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So naturally the child starts becoming very afraid -- and that fear is the beginning of the fear of death.
The child feels as if he is going to die. I am not saying that he actually thinks in these words, he cannot, but when you uproot a tree, the tree also starts trembling: death!
He doesn't actually say the word 'death', but he feels it in the guts; it is a gut feeling. The child cannot think of death, that's obvious, but the child can feel that he is being uprooted. It is not a thought, it is a feeling that he is being thrown out, expelled.
In fact, the christian parable that adam was expelled from heaven has its roots in birth. That is the paradise from where every adam has been expelled. So that story, the expulsion of adam, has tremendous significance. This birth canal is a very very small passage and the child feels suffocated. He is being thrown into a dark tunnel, and a thousand and one fears enter into his being, unknown fears. He cannot even label them; he has never known them before. Then suddenly he is thrown out of the womb into a very strange world.
When man walked on the moon he was not walking in such a strange world because after all the moon is just like the earth; it is not very different. Maybe trees are not there, maybe lakes are not there; it is a desert. You will find many places on the earth exactly like the moon; it is nothing new, it is not strange.
But when a child comes out of the womb, when he opens his eyes for the first time and sees the light, the colours, hears the sounds... and his senses are so sensitive, so alive that everything seems to be mad! This is 'the beginning of the world', what the zen people call 'the beginning of a thousand and one things'. The child cannot figure out what it is! He cannot even breathe because for nine months he was not breathing himself; he was breathing through the mother. Now he has to breathe on his own -- the beginning of the anxiety of whether he is going to arrive or not.
[For a few moments he's between death and life, Osho says. That pause is the first experience of death, and from there the fear enters the nervous system and then it goes on accumulating.
Osho
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