From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 13. ECSTASY IS KNOWING THAT NOBODY IS HOLDING YOUR HAND
will be surprised to find out the real voice; perhaps it is your mother – you will hear her speak again.
Perhaps it is your father; it is not at all difficult to detect. It remains there, recorded in you exactly as
it was given to you for the first time – the advice, the order, the discipline, the commandment.
You may find many people: the priest, the teachers, the friends, the neighbors, the relatives. There
is no need to fight. Just knowing that it is not your voice but somebody else’s – whosoever that
somebody else is – you know that you are not going to follow it. Whatsoever the consequences,
good or bad, now you are deciding to move on your own, you are deciding to be mature. Enough
you have remained a child. Enough you have remained dependent. Enough you have listened to all
these voices and followed them. And where have they brought you? In a mess.
So once you figure out whose voice it is, say goodbye to it... because the person who had given that
voice to you was not your enemy. His intention was not bad, but it is not a question of his intention.
The question is that he imposed something on you which is not coming from your own inner source;
and anything that comes from outside makes you a psychological slave.
Sheela, put this light out; this is driving me Oregonian!
It is only your own voice which will lead you into a blossoming, into freedom.
Yes, the path in the beginning will look dangerous, because you were always holding the hand of
your father, your priest, your rabbi, your mother; and when a child is holding the hand of the father
there is no fear, no danger. He can rely on the father. But now you are holding his hand only in
imagination; there is no father, it is pure imagination. And it is better to know that you are alone and
there is no hand supporting you, because then you will try to find your own way to protect yourself
against dangers.
It is dangerous to go on believing that you are still protected when you are not really protected. That’s
what has happened to millions of people in the world. They feel they are protected – protected by
God, protected by all kinds of things.
There is no God.
There is nobody to protect you.
You are alone, and you have to accept your aloneness joyously. In fact, it is a tremendous ecstasy
that nobody is holding your hand.
My grandfather loved me very much, just because of my mischiefs. Even in his old age he was
mischievous. He never liked my father or my uncles because they were all against this old man’s
mischievousness. They all said to him, ”You are now seventy and you should behave. Now your
sons are fifty, fifty-five, your daughters are fifty, their children are married, their children’s children
are there – and you go on doing such things that we feel ashamed.”
I was the only one with whom he was intimate, because I loved the old man for the simple reason
that he had not lost his childhood even at the age of seventy. He was as mischievous as any child.
And he would play his mischief even on his own sons and daughters and sons-in-law, and they
would be just shocked.
From Ignorance to Innocence 168 Osho