Fear can be answered only with Faith || Acharya Prashant(2014)

Acharya Prashant
5 min readAug 27, 2024

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Speaker: Mind has so much stored, that it does not even know how much is stored. There are two portions to the storage.

There are two parts of this godown.

One part is — where you know that you have something stored.

And the other part is — where you have it stored, but have forgotten that it is stored.

Now what is happening? For example this is a place where you keep all your stuff. You brought lots vegetables and have kept here. You are like the mind- accumulative, always in a hurry to accumulate, afraid that there might be a famine, that there might be a curfew, that — “I may not get vegetables.” That is what the mind is always thinking: “Hoard, store.”

So you keep bringing vegetables even when no vegetables are needed. Your house is full of vegetables. And because the refrigerator and other places can hold only small amount of vegetables, so you keep your vegetables at very unseemly places: under the bed, in the car. Wherever you find space, you put the vegetables. You are always storing vegetables.

Now so much is stored, that some of it is remembered, and some of it is forgotten. Now what will happen to that which is forgotten? It starts rotting. Now the house is stinking, but you don’t even know why it is stinking. That is subconscious.

It is stinking because you kept something in it, and you forgot. (Referring to the average age of the audience) And this may not have happened in only the last thirty years of your existence.

Your parents may have kept something and it has been given to you through their genes. May be it happened one thousand years back, and just the flow of DNA has brought it to you, but surely somebody forgot. And because the mind of the mankind is one, because the mind of the universe is one, because there can be only one mind, it has come to you. As it comes to everybody else. Now your life is stinking, and you don’t even know why. That is the subconscious.

Now how do you find out why the house is smelling so bad? What is the house? The mind.

How do you find out that why is it smelling so bad? “I haven’t done anything, yet it is smelling.” When it stinks, you don’t run away from the house. You don’t take a deodorant and spray it all around, that — “Now the smell is gone for some time.” You don’t start making an argument that — “This is not stink. This is a rose flower smell.” You don’t start doing all these things. Basic honesty is needed to accept that — “Yes, it is stinking. Let me go close to it. I will not run away from it.”

When you go close to the stink, where do you reach? The source of the stink, the place from where the stink is arising. When you reach the source, what can you do? Then you can clean it. That is the unconscious. The unconscious cannot be seen directly, but its effects can be experienced in life. You can’t see, so it is quite puzzling. You can’t see, but the effects are there. You are unnecessarily afraid. You ask yourself, “Why am I afraid?” And you don’t find any reason.

People are afraid of lizards. Now lizards have done nothing to them. For example, you are thirty-five years old, you can’t remember whether any lizard ever harmed you. Yet you are afraid of the lizards. There is a reason, lizards represent reptiles. And when you were a monkey sitting on a tree, there was this large python who was also on that tree. You were a bird once, the snake came and ate your eggs. You are afraid of lizards since that time. It is not that today the reptiles are scaring you. You would always be scared of reptiles. It is there in the genetic material itself.

You have to go close to it and see that — “I am no more laying eggs and you are no more a python, look at my size and look at your size.”

Put the lizard on the table and talk to it. “Look at yourself, and look at me. Now is it befitting that I am afraid of you? You should be afraid of me.” Talk to the lizard. And slowly you will find that the fear will be gone. You are no more the pigeon, she is no more a python. So why should you be afraid?

Listener 1: Sir confronting the situation is one way — to let the fear go away. But we are so fearful that we don’t want to confront our fears.

Speaker: There you need faith. That — “Let me confront it. Nothing can go wrong.”

Listener 2: Sir, faith on what?

Speaker:

On nothing. You have trust on something. You have faith on nothing. Trust always has an object to trust, faith has no object. That is why trust can be broken, faith cannot be broken.

Object can deceive you, faith is object-less. When you have faith, you cannot be deceived. So difficult, right? It is like hanging without a rope. No object to hang to; still hanging. That is what faith is.

You see, if you hang by a rope, the rope can be broken. But if you hang without a rope, there is no fear. Nothing can broken. That is faith.

“I don’t have faith on anybody. I am just faithful.”

Listener 2: Sir earlier when we were talking of student teacher relationship you were talking of faith, I thought you were talking of faith on the guru.

Speaker: Faith finds expression, it is like individuality. It finds expression. I seizes the moment, and it expresses itself. Faith is like individuality, you can do nothing to arouse it. Faith like individuality and like core, is there .

I am asking you: “Are you the agent who can calm their minds down, and let faith be expressed.” I am not asking you to become centers of faith. I am not saying that the students should have faith on you . Don’t get me wrong.

I am just asking, “Is your presence of the quality, that it will bring the students’ mind to faith?”

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