Conquering Fear? Fear is to be understood, not conquered

 

Question 1:

Mukti Gandha, your question is based on complete misunderstanding, confusion. You will have to understand first where your confusion is.

You say:

This is the first point of misunderstanding.

You cannot conquer fear. Fear has to be understood. The moment you start thinking of conquering it, you have already accepted its existence, its power over you. And fear is just like a shadow: you can fight with it, but you cannot win. On the path one has to be very aware whether one is fighting with something that does not exist, but is only his own projection; otherwise the journey goes on becoming longer and longer.

Secondly, the language of conquering is not the language of a meditator, it is the language of a soldier. We have nothing to conquer. We have to certainly understand everything concerning ourselves, our mind, it's workings. For example, fear has never existed. That does not mean that people have not been afraid. That is a totally different thing. People have been afraid because they don't understand many things and fear arises out of their ignorance.

You have seen death... you think so, because death can be seen only in deep meditation, where it withers away like darkness withering away when the light is brought in. But everybody thinks he has seen death because he has seen somebody dying.

To see somebody dying is not to see death, because what is happening inside the person is invisible to you. He is only changing the house; he is moving from this body to another body. But once that consciousness that is his life moves out of the body, the body is dead. The body has always been made of dead, material things. It is the consciousness within which radiates through all that the body is constituted of and makes it look alive.

And you know perfectly well, when you are depressed, sad, you look less alive. And when you are joyous, blissful, laughing, you look more alive. Life comes from the inner sources of your being and life is eternal; hence, death cannot exist. Death is only a change which you cannot see with your eyes.

There have been experiments done: if there is something like consciousness or soul in man... They have weighed a dying person. Certainly if something leaves him he will lose weight - it does not happen. Because he does not lose weight, the people who have been experimenting with such stupid things have concluded that there is no consciousness. Consciousness has no weight.

So first you have to understand that fear has not to be conquered; otherwise you will remain always afraid of the conquered fear - because the conquered fear is there. You may be on top of it, but things change. You may, in a certain weak moment, be defeated by the nonexistent fear again and it will be on top of you. And you do not always have the same vitality, the same aliveness; there are ups and downs. In every state when you are not feeling a well-being, fear will come back. And the miraculous thing is that fear has no existence except in your imagination.

You have not seen death. To see death there is one possibility, and that is in deep meditation; the other possibility is to die consciously. But the other possibility is not certain because death is such a great surgical phenomenon - the whole consciousness has to leave the body - and nature has made an arrangement that before people die they become unconscious.

Medical science learned it very late, that when you operate, first make the man unconscious. Either local or general, but some anesthesia, some unconsciousness has to be there. He will not be able to bear the pain - and this is about small surgery. Death is the greatest surgery. Your whole consciousness is taken out of your body. Naturally you become unconscious before it happens.

So even if you die - and you have died many times - you don't remember, because you were unconscious. How can you remember? Memory has not made any record of it.

So the only certain way, a hundred percent sure, is meditation. Meditation creates the situation in which you know that you & your body are absolutely separate. They are working together in deep harmony, in great synchronicity, but they are not one. Once you understand that they are not one, you know your consciousness is your life. And the moment life leaves the body, people think the body is dead.

It is always somebody else who dies. Have you observed it? You never die. One feels really great that somebody else has died and you have been alive for eighty years and still death has not come. In fact, the longer you live, the less is the possibility of your dying. The data is, most people die nearabout seventy-five. Then the rate of death starts falling. Nearabout eighty, less people die. Nearabout ninety, even less people die. Nearabout a hundred, very few people die. Nearabout a hundred and fifty, it is very rare to find somebody dying. And nearabout two hundred, there is no precedent. So if you can go on pulling yourself up to two hundred, you will not die. You will see everybody else dying and you will enjoy!

But seeing somebody else dying is not an experience of death. You have to go inward so deep that you are only pure consciousness. The body is surrounding you, but it is not inseparable from you. You can see the gap. That very moment you have seen that death is a fiction - the greatest fiction.

But it goes on haunting people because nobody meditates. And when they die, the fear of death makes them so unconscious that it becomes impossible for them to experience what is happening.

From outside you cannot experience; from inside you can experience only with awareness. But that kind of awareness is very rare. Those who have managed to create, through meditation, that crystallization of awareness are agreed on the point that death does not exist. There is no question of fear.

And then you go on saying:

Nobody knows anybody in the whole of history who has conquered fear. Even your greatest warriors are trembling inside. And you are making it completely upside down. First you will conquer fear.... That is a Don Quixote experiment. How are you going to conquer fear? - aikido, jujitsu, archery? Even nuclear weapons in your hand will not allow you to conquer fear.

Fear is a by-product of your unconsciousness, so the only way to get rid of it - to know that it is a bogus reality - is to become conscious. It is not a question of conquering; fear has nothing to do with it. Once you know what death is - that it is a fiction - fear disappears.

You are saying:

Great! Other people are killed and you feel that the death is sweet. If it is so sweet, why are you living? Join those dead people in the hills, get killed. And in India there are such simple ways of getting killed - just on M.G. road, traffic will kill you, you don't have to manage...

Strange laws exist in the world. If you are caught committing suicide, then the punishment is to send you to the gallows. A strange society we have created. The poor fellow was himself doing the same thing - that was crime. And now the punishment is the same crime. Now it is being done by the government, by the justice department. He himself may have failed, but now there is no possibility of any failure.

Death can be sweet if you move from one body, one existence, one form, with pure awareness, into another form and higher. Then it is sweet, really sweet. But not for others, only for you. And you go on intellectually creating the whole question, based on absolute fallacies.

You say:

Remember, 'thinking' does not make any sense here. Here you have to know, not think; here you have to experience, not think.

Thinking is a poor substitute for experience - and a dangerous substitute, because it will prevent you from experiencing. Do you say to your girlfriend, "I think I love you"? Either you love or you don't, but from where does this "I think" come? And if the girl belongs to my commune, she is going to give you a good slap to wake you up from your thinking. Love is not a thinking.

But you say:

Just imagination, guesswork, that death helps one understand fear. Death makes one understand fear, but it is not the death of somebody else, it is your own death, and that too with the condition that you are conscious.

Seeing the death of other people should create a sadness in you, not sweetness. And it is not going to help you to understand what fear is all about. Only your death... that too with an absolute condition. Moving out of the body with full awareness will not only allow you to understand fear, it will allow you to forget all about fear. It doesn't exist.

But people go on thinking about things which can only be experienced. It is one of the greatest problems, that thinking gives you substitutes and if you become satisfied with those substitutes, guesswork, then you will never encounter the real. It is because of this that I emphasize: first get rid of all your thinking. Be in a silent clarity, a transparency, so that you can see things as they are - not that you think about them or guess about them.

Then not only fear, but many other things will disappear and many new things will appear in your experience. The same energy that was involved in fear, released, may blossom into flowers of love in your being. The same energy involved in anger may become a fragrance of tremendous joy in the silences of your heart.

You don't have many energies, you have only one energy. But that energy is invested in fear, anger, greed, jealousy. This same energy, once you are alert, centered in yourself, turns into blissfulness, into ecstasy, into gratitude, into love. And a strange thing which no religion has ever talked about: every fiber of your being becomes prayerful - wordless, not addressed to any phony god. And all gods are phony. Simply out of gratitude arises the prayer - a gratefulness - towards this beautiful existence. Except for this existence, you don't have any sacred place. This is the only holy, sacred temple. There is no other temple. All other temples are false, substitutes, to deceive and cheat you.

So get out of your misunderstanding and guesswork. Reality cannot be discovered by thinking and guesswork. You will come to stupid conclusions. And the difficulty is, you may cling to them.

Edna and Zabriski have a lovely Polish wedding in Chicago.

"Let us be good Americans," says Zabriski, "and have a black baby."

"Okay," says the young bride.

Nine months later Edna gives birth to a beautiful white baby. Next year their second baby is white, and a year later she gives birth to another white baby.

"We must be doing something wrong," says Zabriski. "I will ask my friend at work."

So Zabriski meets his friend, Dougie, the huge black foreman, and asks him why they could not have a black baby.

"Hey, man," says Dougie. "Have you got a prick that is fifteen inches long?"

"No." answers Zabriski.

"Is your prick five inches wide?" asks Dougie.

"No." replies Zabriski.

"Well, that's your answer then," says Dougie. "You are letting in too much light."

 

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