What do you call your name?
What do you call your identity?
It can be burnt; death will take it away.
Death is nothing but a cleaning woman.
It will clean it away and you will cry convulsively.
Then you will say, 'Death has killed ME.'
Death has never killed anybody; death has no power to kill; death is the most impotent thing in the world. You make it potent by clinging to the superficial.
The power of death is not intrinsic to death, the power of death is given by you.
Death is empowered by you because you go on clinging to the superficial. Death can take only the superficial, it cannot enter the depths of your being.
But if you think your clothes are you, your body is you, your mind is you, then you have given power to the hands of death. Death will destroy this and then you will convulsively weep that 'I have been killed' and for your whole life you will be afraid of death.
Zen says that if you drop knowledge — and within knowledge everything is included, your name, your identity, everything, because this has been given to you by others — if you drop all that has been given by others, you will have a totally different quality to your being — innocence. This will be a crucifixion of the persona, the personality, and there will be a resurrection of your innocence; you will become a child again, reborn.
Hindus call this state DWIJ, twice born. This is a second birth. A man becomes really a Brahmin when he has gone through the cross — the personality burnt and destroyed by death. Or he has renounced it himself voluntarily, then innocence arises and he is reborn. Then he is a Brahmin because then only does he come to know what truth is.
But we have decided to follow the short-cut, the way of the belief. We are hoping against hope that somebody else's eyes will do the work for us.
OSHO
