Question – Beloved Osho, you tell us to surrender and at the same time ask us not to cling onto you. The way we are now, it seems in the name of surrender we are clinging to you. Now it seems we will die without you. What is the reason for this to be so? What should we do in such a condition?
Osho – You should die! That is the very meaning of surrender. One should not make efforts to survive. There is nothing wrong in dying, the entire wrong is in surviving. And what is there to be saved, for which we are always making attempts to save, save and save? What is there to be saved? If you look attentively, think calmly even for a moment, what have you got to be saved?
And when you see that you have nothing to be saved, the fear of dying will immediately disappear – because who will die then? When there is nothing to be saved, then what is there to lose? The fear that something maybe lost is based in the illusion that you have something. And you never even open the door and look in your house to see if there is something there. Perhaps it is because of this fear that you may see there is nothing there that you don’t look, because then you won’t be able to create even this great fuss of saving, of surviving, that you keep creating all the time. Then you will look very helpless. You may not have a safe deposit but you keep a hubbub maintained lest a theft occurs. That too creates an impression that something is there.
What is the fear of dying? Why is there so much fear in it? What will be lost in your dying? This is one of the deepest questions a seeker should be asking within himself: ”If I died, what will be the loss? What will happen because of my dying? If I become nonexistent, what is this uneasiness in accepting that state of nonexistence?” – because there is no happiness in our existent state anyway. As I said earlier, there exists only a hope that perhaps someday there will be happiness.
Whatever you are, you are in pain and misery with it; wherever you are, you are in pain and misery in it – and still you get anxious you may lose it! No, just die! Dying is the greatest art. And it is the one who has learnt the art of dying who attains to the total celebration of life.
The moment you let go of yourself, the same moment all the life energies within you will be absorbed in an unique dance. As long as you are protecting yourself, the dance is not released because of the very protection. You are so much afraid that you cannot laugh. You are so much in fear that no flowers can bloom within you. You have gripped your own life with your own hands so tightly that your hands have become a death grip on your neck. You go on increasing the pressure lest you may die – and this sense of dying you are feeling is because of your own hands. So a vicious circle is created.
A friend comes to me. He has a headache the whole day. So to get rid of the headache he drinks in the night. Because of the drinking, the headache next day begins early in the morning. Now what is to be done? When he meets me in the evening he says, ”What to do? I will have to drink because there is this headache.” And when he meets me in the morning he complains: ”How to get rid of this drinking? It brings a headache.”
This exactly is the situation of life. On one hand you create your own sufferings, on the other you want to be rid of the suffering. So what is this man’s desire now? I told him, ”Your desire is that the drinking should continue but there should be no headache?”
He said, ”You exactly caught my idea. This is exactly my desire.”And this cannot be. Your desire too is similar, that you should also remain and liberation should also happen. This cannot be. In your dying is the liberation. In your surviving is the bondage. Because you are the bondage, your not being is the liberation.
Source – Osho Book “Nowhere To Go But In”