By SADHGURU, Isha Foundation
IT is a misconception that people are afraid of death. The fear is not about death. People are afraid of just about anything that they are not familiar with.
Anything that you are afraid of, you naturally avoid, or at least strive to avoid. If you go by this logic of trying to avoid everything that you are not familiar with, you are striving hard to ensure nothing new ever happens to you. Look at the misfortune of humanity: we constantly strive to see that nothing new ever happens to us, and at the same time, constantly complain that our life is dull and boring! This is a self-defeating position that people have taken.
Going to the temple, church, or mosque and praying to a God is also stemming from fear. Most people have become God-fearing people; God has also become about fear. If there was no fear in people, most of them would never enter a temple, church or mosque. Please see that it is fear which takes you there.
So how to get rid of this fear? If you try to make it go away, it will not. If you become brave, it will not go. If you become courageous, it will not go. This is because bravery and courage are different expressions, different forms of fear. Only if a dimension beyond the physical becomes a living reality within a person, will he become free from fear.
Everything that you experience through the five sense organs is only physical. Sense organs cannot experience anything beyond the physical. All your experience right now is limited to sense perception so everything that you know is only physical. You say God, that is also physical. You say ‘my emotion, my thought, my love,’ they are all physical. This is because, as the body is physical, the mind is also physical; maybe subtler, but still physical. So everything that you know as life and the world, as yourself and the existence, is all physical.
The physical in the existence is constantly under threat because physical means it is always within limited boundaries; it is always demarcated. With anything which is demarcated, there is always a fear of losing it. Anything that exists within a contained boundary is constantly under threat. For instance, this physical ‘you’ is constantly under threat. No matter how healthy, strong or young you are right now, tomorrow morning you may be dead. I am not wishing it upon you, but you may be dead, isn’t it? Because the physical is under constant threat. Nobody can avoid it.
If your experience of life is limited to the physical, fear will always be a natural companion in your life. It does not matter what else is there or not there, fear will be a constant companion. Just look back at your life. You educate yourself, you find a job, you get married, because otherwise there is no security. Almost everything that you have done in your life has been in search of security. The need for security arises due to fear. Fear is the fundamental emotion and everything else is springing out of it.
Fear has become so fundamental simply because the experience of life has not gone beyond the physical. If your experience of life rises beyond the physical, if something beyond the physical becomes a living reality within you, then you will see that fear just does not exist. Fear is not something that you conquer, it is something that you stop creating. You cannot create something and conquer it later because even if you conquer that fear, you can always create more of it! So if you stop creating fear, the whole drama is over. You are creating it because your experience and your identity is so limited to the physical that fear becomes a natural process.
So this is how this fear has evolved. It is coming from a wrong context because you are holding your life itself in a wrong context or rather in a limited context of the physical. If you strive to take your experience beyond the physical, if you strive to transcend your experience beyond the physical limitations of life, then fear will just evaporate. Such a thing will not even exist in your life; and there is no need to do anything about that which does not exist.