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years -- yoga techniques and karate techniques.... I feel now that I'm becoming less ambitious. I'm dropping into becoming more ordinary.]
Very good, mm? That is the only way to become extraordinary -- just to be ordinary. And all those people who are after being extraordinary, are simply ordinary people.
Once you understand that there is nothing to prove, you relax. Not that you stop doing things. In fact for the first time things start moving on their own. An ambitious person is a destructive person, because his real motive is somewhere else.
Once ambition drops, compassion enters in. You will go on doing the same thing, but not for your ambition. Because you love it, you do it. And once you are not ambitious, you will see that your work has become very very graceful. It attains to a dignity, because there is nowhere to go, nothing to achieve. One moves gracefully. If there is no ambition, there is no point in manipulating people. Then techniques can be used, but you don't use people for techniques. Then means are ends, ends are ends. And everything is clear.
People are ends, they are not means. That's the difference in ways of looking at people. A politician looks at people as if the are means to achieve something: power, prestige position. Ambition is politics... the very roots of politics. They may look at people as means; use them as steps, moving on their heads to go higher and higher and higher. This is inhuman -- politics is inhuman.
A religious man looks at people as ends. They cannot be used. Love them, help them, celebrate them. Celebrate with them... enjoy them. But there is no question of using them in any political sense. Then all that you have learned, karate or whatsoever, you share with everybody. It can be helpful.
Technology in itself is not bad, but it should not become the goal. It should be kept in its place. Man remains the highest goal, an end in itself. Nothing is higher than man. Man is the ultimate goal.
When you look at man with this religious vision, then everything that you know is good. If you forget this vision, then whatsoever you know is poisonous. That's how, through knowledge,
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