Ranveer Singh: Hi!
I’m Ranveer Singh, and I want to know the truth about ambition.
I find myself to be ambitious, and sometimes I wonder, is it a good thing, is it a bad
thing, how is it affecting me, how is it affecting
other people?
Sadhguru: Well Ranveer, he’s saying, he’s very ambitious,
but fortunately, he’s still kept his playfulness in his ambition,
because generally, ambitious people become (Gestures).
In the beginning, they carry a constipated face.
As life progresses, they will become grave practicing the final pose, all their life.
Because you make up something in your mind which you call as ambition, it’s just a
thought.
Now, you put so much of your life energy into it
that your very life becomes about that one thought that you have.
Believe me, no thought is worth investing your entire life, no thought.
Essentially, right from kindergarten, teachers and parents are keying children up
– “You must be number one,” the lowest number in the number system.
And this “number one” slowly translates into ambition.
It may take on various forms, but essentially “number one” will remain in the scheme
of ambition.
But the reason why people take to ambition is,
they do not know how else to propel themselves to success.
How to propel myself to success without fixing a goal, this is the fundamental question.
Is ambition right or wrong?
It’s neither right nor wrong, it’s just very limited because what ambition can you
have – whatever you know right now, maybe multiplied
by ten, is your ambition.
If you’re very brave, you will multiply by hundred.
If you’re little foolhardy, you will multiply it by a million,
but it is just an expansion of what you already know.
You cannot have an ambition about something that you do not know at all.
If absolutely new possibilities need to happen in one’s life,
above all, if human genius has to unfold, it’s very important that we do not create
an ambitious world, but we create a… a very joyful and involved
world.
If you are very joyful and absolutely involved in whatever you are doing,
depending upon the capacities that are there within us,
we will go as far as we can go.
Your entire business is to constantly upgrade this machine,
so that it’ll be at a higher level of function in every moment of activity, whatever you’re
doing.
So, for Ranveer and everybody, for me, you’re not ambitious enough.
If you don’t fix anything, but keep this on full speed all the time, let’s see where
it goes.
Who knows where it’ll go?
Maybe it’ll go in places that you have never imagined possible.
If only what you imagined happened, what a poor life it would be.
So, do not limit yourself with ambition, because a human being is a limitless possibility.
Life is about exploring that possibility.
[Questioner] Sir, I'm a skeptic.
Sir, you… you talked about this fact that we should enhance our competence.
So how do you start this process?
[Sadhguru] IIT is a beginning.
So… what are you skeptical about?
You don’t believe competence will work in this world, is it?
Corruption is also a certain kind of competence, anyway.
[Questioner] That was supposed to be a joke.
[Sadhguru] Okay, that’s supposed to be a joke.
So, now, ‘How do I enhance my competence?’
See, let’s say you want to run on the field, let’s say you want to run a race, you want
to run one hundred meters.
It is not running that you have to work on right now, you have to work
on your legs and lungs and muscle and everything.
Isn't it so?
So if you want to become a great engineer, yes, definitely an institute like this is
crucial on one level, but any number of people might
have come here and gone, not all of them became great engineers.
Though they might have produced hundreds of great engineers,
still not all of them will become, simply because of their own
individual attitudes and competence and whatever else, isn't it?
So whatever the institute can do for you, it is doing.
One foremost thing that you need to do is to enhance your own physical
and mental capabilities, because if you want to be a good engineer
you need a working brain.
Just having a degree of engineering can… may be a passport to a job,
but it is not a passport to success, isn't it?
So to have a working brain, which the engineering degree will not freeze
Usually lots of degrees, when people acquire degrees they freeze their brains;
they think they can… now they are finished using it and now they can rest it for the
rest of their lives; it is not so.
This is only to enhance your capability.
This is just an organized effort.
A school, a college, an institute is just an organized effort towards that,
because each individual cannot craft it for himself, that is why an institution;
otherwise an institution has no other purpose, it is here to just organize that possibility
of you striving to be of a certain competence
- but that is a mass application.
But as an individual, your most important thing is you as a human being,
you are functioning at the fullest level.
If that has to happen, there are other dimensions which one needs to explore.
Unfortunately though these sciences and technologies for inner well-being have been the mainstay
of this culture for thousands of years, today we are largely losing it for various
reasons because we want to imitate somebody else, we don’t want to
imitate our grandfather Topiwala anymore, we want to imitate the hat seller from another
country; because of that we are losing those things,
but we should not.
We have to bring it back into our lives, this is very much a part of the way
the culture itself is structured, that it is all about the human being.
See, this is the only culture which talks about –
which even a illiterate person in this culture is aware of –
that you can actually evolve to another dimension of existence.
Even if I go into a village and talk to an illiterate peasant, who has not read anything,
who doesn’t know anything, who has not heard any of this stuff, even to him if I go
he will not ask me, give me a golden horse’ or something, he’ll say, ‘Mukti venum
Swami.’
He's saying he wants Ultimate liberation.
Where did this fellow get this?
Nowhere else on the planet this is possible.
Nowhere else on this planet is it possible that an illiterate person is thinking that
he can break his present dimension of existence and
go to another place, whatever that place is.
So this was bred into our culture so deep, we should not lose it.
It was not just the idea – there are technologies to become free.
If you became free from the process of your body
and the process of your mind, if you can sit outside of it and work it,
you would work it brilliantly, do you understand?
You would be able to use this body and use this mind only when you're able to not treat
it as ‘myself.’
These are powerful instruments in your life.
These instruments can be employed the way you want it, only when you
have an outside access to it.
Right now you are a phenomenal computer, but you don’t know where the keyboard is.
When you can’t think, you scratch this spot; that’s not where it is.
Do you see people, when they cannot think, they're thinking hard, they scratch here,
it doesn’t work like that.
There are proper steps that one can take; it could be offered here if everybody's willing
for that.