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Fear and Fearlessness

July 14, 2003

Today I am going to talk about Fear and Fearlessness. Fear is one the biggest problems we are facing all the time. We are always afraid of something and don’t even know what of. Children are afraid, young people are afraid and the elder generation is very afraid too. If you ask what we are afraid of, some people will have an answer, some people don’t. They are just afraid. Fear paralyzes you and blocks you from thinking straight. You cannot do the right thing. We know that. But why are we so afraid?

To me we are afraid because we have lost so much, in this life, in our previous life and the lives before that. We have lost our youth, our health, our wealth, our loved ones and our very life so many times. Our fear comes from remembering what we have lost before. We don’t want to lose that again. People’s lives are dominated by fear. In addition to that there are a lot of negative emotions that are troubling us. They destroy so many things.

There is a text written by the First Dalai Lama who lived in the 1300s. In this text he is praising Tara. She is equivalent to Mother Mary in the Christian tradition. Actually it is Mary. When you go to Japan she is known as Cannon, in China she is Kuan Yin and in Tibet and India she is Tara. To me she is and the same person. The Dalai Lama praises her for being perfectly capable of freeing us from the 8 fears, from evils spirits, obstacles and from the results of our own negative actions and their imprints. We are carrying our fears with us from life to life. They are very powerful negative emotions, paralyzing us, making us incapable to complete what we set out to do.

On top of that we have fears of illnesses, untimely death and even of bad dreams and bad signs. People think they saw a bad sign and begin to worry that they are going to die soon. How many times do superstitions stop people from doing something they want? Then, there are other fears. But here let me talk about the 8 fears.

The first is pride. It is called the Fear of the Lion. I have to point out here that self confidence is different. We have to have it, otherwise we can’t achieve anything. But what we don’t want is the kind of pride that thinks, ‘I am far superior to you. You are so silly and stupid.’ This is terrible. It makes us look bad in the eyes of others. They will say, ‘Look at this one. He thinks he is the best in the world.’ The First Dalai Lama called that the ‘Fear of the Lion’. The lion thinks he is the king of all wild animals. We talk about the Lion’s Roar and make a big thing out of that. But the pride of the lion is the one that looks down on others. It deprives us of the qualities our wonderful life has. This is life is great but we are not superior to other human beings. We can’t look down on others. Those people who do very often make a mess out of society, like Hitler, Chairman Mao and Saddam Hussein. They look down on others consider themselves superior. If you can’t control pride it can go to that extent.

Self confidence on the other hand is a must. You don’t want to become somebody else’s door mat. That is a danger particularly if you want to be compassionate and loving. If you don’t have self confidence at that level you will become a door mat. Self confidence includes developing the wisdom that knows what should and what should not be done, where we should and where we should not go. The pride of superiority is blocking you from developing wisdom as well as from having true self confidence, because you are bound to be contradicted.

The second fear is the ego-fear. We have that ego in ourselves and it is so powerful. Even if we have self confidence, but without wisdom, our ego will give the confidence to ego, not to ourselves. Can you see the difference between ego and ourselves? It is very hard to see. We all know and say that it is not good to listen to the voice of your ego talking to you. But when you ask the question: What exactly is ego and what is me – can I make the distinction? You have to ask that question to yourself. Who am I and who is my ego?

The ego-fear is the greatest spiritual fear you can have. The ego is the reason if we don’t progress on the spiritual path. It is the one who holds us back, who misleads us, who causes confusion and contradiction all the time. This is done by ego, not by ourselves. We, as human beings are naturally wonderful and kind, compassionate, caring and loving. It is a wonderful thing. You can’t get anything better than that. Yet the ego overshadows us and it actually identifies itself as our self! That’s why making the distinction between us and our ego is so hard. You can talk about it but do you really know what is what? I just want to raise that question for you to consider. I don’t expect you to reach a conclusion on this for a decade or so. Honestly. This ego is such a terrible obstacle for our spiritual life. Ego identifies as us, and actually we become the slave of our ego. I cannot function, because my ego is standing over me. Ego will only release control for a few minutes when it gets embarrassed. Then my own head will pop up for a few seconds. That is why we fail to get what we really want. Whatever we don’t want we get all the time. It is because of our ego. Mostly, even if we put a lot of effort in we don’t succeed. Ego is a confused state. Ego pretends that it is protecting us. But actually it only tries to protect itself. In the process it is destroying us.

For example, compassion is something wonderful that we have to have. But our ego tells us, ‘Okay, compassion is great, but let us destroy our enemy.’ We, the person, is the one who is compassionate and wants to take care, but the ego comes in and wants to hurt. It is oriented towards hatred and obsession. Ego is completely confused. The fear of ego is the biggest fear we have on the spiritual path. And people don’t even notice it. The problem is that it is well hidden. If it were exposed, we wouldn’t put up with it. Ego would lose. We are basically good people. True wisdom is when we are able to make a distinction between the ego and ourselves. Wisdom is catching ego on the job and busting it. Buddha goes to the extent and says that everything is ‘empty’. Emptiness is something very big in Buddhism. But it is not empty. It is full.

Wisdom is the real antidote of ego. When you gain that wisdom you are getting to the level of fearlessness. This fearlessness is the true spiritual self-confidence. We can get that when we bust the ego, when we catch it red-handed, stealing, cheating and lying. Who is it cheating? Us. My ego cheats me, your ego cheats you. That is its function, its job. It aims to confuse and cheat us, so that it can remain like a king or dictator. It is the biggest war lord, whereas we are its servant. We have been defeated so badly that we don’t even dare to challenge it. We just surrender all the time. That is our reality.

A true spiritual hero is someone who really challenges their ego. Among the enlightened ones, in the world of the divine, a hero is one who is challenging the ego. The ego is the obstacle, standing right in front of us, not letting us go.

Our fear is huge, permeating our life all the time, blocking all our progress, spiritually and materially. Especially in the spiritual world, the main thing is ego. All other negative emotions, such as hatred, jealousy, obsession and so on are ego’s product. They are coming out of ego, not from anywhere else.

The metaphor in this case is the elephant. The elephant is a huge animal. If we can make use of it, it will be very useful. It is the biggest animal, and the most productive, when it is properly used, particularly, if you talk from the perspective of 2600 years ago. At that time there were no tractors, bulldozers or bobcats. The most powerful thing was the elephant. A trained elephant is very productive and also very kind. On the other hand if an elephant is drunk, angry, lost or confused, then it will spare no one who is in its way. It will simply crush anyone. When our ego is in charge it is like the crazy, drunken elephant within us. In our particular tradition we even call that the fear of the elephant.

The first thing a crazy elephant does for its protection is to react with hatred. The ego is the same. When you are in that mode you don’t want anyone around. It is like fire. That is the third fear, the fear of fire. A forest fire burns all trees. Likewise, hatred burns up all our virtue. The positive karma we have is all burnt by hatred. That is why hatred is so bad. You may work hard, you may meditate and try to be a good person, and you build up some good karma that way, but that karma will be destroyed by hatred. Hatred is like fire. This fire needs fuel to burn and its fuel is positive karma. From the spiritual point of view that is why it is so horrifying. From the ordinary point of view hatred brings more hatred. It makes you hurt other people. This is negative and it will make the others want to hurt you too. Hatred is the first product of ego.

To even notice these things going on and to be able to prevent them, we need mindfulness, alertness and awareness. That is the keys that can protect us from the ego as well as all the emotional fears. These negative emotions are called ‘fears’, because they are something we should be afraid of. But we don’t know that yet. We are afraid, but we are not sure what we are afraid of. We should be afraid of those negative emotions.

The next is the fear of the poisonous snake. The second product of ego is jealousy. You have jealousy, because you are confused. More or less people are ready to help each other. But we think that they want to hurt us. We are afraid that they are taken us over, that they will be better then we are, and we think that we should challenge them and defeat them. We don’t see what is wrong or right, because ego makes us confused. Jealousy hides in the darkness of the confused ego. When it sees somebody else doing something a little better than you are doing it suddenly stand up and it will spread its poison. It wants to hurt the ones who are doing better.

The next is the fear of the thief. A thief destroys the goodness of people, steals everything of value. In this case the thief is wrong view. If you deny the existence of the divine, that is wrong view. If you say that there is nothing called ‘bad’, that’s wrong view.

Good and bad both exist. I know a lot of people who believe that there is no bad. You can refuse that bad exists, but that doesn’t make bad things go away. They come. We meet them very often. People get killed. That is bad. There is suffering. There are illnesses. There is death. That’s all bad. It is just as wrong to say that bad things don’t exist as it is to say that good things don’t exist. If there is no good what could we hope to gain from the spiritual path? We might as well just do whatever we feel like doing. We could just enjoy the wonderful day when the sun shines. Why should we sacrifice the joy of being outside in the sun to being in a room and learn about spirituality? What in this case is the use of moral, ethical standards? It is natural that good and bad exist. You have to accept that, otherwise you are submitting to the thief who is destroying the source of all goodness. Otherwise why should people work and make efforts in becoming better people? If there is no good or no bad, there wouldn’t be a need for spiritual practice. We could just be happy with the material world. But in fact we are not happy enough with the material world alone. We are not satisfied with it. There are quite a few young millionaires who kill themselves. Even if they don’t things can change. Today’s millionaire can be tomorrow’s beggar and vice versa. If the material world were enough to make us happy, everybody should be a yuppie.

Strangely, there are whole spiritual traditions that don’t accept that bad things exist. But good and bad are there, right in front of our face, as large as life. You can’t ignore that.

I have been teaching Buddhism for a long time. But I don’t go much for a belief system. Unless I have unshakeable reasons I don’t just believe something. When there is solid evidence, however, I cannot deny that either. You could say that is a scientific approach. Maybe I am a spiritual scientist. I have to accept good and bad and just like good and bad, there is heaven and hell. I haven’t seen either, but I know it must be there. It is obvious. When we do something good, we get good results, and when we do something bad we get bad results. When they accumulate, they will grow into something very big and where are we going to settle this? It is going to be heaven and hell. No one can really deny that. No scientist can say that there is no reincarnation. On the other hand, they haven’t officially accepted reincarnation either.

But we carry our habits like hatred and jealousy for life after life. We don’t have to teach kids how to hate. Some really know exactly how to hate. Others have compassion from the time they are born. Many times you find kids where one brother just likes to go and kill insects and the other likes to protect and save them. You can see that each person has a different nature. They have the same parents. They are brought up the same way, but they have different personalities. One is compassionate, the other is violent. Where does that inclination come from? It has to come from previous lives. That is obvious. We can see in our own life how our memories click back to a past life sometimes. Some situations we get in seem so familiar. We could swear that we have been through this before. We try to remember where and what had happened. But we can’t. These are glimpses of previous lives. Also, many people have gone through certain drug-induced experiences in the sixties. They have seen things beyond what can be expected, both good and bad. These are glimpses of the possibilities of future existences. These are glimpses of what we can achieve. We cannot sustain that joy and happiness we might have experienced. If it was a miserable, horrible experience we are glad to have come out of it. All those are glimpses of other states of existence. And the experience of people in the sixties has led to greater openness in society as a whole. Otherwise you people would not be here today, interested in things like reincarnation. We do know that there is more than what we see here.

Often, because we go through a lot of difficulties we project that there must be other beings on other planets who are better than we are. That is not the case. You may think that a close encounter with the third kind is something great. But did you look at those people in the movie? What did they look like? There is good and there is bad everywhere. As a matter of fact, we human beings are quite good. We are not bad. We have both, pain and joy. We are not out of touch. We understand joy and pain and we can choose what we want to do about it. That is why we are great. We can overcome our fears. We can be wonderful beings. We are almost the best of all beings. We are only lacking a little bit in the spiritual field. That’s all. In this 21st century America is not only powerful politically and economically, but we are also spiritually very rich today. Almost every spiritual path in the world has come here. When in ancient times Tibetans were looking for a spiritual path they sent their brightest kids on a journey to India to find out and bring it back. If 60 of them went, half would die in the heat of India and only about a dozen would make it back. The spiritual path reached Tibet with great difficulty. Today, in this country everything is available right here. Both eastern and western traditions are represented here. We should make the best use of it therefore. And yet many don’t know or don’t want to know about it. They don’t want to think about it. If you open-minded and would like to help yourself and others you have to make best use of it. Such opportunities are quite rare. We have one now and if we can’t make use of it, it is our own fault. We cannot blame anyone else.

We all know about our fears now. It is a gradual process that leads us to fearlessness. It is a gradual process of understanding reality. That is the wisdom which overcomes fear. The understanding of our own life, of our own capabilities, of our own spiritual path, of how to overcome our negative emotions, of how to overcome negativities are the key to gain fearlessness. It is not enough to claim that you are fearless. You have to get a fearlessness based on reasons, values and conditions. The condition is to reach such a spiritual level where you are able to overpower all the negative emotions like hatred, anger, obsession, jealousy, etc, by thinking and understanding. That is wisdom. If you gain wisdom even the state of buddhahood is not far away. It is within reach for us. A Buddha is something we can become. It is not beyond our capability. It is an internal development within ourselves. The answer how to overcome all our fears is inside of us. We hold the key in our own hand. Fearlessness is something we can attain. But don’t think you can just walk around in downtown Detroit and be fearless. You may just be careless. True fearlessness is when you are no longer afraid of the lion, the elephant, the fire, the thief, the snake. The moment you have overcome those fears you will enter the city of liberation, a joyful place. We can all be there or else we can bring this city here to us and keep it with us. We have that capability.

Thank you