Osho
Seeing that everyone wants so much to be enlightened, isn’t it also true that we are all scared too? What is the fear that prevents us from relaxing into our own self?

There are many fears, not one.

First, if you want to be enlightened, you have to die a psychological death. You have to be reborn as a new spiritual being, and you don’t know anything about spirituality. All that you know about yourself is your mind, centered around the ego.

It is a very strange phenomenon, that you are identified with something which you are not, and you have forgotten that which you are, have always been, will always be. There is no way to be anything else. Your being belongs to the existential. But there are layers and layers of conditioning – of parents, of teachers, of priests, of politicians. Between you, the real you, and you, the unreal you, there is a great line of people.

And naturally, you loved your parents, they loved you. Whatsoever they have done to you is absolutely unconscious, it was not intentional. They never wanted you to be a hypocrite, but they have made you a hypocrite. I never suspect their intentions. Their intentions were to make you something great, but they are as unconscious as you are. Their parents have given them their unconsciousness as an inheritance; and this has been going on since Adam and Eve. Every generation goes on loading the coming generation with all kinds of rubbish, stupidity, superstitions.

But don’t be angry with them. You have heard about “the angry young man.” The angry young man is an idiot. Anger is not going to solve anything; it is going to make everything more difficult and more complicated. Your parents, your teachers, your neighbors don’t deserve anger; they deserve compassion. They could not do anything else. With all good wishes they have destroyed you, just the way their parents had destroyed them.

And if you don’t become enlightened you are going to destroy your children. For their own sake, you are going to give them all kinds of crap.

You have been told you are a Christian, you are a Hindu, you are a Mohammedan. You came into the world as a tabula rasa; nothing was written on you. Your parents engraved on you and made you a Christian and forced the idea of Christianity on you, and they used your fear, your greed to implement it. You were made afraid of hell, you were made greedy for heaven. And of course, they wanted you not to fall into the ways of sin, but to follow the royal road of virtue.