From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 13. ECSTASY IS KNOWING THAT NOBODY IS HOLDING YOUR HAND
I used to tell my father, ”Don’t give me any advice, even if I ask you. You have to be very
straightforward about it. You have simply to say,’Find out your own way.’ Don’t give me advice”
– because when some cheap advice is available, who bothers to find one’s own way?
I had been consistently telling my teachers, ”Please remember one thing: I don’t want your wisdom –
simply teach your subject. You are a teacher of geography and you are trying to teach me morality?
What relationship has morality with geography?”
I remember the poor man who was my geography teacher. He was in trouble because I had taken
something from the pocket of the student who was sitting by my side. I had taken his money from
his pocket and this teacher was telling me, ”Don’t do that.”
I said, ”That’s not your business. You are a geography teacher and this is a question of morality. If
you want, I am ready to go to the principal; you come with me. Nowhere in the geography syllabus...
I have read it and nowhere is it said that you cannot take somebody else’s money. And money is
simply money; whoever has it, it is his. Right now it is mine. A few moments before it may have been
his, but he has lost it. He should be more alert. If you want to give advice, give advice to him.
”In the first place, what is the need to bring so much money to the geography class? There is nothing
to buy, nothing to purchase; there is not going to be any shopping. Why did he bring his money here?
Then if he has brought the money, he should be alert. It is not my fault, it is his fault, and I have
simply taken advantage of it, which is my right. To take advantage of situations is everybody’s right.”
I remember that poor man. He was always in difficulty, and always in difficulty with me. He would
see me out of class and he would say, ”You can do whatsoever you want to do, just don’t bring so
much philosophy into poor geography. And I don’t know anything about philosophy – I simply know
about geography. And you turn the question in such a way that even in the night I go on thinking
whether it was geographical or religious or philosophical.”
Just in front of my school there were two beautiful kadambara trees. The kadambara is a very
fragrant flower, and I used to sit in those trees whenever I could escape from the classes. That
was the best place, because teachers would be passing underneath and the principal would be
passing and nobody would be thinking that I may be hiding in the tree; and the trees were thick. But
whenever this teacher of geography would pass by there, I could not resist dropping at least one
stone or two stones on his head. And he would look up, and he would say, ”What are you doing
there?”
One day I said, ”This is not a geography class. You disturbed my meditation.”
And he said, ”What about those two stones that fell on my head?”
I said, ”That is simply coincidence. I dropped the stones; it’s strange how you appeared exactly at
the right time. Now I will be wondering about it. You also wonder about it, how it happened exactly.”
He used to come to tell my father, ”Things are going too far.” He was a bald-headed man; and in
Hindi the word for bald-headed is munde. His name was Chotelal, but he was known as Chotelal
Munde. Chotelal was rarely used, just Munde was enough because he was the only completely
From Ignorance to Innocence 171 Osho