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achieved it. But in the whole of history not a single person has been able to fulfil his greed. Without any exception all have failed. But still we go on trying. So sooner or later everybody comes to feel that it is a stupid effort it is doomed to fail, an exercise in utter futility. And one can see the ugliness of it because the greedy person becomes like an octopus His whole being is just tentacles spreading in all directions, grabbing everything.
The English word 'greed' comes from a Sanskrit root and the Sanskrit word 'vulture' comes from the same root. The greedy person is like a vulture -- murderous, ready to eat even a dead corpse. One feels the ugliness of is and one wants to get rid of it, but you cannot get rid of it because you go on watering the root: the root is ego. It is ego that wants to fulfil impossible goals. In fact the ego is not interested in possible goals at all, they look too ordinary; anybody can do them. The ego always wants to do something extraordinary to prove 'I am not so ordinary person.' That is the deepest desire of the ego: to prove oneself extraordinary. But the desire to be extraordinary is very ordinary, it is in everybody's heart; it is nothing special.
In fact to accept one's ordinariness is really extraordinary because it is very rare. It happens only once in a while that a person accepts his ordinariness with joy -- not out of despair or failure, not to console oneself, but blissfully, through understanding.
The ego wants to prove, and greed comes in, ambition comes in. And whenever your greed, your ambition, is hindered by anything... And it is bound to be hindered because the same type of people are all around. They are all greedy, they all want the same thing, that you want; hence there is going to be conflict, there is going to be cut-throat competition, hence the answer.
And whatsoever you catch hold of, you cling to, afraid that somebody else may snatch it away because there are so many vultures around; the whole world is full of vultures. Clinging arises, attachment arises, possessiveness arises, and the fear, the constant fear, because you have snatched it from somebody else, now many
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