Story:Inner Voice

One man in America started believing that he was Abraham Lincoln. Every effort was made, but he would stutter just the way Abraham Lincoln used to stutter and he would walk the way Abraham Lincoln used to walk – he was a little lame. And his face was very similar and he had grown the beard. The family was tired. Finally, they took him to a psychiatrist, who used a lie detector.

There exists a machine now that can detect lies. You don’t know it but it may be hidden just underneath you – you may be standing on top of it. It is like a cardiogram. A few questions are asked – very simple, no possibility for lying – such as ”What do you think, is it day or night?” And then the man naturally says, ”It is day.”

”What do you think, are the trees green or blue?” The man naturally says, ”They are green.” A few questions were asked in which he could not lie, and the detector was making a harmonious graph. Then suddenly the psychiatrist asked him, ”Are you Abraham Lincoln?”

The man was getting tired; everybody was making a laughingstock of him. The family thought that he had gone insane and he was being dragged to this doctor, to that psychoanalyst. So finally he dropped the idea. He thought, ”It is better to lie.” He said, ”I am not Abraham Lincoln.” The family was surprised. But the lie detector said that he was lying, because deep in his heart he knew perfectly well he was Abraham Lincoln.

Copying, imitation, can go so deep.

Although he was saying that he was not Abraham Lincoln – and he was not Abraham Lincoln – the machine was detecting his heartbeats and making a graph, so suddenly when he said, ”I am not Abraham Lincoln,” the graph went berserk. It lost its harmony.

The voices of the parents and the teachers, the society and the priest, become louder and louder. Now if you want to find out what is your voice, you will have to pass through a crowd of noises.

It is a tremendously beautiful experiment for meditators just to watch inside – whose voice is this? Sometimes it is your father, sometimes it is your mother, sometimes it is your grandfather, sometimes it is your teacher; and those voices are all different. Just one thing you will not be able to find easily – your own voice; it has been always suppressed. You have been told to listen to your elders, to listen to the priest, to listen to the teachers. You have never been told to listen to your own heart.

You are carrying a still, small voice of your own, unheard, and in the crowd of voices that have been imposed upon you, it is almost impossible to find it. First you will have to get rid of all those noises, attain a certain quality of silence, peace, serenity. Only then will it come, as a surprise, that you also have your own voice. It was always there like an undercurrent.

Unless you have found your natural inclination your life is going to be a long, long tragedy, from the cradle to the grave. The only people who have been blissful in the world are the people who have lived according to their own intuition and have rebelled against any effort by others to impose their ideas. Howsoever valuable those ideas may be, they are useless because they are not yours. The only significant idea is that which arises in you, grows in you, blossoms in you.

Everybody is born a rebel because everybody is born to be an individual in his own right. Everybody is born not to be a part in a drama but to live an authentic life, not to be a mask but to be his original face.

-Osho