Fear can be answered only with Faith

Following is an excerpt from a samvaad (diaogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Acharya Prashant: 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 go down. 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 of vegetables and have kept them 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.

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 smells.”