You are so powerful that it scares you || (2017)
Questioner: Sir, I experience fear a lot of times. How to get rid of it?
Acharya Prashant: As long as it’s just an experience and you honestly acknowledge it, every such experience will burn away the seed from where this fear comes. Every time you experience without yielding to the experience, every time you experience without being afraid of the experience, you are letting the experience burn something inside you. It’s like there is someone who is firing a revolver at you, and how many shots does the revolver have? Six. Every time you are able to survive a shot, what have you done? You have heightened your probability of survival. Now he has one bullet less left. Something that was firing at you has burnt down. Something has burnt down without harming you. So, it has burnt down, and you have not been harmed. That is how you have to go through the experience. Every time you experience fear without yielding to fear, please see that your past conditioning has reduced a little.
The more you can stay this way, the less frequent will the incidences of fearful experiences become.
Q: Sir, later on, would they (fearful incidences) not come?
AP: It is already not coming. You see you haven’t yielded to fear, so has it come? It is already not coming. Please see, the fellow is firing at you, but have you been hurt?
Q: No.
AP: What will change then? You are already not being hurt, and later also you won’t be hurt. The only thing that would change is that the fellow would be exhausted and would no more be firing at you. His ammunition would now be burnt down; exhausted! But you haven’t changed, you weren’t hurt even when he was firing at you, and you are not hurt now that he is not firing at you. So, your condition has not changed, you have remained in your unhurt condition. So, remain in your unhurt condition and slowly you will find that the situations that caused hurt to you will diminish in frequency.
Q2: Sir, there is a quote by you - “You are so powerful that you are actually scared of Yourself”, what does that mean?
AP: You really want to fly free and that is why you are so afraid of flying, right? Are you afraid of something that you know you would never do? What are you deeply afraid of? — that, which you know you are attracted to. If something is dangerous but it doesn’t attract you, is it really dangerous? You will never step into it, so there is no danger. Something is dangerous only when it is not only dangerous but also attractive. You are attracted towards that. It is your own attraction that you are scared of. It is your own attraction towards largeness, towards greatness. Are you ever contented with smallness? Anything that is small, does it ever satisfy you? More and more and more. In a relationship, you want infinite love; you want infinite security; even money you want infinite. Does any limit ever please you? So, there is ‘that’ within you which is never satisfied with the limited and that is what you are so scared of. It would never let you remain in boundaries; it would never let you remain in confinement. But when you come out of confinement, it is a danger to your existing systems, to your prevalent patterns, to your current emoluments; your conveniences are risked.
Now you decide what is better, to keep feeling strangulated, confined, but secured, or to let yourself be drawn towards that which will keep calling you till your last breath, and who knows, even after that?
