Stop Living in Fear

“Fear is not a product of life. Fear is a product of a hallucinatory mind.” —Sadhguru

Question

I find that fear cripples me and restricts me from doing many things. But fear also serves as a self-protection mechanism. How do I create a balance so that I can protect myself but not be restricted?

Sadhguru

For a lot of people, it is only fear which saves and protects them because they have never invested a moment in sharpening their sense. They think sense just happens and their IQ is natural. You may have IQ but you may be completely screwed up in your head. So many people with a lot of IQ are constantly getting into all kinds of trouble. If you have not invested any time, resource or energy to sharpen your sense, the only thing that will save you is 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!

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 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 your fear about? Your fear is never about what has happened. Your fear is always about what may happen. Your fear 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.

What The Hell Can Happen After All?

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.

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.