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Fear

In this situation the question is bound to arise in everyone. The question is arising not out of your intelligence; the question is arising out of your cowardice. You really want some excuse not to dissolve, not to evaporate into the infinite. Immediately the mind gives you the idea that this is what suicide is: – “Don’t commit suicide. Suicide is a sin, suicide is a crime. Come back!” And you start coming back. And coming back means you become again tense, again full of anxieties, again full of desires. Again the whole tragic drama of your life…

It is your fear of total dissolution. But you don’t want to accept it as a fear, so you give it a condemnatory name – suicide. It has nothing to do with suicide; it is really going deeper into life.

Life has two dimensions. One is horizontal – in which you are all living, in which you are always asking for more and more and more. The quantity is not the question; no quantity is going to satisfy you.

The horizontal line is the quantitative line. You can go on and on. It is like the horizon – as you go on, the horizon goes on receding back. The distance between you and the goal of your more and more, the goal of your desire, remains always exactly the same. It was the same when you were a child, it was the same when you were young, it is the same when you are old. It will remain the same to your last breath. The horizontal line is exactly an illusion. The horizon does not exist, it only appears – there, perhaps just a few miles away, the sky is meeting the earth… it meets nowhere. And out of the horizon comes the horizontal line – unending, because the goal is illusory; you cannot come to make it a reality. And your patience is limited; your span of life is limited. One day you realize that it seems all futile, meaningless: “I am unnecessarily dragging myself, torturing myself, reaching nowhere.” Then the opposite of it arises in you – destroy yourself. It is not worthwhile to live, because life promises, but never delivers the goods.

But life has another line – a vertical line. The vertical line moves in a totally different dimension. In such an experience, for a moment you have turned your face towards the vertical.

You are not asking – that’s why you are being given.

You are not desiring – that’s why so much is made available to you.

You don’t have any goal – that’s why you are so close to it.

Because there is no desire, no goal, no asking, no begging, you don’t have any tension; you are utterly relaxed. In this relaxed state is the meeting with existence.

The fear comes at the moment when you come to dissolve your last part, because then it will be irrevocable; you will not be able to come back.

Don’t listen to this garbage of your mind saying that this is suicide. You are neither drinking poison, nor are you hanging yourself from a tree, and you are not shooting yourself with a gun – what suicide? You are simply becoming thinner and thinner and thinner. And the moment comes when you are so thin and so spread all over existence that you cannot say you are, but you can say that existence is. This we have called enlightenment, not suicide.