If you are ambitious, then your mind is bound to remain restless. If you want peace, then the first requirement is to drop all ambition. Unless you drop ambition you cannot be at ease, at peace, you cannot be relaxed.
Just watch people who have succeeded in the world and you will drop the idea of success. Nothing fails like success. Although you have been told that nothing succeeds like success, I say to you that nothing fails like success. Happiness has nothing to do with success, happiness has nothing to do with ambition, happiness has nothing to do with money, power, prestige. It is a totally different dimension.
To live without meditation is to be foolish, because whatsoever you do then is going to be wrong. You cannot do right without meditation because right only grows in the soil of meditation. In the soil of the mind ambitions, desires arise. And when there is ambition there is competition, and when there is competition you are not a friend to others. You are an enemy and others are your enemies. The competitive mind lives in an inimical way, lives in hatred, lives in jealousy; its whole function is out of jealousy. And because of this kind of life man suffers, he remains in misery.
Become still — not a forced stillness, not a practiced and cultivated stillness — become still naturally. Understanding the futility of desire, seeing the absolute absurdity of ambition, become still — through understanding, not through practice.
How to find joy? Let your ambition disappear; ambition is the barrier. Ambition means an ego trip: “I want to be this, I want to be that — more money, more power, more prestige.” But remember, Buddha says: THE WINNER SOWS HATRED BECAUSE THE LOSER SUFFERS. LET GO OF WINNING AND LOSING AND FIND JOY. If you want to find joy, forget about winning and losing. Life is a play, a game. Play it beautifully, forget all about losing and winning. The real sportsman’s spirit is not that of winning or losing, it is not his real question. He enjoys playing; that is the real player. If you are playing to win, you will play with tension, anxiety. You are not concerned with the play itself, its joy and its mystery; you are more concerned with the outcome. This is not the right way to live in the world.
The more meditative you become, the less ambitious you will be. There is no question of fulfilling ambitions; ambition will start disappearing from your consciousness.
This moment is all. Buddha insists very much: Live in the moment. And desire does not allow you to live in the moment. And you go on repeating the same things, you move in circles. Just watch your life, look back. You have been moving in circles: the same anger, the same sex, the same greed, the same ambition, the same postponement and the same desiring mind. When are you going to wake up?
What is enlightenment? — the insight that desire is futile, that ambition is illness. Then suddenly you are thrown back to the present moment. To be in the present is to be enlightened. To be now and to be here is to be enlightened.
Mind is politics, because mind is ambitious and ambition is the root of politics. If you are ambitious you are political. Your ambition may take the form of religion, but the politics is there. Then you are competing with other saints.
Man cannot live without politics, because of the mind. You are brought up, you are trained to be political. Every child is poisoned from the very beginning, poisoned by ambition. We teach children to be ambitious: be somebody in the world, be somebody special, somebody superior, defeat others! We give the idea to every child that life is a struggle and only the fittest survive. Whether you survive by right or wrong means, that is not important.
This is the case with you in so many lives. You have lived the same kind of life again and again — the same desire, the same greed, the same ambition — and each time you were frustrated, but again you are ready to become a victim. It is exactly like dreams.
Buddha introduced the idea that young people should become sannyasins. Then it is something significant. When a young person goes beyond sex, when a young person goes beyond desires, when a young person goes beyond greed, ambition, the longing to be powerful, the ambition to be famous, then it is something tremendously meaningful, significant. Remember one thing: when you are young you have energies. Those energies can take you to hell and those same energies can take you to heaven. Energies are neutral; it depends on you how you use them.
We are very much afraid, and the fear arises because we have believed, we have been told again and again, hypnotized to believe in the ego. This whole social structure up to now, hitherto, has been propounding an egoistic life attitude. Then fear, then greed, then ambition, are natural. And ego is being taught to every child; his ego is strengthened so that you can make him ambitious. Out of ambition arises politics. Ego is created so that you can make him afraid. Out of fear arises religion — the so-called religion.
Each child is poisoned by the society through teaching him ambition. Ambition is a poison far more dangerous than any alcohol can ever be, far more dangerous than marijuana or LSD, because ambition destroys your whole life. It keeps you moving in a false direction. It keeps you imagining, desiring, dreaming, it keeps you wasting your life. Ambition means a subtle creation of the ego, and once the ego is created you is in the grip of darkness. And the whole social structure depends on ambition. Be the first! Wherever you are, whatsoever you are doing: be the first! — as if being the first has something divine about it. By what means you become the first is irrelevant. By right means or wrong means, succeed! As if success in itself has become equivalent to life, synonymous with life. Life has nothing to do with success. Success keeps you rushing towards the future and that becomes your intoxicant. Hoping, hoping for the tomorrow, wasting that which you have or that which you don’t have and will never have.
