Imagine fear as a stubborn houseguest, uninvited, yet persistently present, rearranging our mental furniture and dimming our inner light. But what if this unwelcome lodger isn’t an external intruder at all but rather a figment of our own minds? Sadhguru suggests that our deepest fears are spun from the threads of misplaced identifications. To evict fear, then, might require not battening down the hatches but opening the doors to clarity of perception.
Sadhguru: I have a question for you: What is your deepest fear? Take a moment to really look into what it is and why.
You may have noticed that different things excite you at different points in your life. But generally, your deepest fear remains constant. Fear plays a much larger role in what human beings become than the things that excite them. Why is this so, and what can we do about it? The most destructive emotion in a human being is fear.
For most people, fear is the underlying emotion that influences their talents, activities, love, seeking, and longing to go beyond. Their god, wanting to go to heaven, religion, and much of their cultures are all rooted in fear. Fear plays a huge role in human life, which it should not.
One such fear is that someone may take control of your life and hurt you. It manifests in different ways at various stages in their life, whether it is entering school, college, marriage, a job, a spiritual process, or some other new situation.
This fear is there in everyone to different degrees. In some people, it may be very conscious and pronounced; in others, it may be unconscious.
Many aspects about you are already being controlled by others, including the way you think, feel, understand, and perceive life. People are afraid that their bosses, mothers-in-law, or spouses may control them, or that their children may control them in their old age. It takes many forms, but it is ultimately the same fear.
The fear of being controlled by someone else comes from the concern that what you perceive as yourself may be taken away. The underlying fear is that something may change. People fear anything that is unfamiliar to them, even if it is the very source of life or heaven itself.
Ultimately, you do not want to step into anything other than what you are already comfortable with and know.
Growth means constantly stepping into unfamiliar territory. Wanting to grow but fearing the unfamiliar is self-defeating. The mind always operates based on what it already knows, but there is no way to absolutely know something new like that. This predicament produces enormous fear.
The purpose of intellect is to see everything the way it is. If you see everything the way it is, your thoughts and emotions will not be important to you. You cannot think clearly when the way you function is based on your identifications.
When you are in fear, you do so many stupid things. You may believe you are thinking clearly, but that is not truly the case. The root of your fear is that you are clinging to your identifications.
What can anyone truly lose? You can lose your body, your mind, and all the things that you are identified with – nothing else. All these things, you anyway have gathered from outside. The more deeply you are identified with any of these, the deeper your fear will be.
There are people who seem so self-contained and self-satisfied, as if they were walking straight to enlightenment or heaven. But if something like illness or death in the family occurs, they are broken beyond repair. This is because they have created a false identity based on something that is not them.
It is a fact of life that people can fall ill, die, or face other adversities. If one wrong thing happens, and it destroys you, it means you have been living in a fool’s paradise. The very basis of fear is believing you are something that you are not.
Whether it is your money, your parents, your home, your education, your thoughts, your emotions, your body, your husband, wife, children, or whatever else – you identify with something you are not, believing you are that. Once you are identified with something that you are not, your thoughts run endlessly, without any control or clarity.
The basis of this nonstop thought process is wrong identifications. If you remove these identifications, there will be no thoughts; everything becomes clear and bright.
The more human beings identify with their thoughts, the more muddled and tortured they become within themselves. With absolute clarity of thought, there is no question of fear, frustration, anger, or anything like that. You will see life just the way it is, and you will have no problem with it.
You have a problem with everything that happens around you because you are identified with certain things, and whatever you are not identified with is a problem. Anything that threatens this identity is a problem to you. If your thoughts are absolutely clear, fear does not arise in you. It is an absolute boon to see things just the way they are, not the way you expect them to be.
Whether it is the fear of being less than who you want to be, not being able to go beyond what you consider as your limitations, or losing something that you feel is the basis of your wellbeing, all your fears are rooted in one thing: wrong identifications with something that you are not.
The moment you identify with something that you are not, the possibility of losing the very axis of your life is always threatening, and this fear is debilitating and destructive.
Basing your wellbeing on a relationship, an accomplishment, a certain amount of money, or anything else is a foolish approach to wellbeing. Money, relationships, and other things can be added to your life as decorations to make it a little more flamboyant and beautiful, but they can never be the basis of wellbeing.
True wellbeing arises only when you go beyond identifying yourself with anything.
One of the most fundamental spiritual processes in this tradition is “neti, neti, neti,” which means “I am not that, I am not that, I am not that.” It is about continuously seeing what you are not.
You are unable to see what you are, so you have identified with so many things that you are not, which is the basis of trouble. The first and foremost step is to see, “I don’t know anything.”
You will not arrive at “I do not know” easily because you are identified with so many things. The very identification is a certain bank of knowledge. For someone to arrive at “I do not know anything,” they must be 100 percent “neti,” having dissected themselves absolutely and removed everything that is not them.
If you have taken away everything that is not you from you in your mind, there is a tremendous sense of freedom. One thing is you are free from fear. Traditional processes of Brahmacharya and Sanyas are more surgical ways of taking away everything that you are not.
They may become attached to their new clothes, identity, and name, but this is being handled, and the necessary sadhana is in place. These are all tools designed to take away that which you are not.
If you become deeply involved with whatever you set your eyes upon, it will change the basis of your fears – the identities that you have assumed.
If the barrier of how you think and feel is removed, nothing can stop you from finding your ultimate possibility, whatever that may be.
The fact that your mind manufactures fear shows that it is a limitation. It is important to understand that it is your mind that is creating fear. This is not just true for fear but for so many other things as well. Whether it is anger, fear, frustration, or something else, your mind creates what you do not want because there is no clarity.
If your mind were clear, it would create what you want, and you would not have a single problem in the world. All your issues in life would be external, never with yourself. If your mind is creating what you do not want, the chances of fulfilling your aspirations are remote. Nothing happens in this world without you paying a price and striving for it.
Most people live by chance. Being fifty percent successful is easy, but with such a success rate, you cannot do much. If only fifty percent of your aspirations for happiness and wellbeing are successful, you will live a fearful and frustrated life.
All the inner turmoil that you go through – your fear, anger, frustration, and everything else – is the work of your mind. There is no clarity; your mind has gone berserk. Fifty percent of the time, it might work for you, but that is not good enough. If 50 percent of the time, you are deep in the dumps, you are definitely not doing well.
Your standard should be higher than the world’s average. You should strive not to spend a single moment in anger, fear, frustration, or similar emotions. If you know the joy of living free of those things, you will know how much it is worth.
What happens socially will anyway happen, but what happens within you is of life importance. Of all the things in existence, is your life not the most precious and significant thing in the world, from your perspective of experience? Then why does it not get the necessary attention?
People pay so much attention to their clothes, but how much attention is given to how they are within themselves? What do you know about your nature? You only know a distortion of what you have made yourself to be.
The first step that you have to take in life if you want to know the blissfulness of your existence is to not identify with all the nonsense that your mind is saying. Whatever your mind says is just an accumulation of what you have been exposed to. It is of no life consequence.
How you speak and what you do are of social relevance; they are of no life significance. If you attach any kind of value to you as life, you should not attach any value to the thoughts and emotions that you go through.
Intellect is like a knife – if you keep it clean and uncluttered, it can cut through everything, stripping away all that you are not, and revealing you absolutely. Your intellect becomes sharper only if it is not identified with anything. The moment it is cluttered with identifications, it cannot cut through anything.
Whatever your fears, the root is always the same: you identify yourself with and believe yourself to be something that you are not.
Once you remove this belief from your mind, there will be no room for fear. Once fear is absent, the fear of suffering is also absent. One who has no fear of suffering will live a glorious life.
