Fear Of Hurting Your Own Ego

Even fears like fear of public speaking are fear of losing one's prestige in a way. When you are afraid of talking in front of a gathering, you are actually afraid of what they might say about you. You are afraid that your ego might suffer because of something that they might say about you. And so you get into stage fear. It is a passive form of guarding your ego. Fear is very much a manifestation of ego. Understand that.

So what if people don't approve of your talk? The moment you are afraid of what others will say, you are only guarding your ego.

Fear of the ego suffering is also the reason why people get afraid when they go into meditation. When you go into meditation, there is always the fear of losing yourself – to Existence, to the Existential energy that is surrounding you. So you hold on. You resist meditation. Instead, if I tell you to chant something, you will happily chant. There will be no fear.

Your ego is so afraid that it will dissolve. If it dissolves, all the labels with which you identify yourself will also dissolve. You become a nobody! So you resist and remain somebody at least to

Part 2: Face Your Fears Fearlessly

yourself. This resistance is purely the fear of the ego.

Yes, I am coming to that.

Fear of the unknown is nothing but the fear that we have of darkness, of ghosts and spirits, of God and finally of our own death.

A small story:

One man was traveling on a train.

The ticket collector came to him and asked him for his ticket.

He frantically started searching for the ticket in his wallet, in his luggage and in his pants pocket.

The ticket collector was watching him and said, 'Sir, why don't you search in your coat pocket.'

The man replied, 'Please don't ask me to look in it now. My only hope is that it will be there.'

We are so afraid to look! We are afraid to look at our fears; that is the whole problem. So we delude

ourselves in comfort zones and keep carrying on.

Never fear to look. The moment you fear to look, you are only creating more fear because it becomes more unknown to you.

When we talk about fear of the unknown, fear of spirits and ghosts is very common. There is no need to fear them at all. Just understand that spirits and ghosts are much less powerful than we are. We give them much more power than they naturally would have and let them control our fears. There starts the problem.

Don't go too much into the subject of spirits and ghosts. It is of no use. If you are well-centered and clear about yourself, it is enough. Automatically, nothing can touch you and you will also not have fear of such things.

Fear of darkness is also fear of the unknown. Fear of darkness is nothing but the fear of death. The same garden in your house, which you walk in at daytime, will you walk in at nighttime? No! You are afraid! Why? You know the boundaries of your garden well, yet why are you afraid? You are afraid not because of your garden but because of the darkness.

You are afraid that something might happen to you

in the dark. This is what I mean when I say that every fear of yours is in some way related to the ultimate fear of death. In the case of darkness, it is very obvious, but in the case of your other fears, it is very subtle, that's all.

Actually, darkness is beautiful! It is like your own mother's womb. When you were in your mother's womb, you were in complete darkness. But after you came to the world, you lost this connection with darkness. You started fearing it as something unknown. Tantric followers meditate upon darkness to feel the intensity of Existence.

There is no need to be afraid of darkness. Just once, if you can look into darkness with deep love, with the soothing feeling that it is your mother's womb, you will not be afraid of it anymore.

When a child gets scared of darkness, don't tell him, 'Be brave'! If you tell him this, he will only

become tense because he is not supposed to get afraid. He will not drop his fear for darkness. Just allow him to go through the fear of darkness.

Just once, if you can look into darkness with deep love, with the soothing feeling that it is your mother's womb, you will not be afraid of it anymore.

Let him tremble a little. At least he gets a chance to explore his fear. When he does this a few times, he will slowly lose his fear of darkness.

Now we come to the fear of God. God is also unknown to us and so we fear God. Understand that God is nothing but the name that we give to Existence, to the Cosmos, to Existential energy, to the Life Force that pervades this universe. This Existence, this Universal energy knows only to love. If you can understand this much, automatically all your fears will drop.