Fear of the unknown keeps man clinging to his misery. | Philosia: The Art of seeing all

Osho was talking to his new disciple who has taken sannyas on evening of July 14, 1980 in The Gautam The Buddha hall. Such talks are recorded as ‘Darshan Diaries’. This talk is unpublished till date but carry very important message so I have selected a part of it here as it deals with Fear.

Man lives in misery because of cowardliness. There is no other cause for it. It is fear of the unknown that keeps man clinging to his misery, because misery is known, well-known. We are born in it, we are brought up in it, we see it all around — everybody is miserable, the whole crowd is miserable. It is the climate, the atmosphere. To be blissful means to transcend this climate, this atmosphere, to go beyond the limits of the crowd, to move into the unknown and the unacquainted and the uncharted.

It is the fear of the unknown that keeps us clinging to all kinds of suffering. The suffering is not clinging to you, you cling to it. People prefer suffering more than nothing or nobody.

Sannyas begins with changing your preference. Nothing is not only better than suffering, it is better than everything, it is better than the whole. To be nothing, to be a nobody, to be an utter non entity certainly needs guts.

It is moving to the farthest shore without knowing whether it exists or not. It is losing this shore, which has become very well-known, and taking a quantum leap towards something which may be, may not be — there is no guarantee.

That’s why a master is needed. A master is not a guarantee of the unknown, forthe unknown, but a witness. He cannot guarantee truth for you. We can only share: ‘It is — I have known it, I am a witness to it.’

And if, looking into his eyes, you can feel the trust, if you can feel his love and your love for him, then something starts transpiring, then something mysterious starts happening. That mysterious relationship is disciplehood, that is sannyas. It is the most mysterious experience of life. Even the experience of love is nothing compared to it.

Man lives in bondage because man lives in the mind. Mind is a bondage. Mind is not yours, remember.

Mind is implanted in you by the society; hence there are as many minds as there are societies, cultures, religions.

A Christian mind is different from a Jewish mind, a Hindu mind is different from a Mohammedan mind, an atheist mind is certainly different from a theist mind.

And these minds are cultivated by others; they are impositions by others on you. But the imposition is so subtle that you are not even aware of it, that you are being forced by your parents and the society to be a Christian or a Hindu or a Communist, that this is not your own choice, that you have not chosen it out of freedom.

So freedom was never given to you; you were not even asked, your permission has not even been taken. But for years it has been forced, repeatedly, so it becomes a deep conditioning in you.

Meditation means dropping the identity with the mind, knowing that ‘I am not the mind that I have always supposed myself to be, that I am separate from my mind, that I am just a witness, a consciousness, that I am neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian, that I don’t belong to any country, to any church, to any ideology.’

The moment this becomes your experience you start living in freedom. Meditation brings freedom. It releases you from the subtlest kind of bondage.

A meditator is simply religious. He does not believe in any dogma. He knows by his experience that the world does not end in matter, that there are higher realms than matter, that the whole existence is immersed in godliness.

When this is your experience it is a totally different thing: it is not a belief, it is knowing, it is wisdom, it is a light within your being. It makes you totally free from the past, from all kinds of societies and cultures.

For the first time you know who you are; you become an independent soul. That is real birth, a resurrection.

That’s the whole purpose of sannyas — it is a process of being reborn.

-Osho, The Golden Wind, #14 Copyright Osho International Foundation,
Pune, India.
Osho is right! I have tried this quantum leap after taking voluntary retirement from my services. And I can say that if a person is trying few minutes of meditation in the beginning and just keep practising it then in long run they have enough courage to take this jump in the unknown that transforms life and we get reborn again.

My suggestions:-

Awareness Meditation is the way worked for me and I tried it first during brushing my teeth in the morning after trying 8–10 meditations over period of 15 years! So there is no need to reinvent the circle for you. May be you too find it suitable otherwise with Dynamic meditation and/or Kundalini in the evening it is suitable for most of the people. There are 110 other meditation techniques discovered by Indian Mystic Gorakhnath about 500years before and further modified by Osho for contemporary people that one can experiment and the suitable one could be practiced in routine life.

Hi ….. I write my comments from my personal experiences of my inner journey. This post may include teachings of Mystics around the world which from my personal experience I found worth following even today. For more have a look at my linktree website for getting regular updates through social media lor subscribe to YouTube channel or listen to the podcasts etc.

For references of content on Osho, Copyright © OSHO International Foundation, An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho(dot)com or you can listen or watch his discourses @ OSHO International channel of YouTube where you can get subtitles in language of your choice or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library. Many of Osho’s books are available online at Amazon.

My suggestions:-

Osho International Online (OIO) provides facility to learn these from your home, through Osho Meditation Day @€20.00 per person. You can learn Dynamic meditations from disciples of Osho. OIO rotate times through three timezones NY,Berlin and Mumbai.

Originally published at https://philosia.in on March 9, 2025.