Q: What to do with fear? I am feeling very tired being led around by it. Can it be mastered or killed? How please let me know?
Ans: It cannot be killed, it cannot be mastered, it can only be understood. Understanding is the key word here. And only understanding brings mutation, nothing else. If you try to master your fear it will remain repressed, it will go deep into you. It will not help, it will complicate things. It is surfacing, you can repress it – that’s what misery is. You can repress it; you can repress it so deeply that it disappears from your consciousness completely. Then you will never be aware of it, but it will be there in the basement (sub consciousness), and it will have a pull. It will manage, it will manipulate you, but it will manipulate you in such an indirect way that you will not become aware of it. But then the danger has gone deeper. Now you cannot even understand it!
Fear has not to be mastered, it has not to be killed. It cannot be killed either, because fear contains a kind of energy and no energy can be destroyed. Have you seen that in fear you can have immense energy? – just as you can have in anger; they are both two aspects of the same energy phenomenon. Anger is aggressive and fear is nonaggressive, passive.
Fear is anger in a negative state; anger is fear in a positive state. When you are angry have you not seen how powerful you become, how great an energy you have? You can throw a big rock when you are angry; ordinarily you cannot even shake it. You become thrice, four times bigger when you are angry.
You can do certain things you cannot do without anger. Or, in fear, you can run so fast that even an Olympic runner will feel jealous. Fear creates energy; fear is energy, and energy cannot be destroyed. Not a single iota (very small) of energy can be destroyed from existence.
This has to be remembered constantly, otherwise you will do something wrong. You cannot destroy anything, you can only change its form. You cannot destroy a small pebble; a small atom of sand cannot be destroyed; it will only change its form. You cannot destroy a drop of water. You can turn it into ice, you can evaporate it, but it will remain. It will remain somewhere, it cannot go out of existence. You cannot destroy fear, either!
Down the ages people have been trying to destroy fear, trying to destroy anger, trying to destroy sex, trying to destroy greed, this and that. The whole world has been continuously working, and what is the result? Humanity has become a mess. Nothing is destroyed, all is there; only things have become confused. There is no need to destroy anything because nothing can be destroyed in the first place.
In fact, it is transformed through understanding. There is no need to do anything else; understanding transforms it.
Becoming a warrior and facing yourself is a question of honesty rather than condemning yourself. By looking at yourself, you may find that you’ve been a bad boy or girl, and you may feel terrible about yourself. Your existence may feel wretched, completely pitch-black, like the black hole of Calcutta.
Or you may see something good about yourself. The idea is simply to face the facts. Honesty plays a very important part. Just see the simple, straightforward truth about yourself. When you begin to be honest with yourself, you develop a genuine gut level of truth.
That is not necessarily cutting yourself down. Simply discover what is there; simply see that, and then stop! So, first, look at yourself, but don’t condemn yourself. It’s important to be matter of fact, on the spot. Just look, and when you see the situation in its fullest way, then you begin to be a warrior. A warrior is someone who has stopped giving energy to Ego! Fear is a form of Ego. You need to transform the fear. You need to give birth to love and compassion. You need to become love and compassion. I hope you will do it and find this depth which is in you!
Yog Nanak