Questioner (Q): Acharya Ji, what is the source of fear?
Acharya Prashant (AP): Before I begin, I’ll like to tell you a small story. I just mentioned all the big animals that went extinct when man first reached Australia from Indonesia; that’s how Australia got colonized. Man reached Indonesia, and then from there, man reached Australia. Do you know how those animals got obliterated? They looked at man and they said, “Oh, a small being.” And that small being killed them all, one by one. Before they could know that this small being was a dangerous one, they were all gone.
Animals rely on conditioned instincts for survival, so if animals have been in touch with man for long, then they get conditioned in an evolutionary way to look at man and quickly run away. But if you meet an animal that evolution has kept distant from you, separate from you for millions of years, then that animal has no time to develop fear.
The same kind of animals did not get extinct in Africa or Asia because there, those animals had come up along with man, and the long evolutionary journey together had told them that man is dangerous. So, it got into their DNA, right into their DNA, that ‘look at man and run away’. but when man reached Australia, the animals were just not afraid of man. So, what happened? They were killed because they were not afraid. They were seeing that the fellow animal was getting killed and still it was not getting into their bodies that they must run away, so they got killed.
That you know then is the function of fear, that is why man experiences fear. Fear is inbuilt in the body. Fear comes to you because of your evolutionary journey, and fear was needed in order to survive physically, in order to survive physically. But, you also see that evolution is a laggard, evolution does not respond quickly to environmental changes.
