Try to understand both the fear and the attraction. And don’t think that they are opposites – they don’t overlap, they are not opposites either; they don’t interfere with each other. The fear is directed in one direction: the ego. And the attraction is directed into a totally different dimension: the egoless self. And the attraction is far more important than the fear.

The meditator has to overcome fear. The meditator has to fall in love with death, the meditator has to invite death – the meditator has not to wait for it, he has to call it because death is a friend to the meditator. And the meditator dies before the death of the body. And that is one of the most beautiful experiences of life: the body goes on living, on the outside you go on moving the same as you were before, but inside the ego is no more, the ego has died.

Now you are alive and dead together. You have become a meeting-point of life and death; you contain now the polar opposites and the richness is great when polar opposites are contained. And these are the greater polar opposites, death and life. If you can contain both, you will become capable of containing existence because existence is both. Its one face is life, its other face is death.

This is something beautiful – don’t make a problem out of it. Meditate over it, make it a meditation, and you will be benefited immensely.

The second question:

Osho,
Today in the samadhi tank I could have sworn I felt your presence for a few moments. I became quite frightened. Other people have spoken of feeling your presence even as far away as England. What is this? Is it imagination? Or projection? Or something else?

It can be a projection, it can be imagination, but it can also be something else…it depends on you. And only you can decide what it is. For example, were you thinking about me before it happened? Were you desiring that it should happen? Was there imagination functioning somewhere inside you? Were you fantasizing? Then it is imagination, then it is projection.

But if it was out of nowhere, you were not thinking about me at all, you were taken by surprise, you were shocked, you could not believe it, then it is something else. And that’s what has happened to you.

You say: “I became quite frightened.”

If it had been your own imagination, you would not have become frightened at all – you would have known that it was your imagination. If it was just a projection of your mind, you would have known. You became frightened only because it had nothing to do with your mind at all.

You say: “I could have sworn I felt your presence for a few moments.”