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Fear is as nonsubstantial as your shadow, but it is. The shadow also exists, nonsubstantial, negative, but not nonexistential. Sometimes the shadow can have a great impact on you. In a jungle when night is approaching you can be frightened of your own shadow; in a lonely place, on a lonely path, you can start running because of your own shadow. Your running will be real, your escaping will be real, but the cause will be nonsubstantial.

You can run away from a rope thinking it is a snake; if you come back and look closely, observe, you will laugh at the stupidity of it. You are afraid to go to places where fear exists. You are more afraid of fear than of anything else because the very existence of fear shakes your foundations. And this shaking of your foundations is very real, remember.

Fear is like a dream, a nightmare, and when you awake from a nightmare the aftereffects persist, the hangover persists: your breathing has changed, you are perspiring, your body is trembling, you are hot. You know that it was just a nightmare, a dream, nonsubstantial; but this knowing will take time to penetrate to the very core of your being. Meanwhile, the effects of the nonsubstantial dream will continue. Fear is a nightmare.

You ask me, “What is fear made of?” Fear is made of ignorance of one’s own self. There is only one fear – it manifests in many ways, there can be a thousand and one manifestations, but basically fear is one thing – and that is: “Deep inside, I may not be.” And in a way it is true that you are not.

God is, you are not. The guest is, the host is not. And because you are suspicious – and your suspicion is very valid – you don’t look in. You go on pretending that you are. You know that if you look in, you are not. This is a deep, tacit understanding. It is not intellectual, it is existential. It is in your very guts, the feeling that “I may not be.” It is better not to look in; to go on looking out. At least it keeps you befooled, it keeps intact the illusion that “I am.” But because this feeling of “I amness” is false, it creates fear; anything can destroy it, any deep encounter can shatter it. It can be shattered by love, it can be shattered by meeting a master, it can be shattered by a great disease, it can be shattered by seeing someone die. It can be shattered in many ways, it is very fragile. You are somehow managing it by not looking in.

Mulla Nasruddin was traveling on a train. The ticket collector came and asked for his ticket. Mulla Nasruddin looked in all his pockets, in all his suitcases, and couldn’t find the ticket. He was perspiring and becoming more and more frightened. The ticket collector said, “Sir, you haven’t looked in one of your pockets. Why don’t you look in it?” Mulla Nasruddin said, “Please don’t ask about that pocket. I am not going to look in it. That is my only hope! If I look in that pocket and it is not there, then it is not there, absolutely not. I cannot look in that pocket. Mind you, I will look everywhere else. That pocket is for my safety, I can still hope that it may be in that pocket. I have left it deliberately and I am not going to touch it. Whether I find the ticket or not, I am not going to look in that particular pocket.”

This is the situation with the ego too. You don’t look in, that is your only hope: “Who knows? Maybe it is.” But your tacit feeling says that if you look, it is not. This false ego which you have created by not looking in, by continuously looking out, is the root cause of fear.

You will be afraid of all those spaces in which you have to look. You will be afraid of beauty because beauty simply throws you in. A beautiful sunset, all those luminous colors in the clouds, and you will be afraid to look at it because such great beauty is bound to throw you in. Such great beauty stops thinking: for a moment the mind is in such awe it forgets how to think, how to go on spinning and weaving. The inner talk comes to a stop, a halt, and suddenly you are in.

People are afraid of great music, people are afraid of great poetry, people are afraid of deep intimacy. People’s love affairs are just hit-and-run affairs. They don’t go deep into each other’s being because the fear is there that the other’s pool of being will reflect them. Because, going deep into each other’s being, if they are not found in that pool, in that other being’s mirror, if the mirror remains empty, reflects nothing, then what?

People are afraid of love. They only pretend, they are only playing games in the name of love. They are afraid of meditation. Even in the name of meditation they are engaging in, at the most, new ways of thinking. That’s what Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation is – it is neither meditation nor transcendental. It is simply chanting a mantra, and chanting a mantra is nothing but a process of thought, concentrated thought. It is again a new device, a device to not meditate.

People are repeating Christian prayers, Mohammedan prayers, Hindu prayers – all ways to avoid meditation. Remember, these are not meditations; the mind is so cunning that in the name of meditation it has created many pseudo-phenomena. Meditation is when you are not doing anything at all, when the mind is not functioning at all. That nonfunctioning of the mind is meditation – no chanting, no mantra, no image, no concentration. One simply is. In that isness the ego disappears, and with the ego the shadow of the ego disappears. That shadow is fear.

Fear is one of the most important problems. Every human being has to go through it and come to a certain understanding about it.

The ego gives you the fear that one day you may die. You go on deceiving yourself that death happens only to others, and in a way you are right: some neighbor dies, some acquaintance dies, some friend dies, your wife dies, your mother dies – it always happens to somebody else, never to you. You can hide behind this fact: maybe you are an exception, maybe you are not going to die. The ego is trying to protect you. But each time somebody dies, something in you becomes shaky. Each death is a small death for you.

Never send somebody to ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. Each death is your death. Even when a dry leaf falls from the tree, it is your death.

Hence, we go on protecting ourselves. Somebody is dying and we talk about the immortality of the soul. The leaf is falling from the tree and we say “Nothing to be worried about. Soon the spring will come and the tree will have foliage again. This is only a change, only the garments are being changed.”

People believe in the immortality of the soul not because they know but because they are afraid. The more cowardly a person is, the more possible it is that he will believe in the immortality of the soul – not that he is religious, he is simply cowardly. Belief in the immortality of the soul has nothing to do with religion. The religious person knows “I am not,” and that whatsoever is left is immortal – but that has nothing to do with “me.” This “me” is not immortal, this “I” is not immortal. This “I” is very temporary – it is manufactured by us.

Fear is the shadow of “I,” and because somewhere deep down the “I” is always alert: “I will have to disappear in death,” the basic fear is of death. All other fears only reflect this basic one. And the beauty of it is that death is as nonexistential as the ego, and between these two nonexistentials – the ego and death – the bridge is fear.

Fear is very impotent, it has no power. You say, “If it is nonsubstantial, then how does it manage to have such power over me?” You want to believe in it – that’s its power. You are not ready to take a plunge into your inner depth and face your inner emptiness – that is its power. Otherwise it is impotent, utterly impotent. Nothing is ever born out of fear. Love gives birth, love is creative; fear is impotent…

Mr. and Mrs. Smith were brought before the bar of justice. “I would like to divorce this character,” shouted the wife. “I would like to get rid of this battle ax,” screamed the husband. The judge asked, “How many children do you have?” “Three,” said the wife. “Why don’t you stay married one more year,” said the judge, “have another child, and then you will have four. Then you can take two each and both be satisfied.” “Yeah,” said the husband, “but supposing we have twins?” “Ha!” said the wife, “Look at my little twin-maker. If I depended on him, I wouldn’t have had these three!”

Fear is utterly impotent. It has never created anything. It cannot create; it is not. But it can destroy your whole life, it can surround you like a dark, dark cloud, it can exploit all your energies. It will not allow you to move into any deep experience of beauty, poetry, love, joy, celebration, meditation. No, it will keep you just on the surface because it can exist only on the surface. It is a ripple on the surface.

Go in, look in, and if it is empty, so what? Then that’s our nature, then that’s what we are. Why should one be worried about emptiness? Emptiness is as beautiful as the sky. Your inner being is nothing but the inner sky. The sky is empty, but it is the empty sky that holds all, the whole of existence, the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, the planets. It is the empty sky that gives space to all that is. It is the empty sky that is the background of all that exists. Things come and go and the sky remains the same.

In exactly the same way, you have an inner sky; it is also empty. Clouds come and go, planets are born and disappear, stars arise and die; and the inner sky remains the same, untouched, untarnished, unscarred. We call that inner sky sakshin, the witness – and that is the whole goal of meditation.

Go in, enjoy the inner sky. Remember, whatsoever you can see, you are not it. If you can see thoughts, then you are not those thoughts; if you can see your feelings, then you are not your feelings; if you can see your dreams, desires, memories, imaginations, projections, then you are not them. Go on eliminating all that you can see. Then one day a tremendous moment arrives, the most significant moment of one’s life, when there is nothing left to be rejected. All the seen has disappeared and only the seer is there. That seer is the empty sky.

To know it is to be fearless, and to know it is to be full of love. To know it is to be God, to be immortal.