Fear: Understanding and Accepting the Insecurities of Life

by Osho

The fear is not more than six inches deep. Now it is up to you whether you want to go on clinging to the branch and turn your life into a nightmare, or whether you would love to leave the branch and stand on your feet. There is nothing to fear.

But because this feeling of “I amness” is false, it creates fear. You know that anything can destroy it, any deep encounter can shatter it. It can be shattered by love, it can be shattered by a serious disease, it can be shattered by seeing someone die. It can be shattered in many ways, it is very fragile. You are managing it somehow by not looking in.

People are afraid of love. They only pretend, they only go on playing games in the name of love. They are afraid of meditation; even in the name of meditation at the most they go on practicing new ways of thinking.

You are not ready to take a plunge into your inner depth and to face your inner emptiness—that is its power.

A fearless person has everything that life wants to give to you as a gift. Now there is no barrier. You will be showered with gifts, and whatever you do you will have a strength, a power, a certainty, a tremendous feeling of authority. A person living out of fear is always trembling inside.

So what to do? Live more, and live more intensely. Live dangerously! It is your life, don’t sacrifice it for any sort of foolishness that has been taught to you. It is your life, live it. Don’t sacrifice it for words, theories, countries, politics. Don’t sacrifice it for anybody.

Straight out of Bukowski

The only courage is to live life totally, there is no other courage.

And then live. And live in total freedom so intensely that every moment is transformed into eternity.

celebrate. Life would like you to participate so deeply that there is no repentance for the past, that you don’t remember the past, because every moment you go more and more deep—every moment life becomes more and more beautiful, more orgasmic, a peak experience, and by and by, when you become

When sitting sit, when walking walk, above all, don’t wobble.

once a person is tethered to the known he is dead.

You were given an opportunity, a great opportunity, and you missed it. You go on postponing for tomorrow. You say, “Tomorrow I am going to live.” But simultaneously, side-by-side, you know there is a fear: “Tomorrow, who knows? Tomorrow maybe death will come, then what?” You have postponed life for tomorrow and there is no more tomorrow—

One accepts it as a fact. The real problem is always psychological. The physical pain is part of life. When you start thinking about it, it is not physical pain at all, it has become psychological. You think about death and there is fear—but when death actually happens there is no fear. Fear is always about something in the future. Fear never exists in the present moment.

So the first thing to be understood is that if you can dissolve the psychological pain, no problem is left. Then you start living in the moment.

Everything is possible and nothing is certain.

My suggestion is that when there is pain, go deeply into it, don’t avoid it. Let it be so, be open to it; become as sensitive as possible. Let the pain and its arrow penetrate you to your very core. Suffer it. And when the pleasure comes, let that too move you to your innermost core. Dance it.

You can find many excuses, but the real sadness is this: You don’t know who you are.

Fear needs a crowd, fear needs companionship, friends, even foes will do. But to be alone, to go inward, you cannot take anybody with you; you have to be more and more alone. Not only can

Love is a ripple in the heart, a vibration in the heart, a throbbing, a sharing of whatsoever you are, a deep, intense urge to go and reach the other, to share your being and your delight and your song. But when your heart is almost dead, frozen, and you have been taught to condemn yourself—that you are ugly, that you are bad, that this is sin, “don’t do this, you are guilty”—then you cannot accept yourself. How can you accept anybody else?

Once sex and death are no longer taboo, a person is free. These are the two tricks to create bondage for humanity. Once neither of these are there, you are freedom; not that you are free—you are freedom.

The whole of life belongs to the gambler, and the whole mind has become a businessman: calculating, thinking of profit and loss, never taking a risk—and risk is needed. Life comes to those who risk, who live dangerously, almost on the verge of death. That was the attraction in the past of being a soldier, a