to be moral in this immoral situation is to ask something absurd. An individual cannot be moral in an immoral society. If he tries to be moral, his morality will only make him egoistic and ego is as immoral and corrupt as anything else.
This situation is a human creation. We have created a society with a mad rush for wealth, power, politics; we go on supporting it, and then we ask why there is corruption. Where there is ambition, corruption will be the logical consequence. You cannot check corruption unless the whole basic structure that encourages ambition is destroyed.
Ambition even becomes manifest around a so-called saint. He will incite you to ambition in terms of comparison; he will say, "Become better than others. Be good so that you will go to heaven and be the beloved of the divine while others will be tortured in the fires of hell." The poison of ambition can easily be used in order to make a person good.
But that is not really possible. A person may be ambitious and bad -- that is natural, logical -- but he cannot be ambitious and good. It is impossible. If a person wants to be good, he cannot think in terms of comparison, because the flowering of real goodness only comes when there is no comparison.
Comparison is the barrier because comparison creates ego, it creates violence. The moment you say, "I am more humble than you," you have become violent. You have used a subtle, cunning method that thrusts a knife into the other; you have killed him. The weapon is lethal -- and much more subtle than political or capitalist weapons. If you say, "I am better than others, I am more saintly than others," then the object may be different, but you will be on the same ambitious track. Criminals and sinners are not the only ones who are corrupt; the so-called good people, the "saints," are also corrupt -- in a more subtle way.
Our whole society is corrupt. It creates sinners with ambition and saints with ambition. And they are interdependent, because both exist on the same axis: the axis of ambition. A person who understands this will drop out of society completely. He will be neither a sinner nor a saint -- he will not fit himself into any category -- and you will be at a loss to measure who he is, what kind of a person he is. We need a society that is nonambitious.
God is not involved in it at all, but if you are ambitious, even God will become part of your ambition. You will pursue him, you will try to attain to God.
A person who is ambitious is never able to attain to God. He is never relaxed, he is never loving -- because ambition is violence. And a person who is not at ease, who is not loving, who is not silent or peaceful, can never know what God is. God is not something that can be known intellectually, he is something that can only be felt.
When you are at ease, totally relaxed, going nowhere -- when the mind is still and at peace with itself -- then you know what existence is. Then you know the beauty and the bliss of existence. It is not beauty in contrast to ugliness; there is no contrast and there is no comparison. Rather, everything becomes beautiful -- the very existence is beautiful. Then a cactus is as beautiful as a rose. Then individuality is beautiful; it is incomparable.
Then for the first time you begin to love. It is not a love that exists in contrast to hate because that kind of love can never really be love, it is bound to be a diluted form of hate, a non-intense form of hate. It is the opposite pole: love exists at one pole and hate exists at the other pole, and you go on wavering between the two. Your hate means less love. Your love means less hate.
You may ask how one can be beyond hate and love. You can only be beyond the duality of love and hate if you are no longer ambitious, if you are no longer tense, if you are relaxed -- going nowhere, seeking nothing at all, just being. Then you know God and, simultaneously, you know love. Love is a byproduct of being in tune with the infinite; it follows just like a shadow, it is a consequence.
OSHO
The Great Challenge
Chapter – 8
Title : God is Existence itself
Question – 1