And because of the fear of insecurity, you are also fearing not knowing; and not knowing is the highest peak of consciousness. But certainly you must be afraid of peaks because you can fall from there; you prefer the plain, asphalt road – no danger of falling from there. You would like to be at the lowest point in consciousness, because from there you cannot fall.
Millions of people have decided to live at the minimum out of the simple fear that from the maximum you can fall. It is safer to live at the minimum; it is even safer not to live at all. Nobody has ever heard that dead people are insecure; graveyards are the most secure places. Once you enter your grave, there is no fear: even death cannot do anything to you – one cannot die twice.
Man has been trying to create false props for security, knowing perfectly well that they all fall down, but still he goes on piling up props around him. Time does not care about your props, nor does life care about your props. In fact, it is compassionate of nature that whatever you do, you remain insecure. You can have a bank balance, you can have a big insurance – but these are just strategies to befool yourself. What insurance can there be against death? What insurance can there be against the constantly changing flux of life? You cannot prevent it: it is a mountain river flowing fast, dropping from high mountains into waterfalls, moving into valleys towards the ocean where it will disappear completely.
The idea of safety has created the idea of accumulating knowledge – nothing should be left unknown because the unknown creates insecurity. If it is known, you feel safe.
Even small things, you are continuously trying to know…even if you are traveling in a train with a passenger, you immediately want to know his name, where he is going, what religion he belongs to, what his profession is. You may not have thought that this is a way of feeling safe about the man; otherwise, who knows? You may be traveling with a madman, and in the middle of the night he may sit on your chest.
That’s why people are always afraid of strangers. They become uneasy even if you start living your own style of life, not following the crowd. That means you are becoming an outsider, a stranger. So people go on filling their heads with all kinds of knowledge, most of which is simply rubbish and crap; people become walking encyclopedias.
In my village, I used to know a brahmin. He was a little cuckoo – I have never come across another man like that. He had crammed the whole Oxford Dictionary; that was his great achievement. You could ask him the Oxford Dictionary meaning of any word, and he was almost like a computer: he would immediately give you the exact words that the Oxford Dictionary says. And he was living under the wrong impression that he knew the English language.