This is the fear. You are afraid of dropping any conditioning because that conditioning is giving you a certain personality. But you are not aware of that, so you are not worried about it. Your personality has taken the place of your individuality. And to throw away your personality – which means all your past, the whole of it; there is no question of choice….

It is not a question that there are bad parts in it, throw them; and there are good parts in it, preserve them. Your whole past is imposed by others on you, so whether it is good or bad does not matter. The significant thing to remember is that it is not your discovery, it is all borrowed; it is secondhand, thirdhand – perhaps through millions of hands it has passed. It is really dirty. You have to get rid of it in its totality.

There will be a gap when you will feel completely lost. You used to know yourself, who you were. There will come a gap when you will not know who you are, but that is a beautiful experience, because your innocence is back again. You are born again; it is a rebirth. Now you can start discovering.

The whole territory is new, you have never been here before. You were kept going round and round on the circumference of your existence. It is adventurous, it is a great challenge. Fear arises. Fear arises because what you think you are is certainly in your hands. And the individuality I am talking about, you don’t have in your hands. You don’t know what you are going to discover, or whether there is anything to discover or not.

There is a proverb in many languages…similar proverbs: “Half a loaf of bread in the hand is better than the full loaf far away.” And I am asking you to drop the half loaf for something that is so far away from you right now. Fear is natural. It is nothing to be worried about, it just has to be understood.

One fundamental law of life: you were as alive – perhaps more alive – in your mother’s womb, but you were not a Christian. You had not yet heard of Jesus Christ, you were not carrying a Bible, you were not clinging to a cross. You had no idea what your name is, you had no ambition to become the president of America, to be the richest man in the world. You had no ambitions. Ambitions are extensions of your ego: the bigger the ambition, the bigger ego you are searching for.

At birth you were simply there. So one thing is certain, that whatever you have gained after your birth is not really a gain, it is a loss. On each step you have been losing the real and getting cluttered with the unreal, losing the precious and getting attached to some junk.

It is a question of understanding that even if you drop your whole past you are not going to die, because you were alive for nine months in your mother’s womb perfectly well. In fact, scientists say that during the nine months in the mother’s womb the child grows more, faster, than he will grow in his whole life of seventy years. He passes through so many phases; he passes through almost all the phases humanity has passed through. At a certain moment he looks like a monkey in the mother’s womb. Earlier than that, he looks like a fish.