Osho,
Why is the new so scary? Even though deep inside I am tremendously thankful and happy, I find part of myself feeling guilty. I can’t find the new way for me to be total in my work. It is becoming very painful. Can you please bring some light and guidance to me?

“The new is always scary because of the simple fact that it is new. You don’t know how to face it. All your knowledge is suddenly found to be absolutely meaningless because there is no answer in your experience and knowledge that can be an authentic response to the new – because you suddenly find yourself ignorant, helpless, not knowing what to do; hence the scariness.

“Otherwise, instead of being afraid you will have a totally different experience with the new. You will explode with joy.

If you are an explorer, an adventurer, then the new will fill you with tremendous ecstasy, and you will see in this new a possibility for your intelligence to function.

“With the old, intelligence has no need to function: your memory functions. You know the answer already; the answer is part of your memory system. But memory is not intelligence, remember.

Intelligence is the capacity to rejoice in the new with an openhearted welcome, with intense clarity.

“Just by watching the new, the response will arise from your very innermost core. That is the way of the meditator. The meditator is continuously confronted with the new. In fact, he is in search of the ultimate new, which will never become old, which will always be fresh.

“That is the quality of satyam shivam sundaram. Truth is never old; neither is the godliness that surrounds you from all dimensions, nor the experience of beauty. The roses may come and go, the expressions of beauty may come and disappear, but the experience of beauty is always there, exactly the same.

“You are asking:

‘Why is the new so scary?’ Because you are still in the mind and you don’t know what meditation is.

“Mind loves the old. With the old the mind is very at ease because it knows all the answers. It does not feel helpless, it does not feel that it has to choose this way or that way. It knows exactly what is the right answer. The mind never wants you to come in contact with the new. It keeps you going round and round with the old.

“Meditation is just the opposite of mind.

As mind is confined with the old, meditation is an exploration of the expansion of the whole universe.

“The meditator wants to come each moment to the new, because only with the new does his intelligence become more sharp; only with the new does he himself become new. Only with the new is the way toward the ultimate.

“The old is dead. Of course the old seems to be very comfortable. It seems comfortable because you don’t have to do anything. You don’t even have to be intelligent. You can remain retarded and yet pretend to the world that you are a great intellectual because you are filled with all kinds of information in your memory.

And the memory is not part of your consciousness; the memory is part of your body.

“The memory is just a mechanism like any computer. You feed it with information and whatever you feed it, it is perfectly comfortable with. It knows it. And knowledge gives you a certain power: you are within the territory where you are the ruler, you know everything.

The unknown, the new, suddenly exposes your ignorance, and that hurts.

“You don’t want to know your ignorance; that’s why the new is scary. But your ignorance is enormous; your knowledge is just a dewdrop. If you don’t want to remain a dewdrop – closed, absolutely non-receptive and insensitive to the tremendous existence that is available to be yours any moment – gather courage and come out of your smallness. The moment the dewdrop takes a jump into the ocean is exactly the situation of a man who takes a jump from the mind into meditation.

Mind is so small. Existence and life are so vast, so infinite, that unless you come out of the mind you will live the life of a prisoner and a slave.

“A slave cannot know what dance is, a slave cannot know what freedom is and the joy of freedom and the blissfulness and the ecstasy of being vast, oceanic.

“My work with you is to persuade you to come out of your caves which are dark – although they look very cozy to you because you are acquainted with them.

“It happened in the French Revolution… France had the greatest prison, the Bastille, where only prisoners who were going to be there for their whole lives were sent. They could only enter there; they could never come out. Once a person entered there… It had only a door to enter through; it had no exit.

“There are only two places like this in the world, and strangely, both are prisons.

One is a Catholic monastery in Europe where whoever enters, enters forever.

“There are still almost ten thousand monks in that monastery. They cannot come out again, at least not while they are alive. Dead, they are free to go out– in fact others will throw them out.

And the other place, where prisoners were thrown in, was the Bastille.

“The Bastille had small cells for the prisoners: thousands of caves, dark caves with no light. The prisoners were handcuffed, chained, and the keys of their chains and handcuffs were thrown into a well that was in the middle of the prison because they were never going to be opened, so what was the point of collecting thousands of keys unnecessarily? There was no point. Those people would die and then their chains would be cut, not opened, so there was no need.

“In the French Revolution, the revolutionaries immediately thought to open the doors of the Bastille as a priority, and allow thousands of prisoners their freedom. They were thinking that they were doing something great.

They could not have expected the response of the prisoners. The prisoners refused.

“They said, ‘We have lived here, somebody for twenty years, somebody else for thirty years…’ There were a few people who had lived there fifty, sixty, seventy years.

“Now a man who has lived there for seventy years must be near about a hundred years old. His whole life experience is confined to a small cave. He cannot come out of it; he is chained and tethered to the cave wall. He cannot even move out of the cave just to see the sky or the stars or the moon. Naturally, such a person will be afraid to go back into the world after seventy years.

“Almost everybody he used to know must either be dead by now, or where is he going to find these people he used to know? Their names have faded away, their faces have faded away: a faraway seventy long years… And who knows if they will recognize him? If he cannot remember them, who is going to recognize him? – a man condemned to be in prison for life. And what will he do? From where will he get his food and his clothes, and where will he sleep? He will need a shelter too….

“Here everything is comfortable. It may look uncomfortable to an outsider, but for a man who has lived in the cave for seventy years, it may have been uncomfortable in the beginning for a few days, a few months, but man has a tremendous capacity of adaptability.

In any situation, if you force him, he will start adapting to the situation.

“And seventy years or fifty years is a long time: half a century. And now that he has started feeling perfectly cozy, comfortable: no worry about bread, no worry about tomorrow, no worry about anything. He has forgotten the names of his children, he has forgotten who used to be his wife, and what happened to all those people. No, he does not want to go out.

“The revolutionaries could not believe it. ‘We are giving you freedom and you are as scared as if we are going to kill you.’

“And those prisoners said, ‘That’s exactly what we are feeling: that you are going to kill us.

‘We are perfectly happy here. Just excuse us. We cannot fulfill your expectations. It is too late.’

“But revolutionaries are stubborn people. They did not listen to the prisoners. They cut their chains, they cut their handcuffs, they forced them out with the same violence with which they had one day been forced in. Against their will they had been brought in; against their will they were brought out.

“Many of them could not even open their eyes because the light was too much. Their eyes had become too weak, too delicate. Living in darkness, their eyes were no longer capable of opening in the sunlight. Many of them had forgotten how to walk. But the revolutionaries were adamant: they did not listen to their cries. They had tears, but revolutionaries are revolutionaries.

They forced them, almost three thousand prisoners, out of the Bastille.

“There was nobody to receive them, and they moved around the city like dead people, almost like ghosts. They could not recognize anything. Seventy years before, things had been totally different. Nor could they see anybody who was contemporary to them.

And by the evening almost all of them had returned back to the prison.

“They fought the revolutionaries who were preventing them from getting into the prison.

“They said, ‘We cannot live outside. Who is going to give us food? And who is going to take care of us: medical care, shelter, clothes? Who is going to be responsible for all this – you?’

“And the most amazing thing they said was,

‘We cannot sleep without chains and without handcuffs. We have become so accustomed to them, it feels that something is missing.

“‘We cannot sleep – we tried in the day under some trees, but unless we feel the load, the weight of the chains on the feet, on the hands, we cannot sleep. So please don’t harass us. Life has harassed us enough; now at the end we don’t want to change our lifestyle.’

“Finally the revolutionaries also recognized their problem. They had not thought about it, that man becomes adapted to a certain situation and then that is his territory. In that territory he is perfectly comfortable and cozy….

It does not matter what condition you are in: slowly, slowly you settle down.

“And once you have settled down you don’t even want to budge because then again you will have to start from ABC. Again you will have to start learning, again you will have to start facing problems. Right now there are no problems: you know all the answers to all the questions that can arise in a certain situation in which you have become completely enclosed.

It is cozy and it is comfortable to live in the old, but it will not bring the flowers of freedom and it will not open the whole sky for you to open your wings and fly.

“It will not allow you to have aspirations for the stars; it will not allow you to move in any direction or dimension. You will remain just like a dead grave where nothing moves.

“The new is scary, but the new is what I teach you.

You will have to drop your fears, you will have to drop your ugly coziness, you will have to drop your small comforts.

“These are the things with which you have to pay for the greater joys, the higher realms of being, tremendous possibilities of ecstasies. You will not be a loser, but in the beginning you have to risk something.

“It is good you are aware that the new makes you scared because for centuries man, animals, everybody has been living with the old.

Only man has risen once in a while to have a glimpse of the new.

“Think about buffaloes: can you conceive that at any time in the millions of years of evolution, buffaloes have eaten any other grass than they eat today? The same grass! Can you conceive that one day buffaloes will be different? They are so settled, so utterly settled and so contented. You cannot make a buffalo a buddha. They are perfectly at ease. Why should they bother?

“The whole animal kingdom is lower than man only for one reason: man is an explorer; he has the adventurer hidden in him somewhere. His mind may be afraid, scared, but his consciousness wants to have communion with the universe, to touch the stars, to open up to all the beauties and the truth and the godliness of existence.

You will have to shift your emphasis from mind to meditation, and all fear will disappear.

“You will have to shift your attention from your comfortable, cozy – but old and dirty and rotten – state toward something new, fresh, young from the body to consciousness, from mind to no-mind. Then every moment you are confronting the new.

“And one is thrilled with the new. Once you have learned that the new is not your enemy the fear simply disappears. On the contrary, you start searching for the new.

The day you start searching for the new with joy and a dancing heart, you have become a sannyasin.

“That is my definition of a sannyasin.

“I define my sannyasins from many dimensions; I want to give you the idea of sannyas from as many aspects as possible.

The search for the new is one of the aspects of a seeker.”

END

Abridged and excerpted from: Osho, Satyam Shivam Sundaram – Truth Godliness Beauty, Talk #30 – The Birth of Individuality

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