From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 9. I TEACH A RELIGIONLESS RELIGION
Religious fiction has to be dropped because it is hindering your way, preventing you from reaching
reality.
You have to get rid of all nonsense that has been told to you by your parents, by your society, by
your teachers, by your religious elders.
Unless you clean yourself completely you cannot take the first step towards being religious.
Religiousness is a quality of your being; it has nothing to do with any ritual outside you, it is a quality
of your being.
There are a few things which are qualities of your being and are in a dormant state because you
have never thought that they are to be developed. Have you tried to develop your consciousness?
Have you tried to develop your compassion? Have you tried to develop your intelligence?
The scientists say even the people who are geniuses use only fifteen percent of their intelligence;
eighty-five percent remains unused. And this is about a man like Albert Einstein or Karl Marx or
Rutherford, the Nobel prize-winners.... What about the common man, how much does he use? –
not more than five percent. And that five percent he uses because it is needed for day to day work:
his business, his family, his so-called religion, his political party and his club. Five percent is enough.
You don’t have to be a great genius to become a rotarian. I don’t think a genius would like to become
a member of the lions club. A man trying to become a lion seems to be falling down rather than rising
up.
If the genius himself uses only fifteen percent, that means nobody is trying to sharpen their
intelligence. You only go on using whatsoever life, its situations and its circumstances force you
to use. If there is nobody, no situation forcing you to use it, you will not use even five percent. That’s
why you will not find rich people’s sons and daughters getting gold medals in the universities and
topping the universities. No, they don’t need to use their intelligence; their servants can do that. And
now computers are available. Soon you will not be using even five percent; people will be carrying
a small computer. They are already carrying them. Have you not watched it...?
In my childhood, in my family, my father was very particular about handwriting. He would not allow
a fountain pen in the house, because you cannot have the quality of an ordinary old pen with a
fountain pen; the fountain pen is going to destroy your handwriting.
And you can see it. Just look back: before the press was invented, all the books were written by hand
– such beautiful, artistic handwriting. What the book contains is another thing; just the handwriting
itself is a work of art. But that art disappeared with the fountain pen. And when the typewriter
became available to people, even the little bit that was possible with the fountain pen disappeared –
people are typing. Now tell them to write and their writing looks as if they are uneducated. People
are now carrying small computers to calculate, calculators – they will forget the small calculations
that you can do.
There is a woman alive in India, Shakuntala, who has toured all around the world and has been
exposed to the greatest mathematicians. She is only a matriculate and knows nothing of higher
mathematics, but even Albert Einstein was puzzled by her. You just write any figure, howsoever big
From Ignorance to Innocence 115 Osho