What does it mean when I feel exhilarated but then become afraid and begin to sink?

Beloved Osho, I have had a glimpse of what it could be to just be. But so much fear comes up about doing nothing, I have this sense that I am stuck. What is this fear?

Deva Tharsita, the first glimpse of one's own being is inevitably unbelievable, firstly because you have not known it before so you cannot recognize what it is. It is so vast that what you have been thinking of as yourself is just like a dewdrop coming in contact with the ocean. The fear is necessary. The dewdrop cannot think in other ways except that slipping into the ocean is death. Although it is not true, we have to be compassionate towards the dewdrop too. It is beyond its comprehension. The ocean is so vast -- it is almost a necessity to think, "I will disappear and be lost." Naturally one becomes tremendously afraid. Only one thing can be done and that is to have courage and take a jump. That's the fundamental function of the master, to tell you that "I was also a dewdrop one day. I was also…

[Osho tells him not to put himself down as being cowardly because fear is part of intelligence. You are taking a jump into an abyss, a totally new dimension, an experience for which a language does not even exist... a place beyond the mind. You move into a more poetic dimension but one where the mind cannot label, analyse, control, and so naturally the mind feels impotent and fearful.... ] In India we have a saying that camels don't like to go to the Himalayas because there they feel very much confused. They like to live in the desert because there they are the mountains and they are the masters. Coming to the Himalayas, of course they feel confused -- such huge peaks and they are nobody! The mind is very at ease with science, with mathematics.

The song ends:

THE SUPREME UNDERSTANDING TRANSCENDS ALL THIS AND THAT. THE SUPREME ACTION EMBRACES GREAT RESOURCEFULNESS WITHOUT ATTACHMENT. THE SUPREME ACCOMPLISHMENT IS TO REALIZE IMMANENCE WITHOUT HOPE. AT FIRST A YOGI FEELS HIS MIND IS TUMBLING LIKE A WATERFALL; IN MID-COURSE, LIKE THE GANGES, IT FLOWS ON SLOW AND GENTLE; IN THE END IT IS A GREAT VAST OCEAN WHERE THE LIGHTS OF SON AND MOTHER MERGE IN ONE. Zen masters -- Bodhidharma, Rinzai, Bokuju -- they have been pictured in the first state. That's why they are so ferocious. They look like roaring lions, they look like they will kill you. If you look at their eyes, their eyes are volcanoes, fire jumps at you; they are like shocks. They have been pictured in the first satori state for certain reasons, because Zen people know that the first is the problem; and if you know Bodhidharma in this state, when the…

Beloved Osho, these last days, I have come from discourse shaking and quivering from inside out. It comes after you have left. Although my body trembles, it doesn't feel like fear... Or not any fear that I have known before. The image that comes is of me hanging by my fingertips to a window frame high in the sky, with nothing beneath it. There is no house, just a window frame and you are leaning out and dancing and singing madly. It is so inviting, that I forget myself and start clapping and singing, too. After you have gone, my survival mechanism comes running and trembling, trying to take ov

Devageet, a very ancient Sufi story.... A man has lost his way in the dark night, in a thick forest. He cannot see any sign anywhere that he is close to some village, some town; but he cannot stay either. It is so dark, and the fear of wild animals.... Trembling, he gropes his way along and falls into a ditch. Afraid, because in the darkness he cannot see how deep the ditch is, he clings to the roots of a tree. The night becomes colder and colder, and he is shivering and trembling. His hands are becoming almost frozen with cold. And now the ultimate fear grips him, that there are not many more moments to his life. His hands are slipping from the root, he cannot keep them tight, he is almost paralyzed... and finally, it happens. The root is lost, and the man falls. But the whole…

It is just like when you dive deep into water and an urge arises to go back to the surface. This is a greater depth than that. No ocean is so deep as the inner reality. So one trembles, feels afraid, lost, uprooted. One feels unskillful because the new is so new and you have never practised it. But by and by if you go on with courage and you take the challenge of the unknown, that very challenge will create the capacity to encounter it. Once you accept a challenge, you start becoming capable of encountering it. Nothing else is needed because the capacity is lying there within you fast asleep because you have never used it. So whenever there is a challenge, never reject it -- welcome it. Challenge is life and life-giving.