#TalkingSpirits
Overcoming Fear
SADHGURU JAGGI
VASUDEV,
Spiritual Speaker,
Isha Foudation
Fear is simply because you are not living with
life, you are living in your mind. Your fear is
always about what’s going to happen next. That
means your fear is always about that which
does not exist. If your fear is about the non-
existent, your fear is hundred percent imaginary.
If you are suffering the non-existential, we call
that insanity. So, people may be in just socially
accepted levels of insanity, but if you’re afraid or
if you’re suffering anything which does not exist,
it amounts to insanity, isn’t it?
People are always suffering either what
happened yesterday or what may happen
tomorrow. So your suffering is always about that
which does not exist, simply because you’re not
rooted in reality, you’re always root ed in your
mind. Mind is – one part of it is memory, another
part of it is imagination. Both of them are in one
way imagination, because both of them don’t
exist right now. You’re lost in your imagination,
that’s the basis of your fear. If you were rooted
in reality, there would be no fear.
What fear does is it puts boundaries around you.
It is because of fear that you build boundaries
all the time. If you put boundaries and restrict
the area of your life, you may be safe but the
problem is you are safe even from life. You are
protected from life itself. That’s real protection!
The Hallucinatory Mind
You must decide whether you have come
here to experience life or to avoid life. If you
have come to experience life, one thing that is
needed is intensity. If you do not have intensity
you will experience a meager life. The moment
you use fear as a tool to protect yourself, your
intensity will go down. Once it goes down, your
ability to experience life is gone. You become a
psychological case. What happens in your mind
is all there will be. You will never experience
anything fantastic and ecstatic because when
you are fearful, you will not have a sense of
abandon. You can’t sing, you can’t dance, you
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can’t laugh, you can’t cry, you can’t do anything
that is life. You can only sit here and grieve about
life and all the risks of life.
If you look at it carefully, what is fear about?
Your fear is never about what has happened. It
is always about what may happen. It is always
about the future. The future is yet to happen.
It has not yet happened. That means, it is not
in existence. So, being fearful means you are
suffering that which does not exist. If you suffer
that which does not exist, should we call you
sane or insane? Your only comfort is “everybody
is like me.” You have the majority with you! But
that still doesn’t make it right because you are
suffering that which does not exist.
How to Overcome Fear
Fear is not a product of life. Fear is a product of
a hallucinatory mind. You suffer that which does
not exist because you are rooted not in reality
but in your mind which is constantly eating up on
the past and excreting into the future. You don’t
actually know anything about future. You just
take a piece of the past, apply make-up on it and
think it is future.
At the most you will die, nothing more. At least
live before you die because anyway you will die.
You can plan your tomorrow but you cannot live
in your tomorrow. But right now people are living
in tomorrow and that is why there is fear. The
only thing you can do about this is, come down
to reality. If you just respond to what is there
right now and not imagine something that does
not exist, there is no room for fear. Once the
hallucination is gone, where is fear? You will not
imagine something that does not exist, you will
respond to what exists right now.
Please look at it and see, what the hell can happen
after all? At the most you will die, nothing more.
At least live before you die because anyway you
will die. We are not wishing it upon ourselves. We
are planning to live for many years, but it can
happen, isn’t it? There is really no security with
life. It is just a question of how gracefully and
with how much freedom you lived this life. If you
have lived, it will be worth dying. Otherwise life
will be a regret, death will be a regret.
Reproduced from: http://www.speakingtree.in
DYNAMISM(E)