Osho,
I feel like my mind is going crazy these days. It is as if it is trying to grasp anything it possibly can, especially during discourse as I sit in silence with you. It feels like it’s having less and less to hold on to, less and less to think about, so it’s creating the craziest things.
Is this part of your work, or am I going mad?

You are going mad! But that is part of my work too.

Just don’t be afraid of going mad, because this is a madness that happens only to very rare individuals. It is not something common. It is not insanity. It is going beyond mind; and the mind feels tremendously afraid, because going beyond means going from the known to the unknown. From the small space which seems to be lighted, going beyond means entering into darkness. And the mind is trained for everything in life. To go beyond and lose grasp of it feels dangerous.

It is the same danger that every child feels when he is born. The pain of the mother is because of the child, because no child wants to be born. He has lived in a cozy home, self-sufficient, without worries, without responsibilities, in utter blissfulness. Now suddenly he is being thrown out of it. He knows only that small space; that has been his world and he was absolutely happy with it. He is being thrown out of it into something unknown, unfamiliar. It feels almost like death. The child resists getting out of the womb; that resistance creates the pain for the mother. The child does not let go and allow himself to come out of the womb easily – he fights. That is the beginning of struggle.

He will fight his whole life now. And that is also the beginning of the fear of the unknown. There is a valid rationality in it, because the child never gets a better world than he has lost in the womb. He gets a miserable world. He had no idea of misery. He had never known any tension; everything was as it should be. And now everything is as it should not be, and for his whole life his effort will be to create the same comfort that he has lost.

The desire for comfort, for luxury, for a beautiful home, for a loving atmosphere, is nothing but simply creating another womb around yourself – the womb that you have lost. You do everything to create it, but everything fails; nothing succeeds in giving you the womb back. That gives an immense guarantee to your mind: never allow anything unknown; never go beyond the boundary of the known – it is dangerous. And once you have gone beyond it you cannot come back, because you cannot go back to the womb. These are not conscious ideas, it is your unconscious feeling.

So while sitting in silence, you may feel afraid when you come to the borderline. You may cling to anything so you don’t lose the known and you don’t get lost in the vast unknown. You don’t want to commit the same mistake that you committed when you were born. The unconscious still carries the scar.