Ambition

"Being without Knowledge is being willful, ambitious, cunning, clever, manipulative, shrewd, and calculating. Take heed. This is the evidence that Knowledge is lacking."

"It is only when people are ambitious and impatient, when they seek to have the great rewards now instead of later, that they get into serious trouble."

Directives

"Do not let ambition pull you where you cannot go. Do not let it misappropriate your vitality and your energy. Learn to become patient and calm with Knowledge, for Knowledge has its own goal and direction in life, which you are now learning to follow."

Quotes on Ambition

"Your ambition is born of your personal need for recognition and reassurance. It is an attempt to counteract fear by controlling the opinions of others. Your ambition here is destructive, but like all other faculties of mind that are misappropriated, in time it can serve the greatness of Knowledge."

"The greatest price of personal goals and acquisitions is that they disengage you from Knowledge within yourself. Here your pre-occupations override your true determination, your true inclinations and your inner voice, which is speaking to you throughout the day to help guide and protect you and to counsel you in matters great and small."

The Antidote

"Your great gift is meant to be given in conjunction with the giving of others. You do not get to be a superstar in reality. Your contribution comes through relationship. You have part of the gift. They have part of the gift. You give together. It is your relationship that gives and makes the giving possible. This serves a s a perfect antidote to all personal ambition and self-glorification."

Ambitions Must Fail Us

"Think ambition like this: it is an attempt to make separation work. It is an attempt to make your individual, self-created self satisfactory. This pursuit must fail for you to begin to realize that you have a greater life that exists without your self-definition but that needs your assistance and all of your energy for its expression. This is a new life, a new impulse, a new motivation."

"It takes great courage to undertake The Greater Community Way of Knowledge, for here you are preparing for something you can barely understand. Here your personal ambitions will fail you or it will seem that they cannot be fulfilled by undertaking the Greater Community preparation. But you go on because Knowledge prompts you. This requires courage. This is choosing truth over pleasure."

"Your incentive for this must come from within you, from Knowledge, for only Knowledge can take you to Knowledge. All other goals and ambitions sooner or later will fall away. What carries you on beyond them is the desire for truth, the need to know your purpose, the need to find genuine relationships and the need to answer the fundamental questions and solve the greater problems of life. It is within you to do this."

Ambition in the Way of Knowledge

"To be a student means you are not a master and you cannot take this Teaching and try to make money with it or do something with it or use it to be significant in the eyes of others. Whatever ambitions may exist, even unknowingly within you, will be flushed out over time."

"You learn The Way of Knowledge because you must, not because it holds some big promise at the end. With a greater motivation that is not contingent upon your ambitions, your feelings, your changing attitudes or the ideas or prevailing beliefs in the world, you will have a strength that the world does not possess. You will have a certainty that the world does not possess. This is evidence of Knowledge."

"The simplest act can express the Wisdom of the universe. When Knowledge is working through you, you will be as much in marvel of it as anyone else could be and perhaps more so because it is happening through your mind and body. For this to take place, ambitions must be left aside. Goals and desires for a happy, unfettered and uncomplicated life will either have to be abandoned completely or greatly altered. That is not to say you are choosing difficulty and duress. You are simply saying, “I must do this and I will accept what comes.”"

Further Study

Wisdom from the Greater Community Volume Two, Chapter 1: Ambition

See also

Practices