Book Review: Fear by Osho

This book is part of Osho's "A new way of living" series of books. It aims to explore the root causes of human insecurities and fear and motivates a reader to shed all the fear and live life at full steam.

The book is divided into five umbrella themes namely understanding fear, exploring roots of fear, listening to your inner voice, a dichotomy of love vs fear and developing insights into fearlessness. As a text of philosophical underpinnings, it has abstracted the concept of fear. Therefore, the assimilation of concepts may take more than one reading. For instance, It is easier to say "shed the fear of failure because it hampers your full blooming and demotivate you" but understanding it at the level of your inner conscience requires a deeper interpretation of the subject. That is a probable limitation of all the text of philosophy. They try to explain practical experiences with the help of theoretical constructs.

However, Osho has done sufficient justice with the topic by citing numerous anecdotes, historical references and quoting some great figures. For instance, He quotes Nitzsche by elaborating on the idea of "Live Dangerously" and Dervish Rumi (Sufi saint Jalaluddin Rumi) poem of "Move within but don't move the way fear makes you move". It contains many references to Buddha stories.

The themes are covered in question answer fashion. This helps us in understanding the crux of the issue. It is supported well with humorous recounts and parables. Given the lucid and coherent English, a fast reader can finish the book in a day but that will not serve the purpose of the book. One needs to read the book slowly and consistently. It requires simultaneous introspection and identification of various thoughts and emotions within you and in your environment. Then only one can derive maximum benefit of the book.

Instead of writing a general overview of book, I would list my 10 learnings from the book.
1. Drop all should's, ought's and must's of your life. The day we do so, we will start living in a different orbit.
2. Start enjoying your insecurities. Accept them, observe them, understand them. Slowly they will go away.
3. When you are in danger, thinking stops. Thinking is a luxury. When people become secure, they think too much. So when the shadow of fear shrouds your soul, knock hard and enter the door. Be a fool. Don't think too much.
4. To realise one's destiny, one should go through a period of no-aim, no-direction and no-ambition. To shed fear, go through fear.
5. Follow your inner nature.
6. Ambition, politics, ego, success these are devilish in nature. Love, freedom, truth and emptiness is the way to go.
7. Giveaway control over your life. Enjoy the insecurities of life. We seek answers for everything so that we can control life and that's where we become miserable.
8. Repression of feeling leads to lose of aesthetic sense, grace and divinity. (Story of marine and monkey on the island)
9. The power need is driven by inferiority. Superior cares nothing about power. Therefore, love rather than domination helps us in shedding fear and rejoicing life.
10. Human life is akin to Japanese tree with no roots. It grows older and older and but it does not grow.
11. When you do something with enthusiasm then godliness takes it roots in you.

I would conclude this with the lines from the last para from the book. "Get up every morning with a great decision, a certainty, a clarity, a promise to yourself that today is going to be tremendously beautiful and you are going to live tremendously". Your suffering will become your joy and your fear will turn into an adventure.