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. This is a self-defeating position that people have taken.
So how to get rid of this fear? If you become brave or courageous, it will not go because bravery and courage are different expressions 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. 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. Your emotion, thought, and love are all physical. 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. Just look back at your life. You educate yourself, you find a job, you get married – 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. Right now 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 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, then fear will just evaporate. Such a thing will not even exist; and there is no need to do anything about that which does not exist.
n Ranked among the 50 most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. He was honoured with the Padma Vibhushan, India’s highest civilian award, in 2017, for exceptional and distinguished service.
