The imaginary fear of death

Acharya Prashant
3 min readApr 3, 2020

Life is transient, always.

Because the brain has nothing of its own, all it gets is what it gets from the outside, the external. The brain has nothing of its own, all that the brain gets is from ‘time’ and ‘space’. When we say, ‘space’ we mean brain gets something from another person or situation. And when we say, ‘time’, then we mean that the brain has a collection of your own memories in the past. So, whatever the brain has it gets from ‘time’ and ‘space’. It has nothing of its own.

Look at the brain. It will always be afraid. Because what comes from the outside can go back to the outside. What time has given you, time can as well take back. So the brain forever lives in misery, in suffering, in apprehension, in insecurity. And it is because of that insecurity, it wants to project the future.

Remember, all fear is nothing but the fear that something will be taken. And hence the greatest fear is, ‘I will be taken away from myself.’

A mobile phone is taken away from you, you become afraid. Something bigger is taken away from you, you get more afraid. What if, you yourself are taken away from you? Then you are extremely afraid. The thing with the brain is that it has nothing of its own. All its identities, its sense of the self itself comes from the outside. So it is forever afraid. That something can be taken away.

Hence death happens to be a great fear to the brain. It knows of itself only as a physical entity. Now the physical entity did not come to the brain out of its free-will. It was a, what you can call as, a random event. You didn’t decide to be born. Did you decide to be born? Did it happen by your free-will? Because it happened accidentally, hence there is a great fear of death. Do you get it? That it just came to me and it can go back at any time. This fear of annihilation, of extinction, is what the brain always lives in.

It is reason for its inertial tendencies. The brain always tends to do something which will help it to sustain itself.

The brain is always afraid of that which it has not experienced. Whatever is new will terrify the brain. All of you must be afraid of death. Am I right? But how many of you really know death? Nobody. Because to know something, actually, you must be in contact with it.

Acharya Prashant