People are afraid of just about anything that they are not familiar with. If you go by this logic, anything that you are afraid of, you naturally avoid, or at least strive to avoid.
By trying to avoid everything that you are unfamiliar 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.
So, how to get rid of fear? If you try to make it go away, it won’t. If you become brave, it will not go. If you become courageous, it will not go. This is because bravery, courage and the like are different expressions—different forms of fear.
Only if a dimension beyond the physical becomes a living reality within a person, is he free from fear. Till then, he is not. When I say physical, I mean everything that you experience through the five sense organs.
Sense organs cannot experience anything beyond the physical. And all your experience right now is limited to sense perception, so everything that you know is only physical. You say God—that too, is physical.
You say my emotion, my thought, my love—they are all physical. This is because, just as the body is physical, the mind too is physical [maybe subtler, but still physical].
So everything that you know as life and world, as yourself and the existence, is all physical. Being physical, it’s always within the limited boundaries; it is always demarcated.
And with anything that is demarcated or contained, there’s always a fear of losing it. For instance, this physical ‘you’ could be dead tomorrow morning—it doesn’t really matter how healthy, strong or young you are. I am not wishing it upon you, but you can 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 be a natural companion. It doesn’t matter what else is there or isn’t there, but fear will be a constant companion. Just look back at your life—almost everything that you have done in your life has been in search of security.
You educate yourself because otherwise there’s no security. You find a job for security. You get married because you seek security. Just see, almost everything you do in your life is always in search of security. And security means there is fear, isn’t it? The need for security arises out of fear. Fear is the fundamental emotion and everything else springs out of it.
What we refer to as spiritual too is just fear. Spirituality does not mean going to the temple, church, or mosque and praying to a God. This is not spirituality, this too stems from fear. Most of you are God-fearing people.
So, God is also about fear, isn’t it? If there was no fear in you, most of you would never enter a temple, church or mosque. It’s fear that takes you there. And you feel more fear by saying: If I do this, God will. God has worse instruments than the devil—torture instruments—that He will use to torture you in hell.
All the horrible things that human beings can imagine, God will do effectively in an organised way in hell. So, it is the fear of God. Fear has become fundamental simply because the experience of life has not gone beyond the physical.
If your experience of life rises above the physical, you will see that fear just doesn’t exist. Fear is not something that you conquer; it’s something that you stop creating. It’s pointless to create something and conquer it later because even if you conquer that amount of fear, you can always create more of it! But if you stop creating fear, the whole drama is over.
Now, if you strive to transcend your experience beyond the physical limitations of life, fear will just evaporate. Such a thing doesn’t even exist in your life. So, there is no need to do anything about that which does not exist.