Ambition means that you have to be higher than the other. Ambition means that you have to prove your superiority that you have to prove everybody else is inferior to you, that you have to succeed. If success remains the god, if ambition remains your education, how can there be equality? To talk about equality is utter nonsense. It does not exist even in communist countries; it cannot exist anywhere unless ambition disappears.

In Russia or in China there are still classes. Their names have changed, the labels are different. Now there is no class of the poor and the rich – a new class has arisen, of the rulers and the ruled. It is the same old game, it makes no difference at all.

We go on playing the same game. All that we do in the name of revolution is to change the labels.

The real question is not how to find truth – because you cannot find truth unless you are free. Truth arrives in freedom. Jesus has said, “Truth liberates.” That is true. That is only half the story – that truth will make you free. The other side which has not been told to you is also as important: truth happens only in freedom. In fact, truth and freedom are two aspects of the same coin, they happen together. If you are unfree you cannot attain to truth, and if you have attained to truth you cannot be unfree. But from where to begin? If you start with truth you will become a victim of words, philosophies, theologies, scriptures. You will be lost in the jungle of linguistic logical speculations.

Start with freedom: that’s my message to you. Come out of the prison that has been imposed upon you – and the prison cannot exist if you don’t cooperate with it. That is the only ray of hope, that it cannot exist without your cooperation. But you cooperate with it. It feels safe, it feels secure, it feels convenient and comfortable, it feels warmer, and you have decorated it well from the inside.

Down the ages that’s what man has been doing: decorating his prison cell. You have really made it beautiful inside; it almost looks as if it is a temple. You have painted your chains beautifully. You have covered your chains with gold and silver; they look like ornaments. Hence you go on cooperating.

And freedom is the basic requirement if you want to know God, if you want to know at all what this life is and what the benediction of this life is and what the beauty of this existence is. If you want to know it at all you will have to come out of your prison. You will have to risk. Because the prison seems comfortable and you have lived in it so long, you have become accustomed to it. You will have to come into the open, under the sun and the moon and the sky. You will have to come into the wind. You may have lived so long in the cage that you may be afraid to open your wings again. You may have completely forgotten that you have wings. This is the situation where man exists. But before we can make a breakthrough out of the prison walls, we will have to understand how the prison is made, what the strategy is, of what it consists.

The most fundamental strategy is that the priests and the politicians and the pundits have been substituting every real thing with something unreal. That is the most fundamental strategy of how this prison, this slavery, has been created.