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FROM IIM-AHMEDABAD TO HAPPINESS
killed in police encounters; they lived in fear, died in fear. Fear, truly, is the cause of cowardice and terror!
All the energy in the domain of embodied life comes from the forces of attraction or repulsion, which appears as love or hatred, in relation with the will. These forces, in turn, are governed by our desire. Desire to possess a thing is love for or attraction towards it; desire to avoid it is hatred or repulsion of it. All our desires assume one or the other of these two forms. The effect of desire, thus, is either to draw something towards or to drive away something from us. Desire gives rise to emotion, that is, a motion towards an object or away from it, in mind. Fear is a repulsive emotion and gives rise to the traits of character such as servility, lying, treachery, and rebelliousness.
Any relationship based on fear is bound to be short-lived. Fear requires the maintenance of prestige and power and, in order to maintain these, favouritism is resorted to. Under such an environment, mutual trust, goodwill and fellow-feeling cease to exist and the relationship lasts only so long as some sort of binding compulsion, purely out of a perception of personal gain and loss, is present. The emotion of love, on the other hand, gives rise to the traits of character such as confidence, candour, contentment and honesty - ingredients of a free-flowing, lasting relationship. But this will require that your own integrity be above board and that there are no skeletons in your cupboard.
Grief, like fear, is the product of the mind, and is caused by the mind's dwelling on the picture arising from either the association with what is undesirable and undesired or the dissociation with an object of desire. Grief - sorrow or anguish - is dependent on all kinds of mental pictures and trains of thought that we allow our minds to pass through. For this reason, on receipt of a message of failure in an undertaking, e.g., failure in an examination, we are
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