https://oshofriends.com/dictionary/70173Unknown
[The new sannyasin says: My future worries me.... Everything's unknown.]
The unknown can never create any fear. How you can be afraid of the unknown? You don't know it, so you cannot be afraid of it. Fear is not of the unknown but of losing the known. We wrongly think that it is of the unknown -- it is always of losing the known. The known is known; and we have our comforts and securities and safeties and our involvement with the known, our investment with the known. And we are afraid of losing it, we are afraid of moving away from it. That is the fear -- of losing the known. We call it the fear of the unknown; that is not right.
The unknown can only excite you; the unknown can only challenge you. The unknown can only provoke and seduce you for a pilgrimage. It can call you forth, but it cannot make you afraid. It is always the known, and the fear arises because you will have to lose it if you go into the unknown. Once you understand the problem rightly it is almost solved.
To understand a problem exactly is to solve it. And if you remain in a misunderstanding about the problem itself, then the solution is very far away. Then it is almost impossible, because you are moving in a wrong direction.
Now to say that "I am afraid of the unknown" is to create a false problem, and you will never be able to solve it. Change it! The problem is, the fear is of losing the known. Once rightly the problem is pinpointed, things become simple.
Then the second thing to be asked is: what is there in the known that you are so much afraid of losing? What it has given to you? What it has made you? Then search into it, and you will not find anything; it has not given you anything. Then why be afraid of losing that which has not given anything? It only promises but never fulfills any promise. It goes on postponing till death arrives.
The past has not given you anything. In fact it is good to get rid of it. It is good to learn the ways of the unknown, because the known is known. Even if it has given something to you and you cling to it, it will be only a repetition, and repetition can never satisfy.
Each time it is repeated it gives you less and less and less. It follows the law of diminishing returns.
You saw a film; it was beautiful. You want to see it again -- it will not be so beautiful now. It will be a repetition. It was really beautiful because it was unknown. The first time you saw it, it was not known. The beauty came out of the unknown. Now you want to see it again, you want to repeat -- you have become greedy. It was such an ecstasy! You go to see it again. Now there is nothing because now it is known; the basic thing is missing. It was the unknown that had given it the ecstatic flavor. Now it is known so the ecstasy is not possible. And if you see it a third time it will drive you crazy! And fourth, fifth and sixth and seventh... and you will be in the mental hospital!
That's how people have gone mad -- almost the whole humanity is mad -- repeating. The same thing, the same sex, repeating again and again in the hope that it will give you again the first glimpse, the first joy. It cannot! That joy was because of the unknown.
Once you understand that all bliss arises out of the unknown, how can you be afraid of it? You will be enchanted by it! You will continuously search the unknown and you will continuously go on dropping the known.
That's what I call a meditative mind: looking into things, inquiring into the root causes, and then following your understanding. If you watch deeply, this is a simple truth: die every moment to the past so that every moment remains new. With the new is life; with the old is death.
-Osho, "Snap Your Fingers, Slap Your Face and Wake Up!, #20"
