Question: Sir, my question is related to the thing that you said about death, that are we afraid of death. Is that someway related to life being transient?
Speaker: Wonderful, the question is about death. Yes, life is transient, always.
You see 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 ‘others’. 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 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 when 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 it’s identities, it’s 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 is what the brain always lives in. Brain always lives in the fear of extinction, always.
Listener 1: Is this the reason for its inertial tendencies? Brain always tend to do something which will help it to sustain itself.
Speaker: Yes.
Listener 3: So isn’t it because it wants to stay away from death that it is trying to go into…?
Speaker: No. You see we said that the brain is always afraid of that which it has not experienced. Whatever is new will terrify the brain. All of you sitting here, are afraid of death. Am I right? Now how many of you really know death? Nobody. Because to know something really you must be in contact with it. You must have a personal taste of it. That none of us have. Right? So all we know of death is coming from the outside, some images that time and space have given to us. Something that we have seen in a movie, or in the locality, or in the house. None of us really know death and are still afraid of it. Isn’t that funny?
But that isn’t funny because if you don’t know it, it is new. And the brain is terribly afraid of the new. Brain is afraid of the death because death will be new, not from the past. The brain does not know death, so it is afraid. It does not know what is there, hence it is deeply afraid. Otherwise, tell me that how can you be afraid of something you don’t know. Do you know death? You don’t know death and are still afraid of it. Is that intelligent of you? Is that intelligent of all of us to be afraid of something that we have no understanding of? None of us have passed through death and yet we are afraid of death.
Whatsoever is new, the brain will be afraid of it. And the brain will greatly welcome whatever is already contained in the past. It will want the patterns of the past to continue into the future.
Excerpted from a ‘Shabd-Yog’ session. Edited for clarity.