If you just watch your fear without resisting it, it melts and gives you back energy for love and creativity.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, recently I heard you say that we have to fight our fears. I don't believe you. For years I tried to fight my fears and they became bigger and stronger. Now, if fear comes up, I go into it totally defenseless, stay with it and go through with it without doing anything -- not even judging the situation. I've realized that fear is a tremendous energy, and sometimes I even enjoy this energy -- like diving from the three-meter board into krishnamurti lake. Can you speak about fighting fear and facing fear?
It is good that you don't believe in me. I am relieved, because if you believe in me, sooner or later you will take revenge. But if the thing had stopped there -- that you don't believe in me -- everything would have been perfectly good. You say, I have said fight fear. I cannot conceive myself saying that, ever. Fight is not my teaching. You must have heard something which has not been said. In fact, what you are doing is what I have been teaching: face fear, encounter it, be a witness to it. That's the only way to overcome, and not only to overcome but to release all the energy that is hidden in fear, for better purposes, for more creative things. Everything has energy: fear, anger, jealousy, hate. You are unaware of the fact that all these things are wasting your life. Your energy is leaking…Read the full discourse →
Can cowardice and hypocrisy also be beautiful? Can I accept even my cowardice, my hypocrisy, my miserliness and a tendency towards privacy that you yourself have called "idiocy"? And if I accept such tendencies, all of which tend to bottle me up, how will I get free?
See the beauty of fear, see the alchemical work of fear. It is simply trying to prepare you for the situation so that you can accept the challenge. But rather than accepting the challenge, rather than understanding fear, you start rejecting it. You say, "Ashoka, you are such a great man, a great sannyasin, and you are trembling? Remember what Osho used to say, that there is no death, that the soul is immortal. An immortal soul, and trembling? Remember what Krishna said: 'Death cannot destroy you, fire cannot burn you, weapons cannot penetrate you.' Remember! And don't tremble: hold yourself in control!" Now you are creating a contradiction. Your natural process is that of fear, and you are bringing in an unnatural process to contradict fear. You are bringing ideals to interfere in the natural process. There will be pain, because there will be conflict. Don't bother whether the…Read the full discourse →
Confrontation of oneself in aloneness is very fearful, very painful. What to do?
If just for three months you can be in total solitude, in total silence, not fighting with anything, allowing everything to be, whatsoever it is, within three months the old will be gone and the new will be there. But the secret is allowing it to be, howsoever fearful, painful, howsoever apparently dangerous, deathlike. Many moments will come when you will feel as if you will go mad if you don't do something and involuntarily you will start to do something. You may know that nothing can be done, but you will not be in control and you will start to do something. It is just as if you are moving through a dark street in the night, midnight, and you feel fear because there is no one around and the night is dark and the street is unknown -- so you start whistling. What can whistling do? You know…Read the full discourse →
Beloved Osho, since you initiated me into sannyas, I have begun to fear you a little. Before that this fear was not there, although I have been frightened throughout my entire life. I know too that the freedom and love I have found in being close to you were not available to me even around my parents. If in the shadow of your overflowing love I am not going to find freedom from fear, then where else? How is this freedom from fear possible?
No, I am not talking of that love. I am talking of a love which is not related to anybody in any way, which is unassociated. This does not mean that you will run away from your wife, or keep the children at a distance, if this love is born in you. If this love is born in you, just your ideas of the wife as wife will dissolve; the very idea that your son belongs to you will dissolve. The ideas will be replaced by an understanding that everyone belongs to the universe, that you are just instrumental; and your love will go on showering, day in, day out. Questions about who is worthy of your love and who is unworthy will all wither away. You will flow like a river, and whoever is thirsty will be able to fill his cup and take it away with him. Your…Read the full discourse →
When moments of fear come, what to do?
Why should you ask to do anything? When there is fear -- be afraid! Why create a duality? When moments of fear come -- be fearful, tremble with fear, allow fear to take possession. Why this constant enquiry: WHAT TO DO? Can't you allow life in any way to take possession of you? When love takes possession, what to do? Be loving! Don't do anything, allow love to take possession of you. When fear comes -- tremble, like a leaf in a strong wind. And it will be beautiful. When it has gone you will feel so serene and calm, as when a strong storm passes by everything is left calm and quiet after it. Why be always fighting something? Fear comes -- it is natural, absolutely natural. To think of a man who is without fear is impossible, because he will be dead. Then somebody will be honking the…Read the full discourse →