one anecdote...
A great crowd gathered around Mulla Nasrudin's house, and they said, "What are you doing? Your wife has fallen into the stream and the river is in a flood. Go immediately; otherwise the stream will take your wife to the sea." The sea was just near. So Mulla came running to the bank, jumped into the stream, and started swimming upstream to find where his wife was.
The crowd screamed, "What are you doing, Nasrudin? Your wife couldn't have gone upstream. She has gone downstream." Mulla said, "Do not disturb me. I know my wife very well. If anyone else had fallen into the stream, he would have gone downstream. Not my wife, however. She must have gone upstream. I know my wife well, I have lived with her for forty years."
The mind is always trying to go upstream, to move upstream. Fighting with everything, you create a negative world around you. Obviously, this has to happen. The world is not against you, but because you are not with the world, you feel it is against you. Float downstream, and then the river will help you to float. Then your energy will not be needed. The river will become a boat, it will take you. You will not lose any energy by floating downstream, because once you float downstream you have accepted the river, the current, the flow, the direction -- everything. Then you have become positive to it. When you are positive, the river is positive to you.
You can make everything positive only by making yourself positive toward life. But we are not positive toward life. Why? Why are we not positive toward life? Why are we negative? Why this constant struggle? Why can we not have a total let-go with life? What is the fear?
You may not have observed: we are afraid of life -- very much afraid of life. It may sound odd to say that we are afraid of life, because ordinarily you feel that you are afraid of death, not of life. This is the usual observation, that everyone is afraid of death. But we re afraid of death only because we are afraid of life. One who is not afraid of life will not be afraid of death.
Why are we afraid of life? Three reasons. Firstly, our ego can exist only if it goes upstream. Floating downstream, our ego cannot exist. Your ego can exist only when it fights, when it says no! If it says yes, always yes, it cannot exist. The ego is the basic cause of saying no to everything.