All these problems are created because the society wants you to be ambitious, and ambition can only be created if there is a goal in the future. For ambition, future is needed. And without ambition, the ego cannot be created. And the ego is the basic strategy of the society to rule over you, to exploit you, to oppress you, to keep you miserable. The ego exists in the tension between the present and the future: the bigger the tension, the bigger the ego. When there is no tension between your present and future, the ego disappears because there is no point where it can have shelter, where it can exist.

Hence society teaches you, “Become this, become that.” It teaches you becoming. Its whole education system is based on the idea of becoming.

And what I am telling you here is just the opposite of it. I am talking about being, not about becoming. Becoming is an invention of the crafty politicians and the priests – and these are the people who have poisoned the whole humanity. They go on giving you goals. If you become tired of the worldly things – money, power, prestige – they are there to tell you about paradise, God, samadhi, truth. Again the whole process starts.

And it is easy to be frustrated with the worldly things. Sooner or later you can see the whole stupidity of having more money or more power. Sooner or later you are going to see the futility of the very idea of “more,” because the more brings nothing else but more misery. It takes away all bliss from you, all peace from you. It is destructive. It gives you only fear, trembling, anxiety, neurosis. It makes you insane; that can be seen very easily. It has made the whole earth a madhouse.

But to see that the otherworldly goals – nirvana and moksha and God and paradise – are also the same is very difficult. You will need tremendous intelligence to see that those goals are also of the same quality. There is no qualitative change because you are still thinking in terms of becoming, you are still thinking in terms of the future.

Future does not exist, it is nonexistential. It is as nonexistential as the past. The past is no more, the future is not yet; only the present is. And in the present there is no possibility for desiring, no possibility of being ambitious, not space enough for the ego to exist. Whenever you are now and here there is no ego to be found. You are a pure silence. Right now…see what I am saying. I am not propounding a theory or a philosophy; I am simply stating a fact.

Ray Horton, just for a second see…this very moment! Where is the ego? And what heights and what depths of peace suddenly become available to you. They are always within you, but you never look at them – you are running and running. And because you are not arriving anywhere you are very much worried.

You say, “It is like driving a car in forward and reverse at the same time. I am not going anywhere.”

There is no need. This very moment, wherever you are, it is a blessing, it is divine. Where else do you want to go? Why live in the past? It is the past that gives you goals. It is the past that you are carrying in your head which projects goals in the future. Future is only a reflection of the past.