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CREATIVE FEAR
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verse referred to the poet himself. We thought then and for a long time were under the impression that the word referred to our guru and the verse itself was a salutary warning to his pupils. If we feared our guru we would be saved, if we continued inadvertent, we would fall. That couplet, I might say, had tremendous impact on both myself and my classmate, Budhamalji; it moulded our lives.
I feel that constructive fear is creative and gives a direction to our life. When I say, be brave, never fear anything, be totally free from fear, I only wish to underline the necessity of avoiding destructive fear. We are going to talk about pure fearlessness too. Ultimately we must achieve total freedom from fear, so as to awaken pure consciousness in which all fears are dissolved, when all our efforts and our inner impulses are suffused with spirituality without any outside conditioning, when all stimulations, all causes and effects cease, when spiritual consciousness actuates our thought and action from moment to moment. That is the destination we aim at, the ultimate goal. But we cannot afford to be impractical. There are stages in life, childhood, youth and mature old age. Right now we are living in the first stage, when any talk of spiritual inspiration would not be intelligible, would not, therefore, be relevant. What is relevant here is that in the initial stage, creative fear has a role to play. In the second stage, when meditation has matured a little, one begins to transcend constructive fear and move in the direction of total freedom from fear, the attainment of which signifies the peak of all spiritual effort and the awakening of a spiritual consciousness in which all apprehensions stand resolved for ever, and where there is complete absence of fear, a state of utter fearlessness, an atmosphere of non-fear, where runs the great stream of fearlessness without any obstruction, where all is courage and self-confidence. Fear surrounds the negligent on all sides, but for one who is awake, fear comes to an end.
All men wish to awaken in themselves the consciousness of non-fear. But how is it to be accomplished?
Two most important systems functioning in our body are the nervous system and the endocrine system. They regulate the working of the entire organism. The external situation and the inner chemistry of the body determine our response. It is a common belief that circumstances make a man. There is some truth in it. But it is not the whole truth. The whole truth is that both circumstances and biochemical reactions within determine a man's nature. We often try to alter the circumstances to suit our convenience, but as often we fail in that endeavour. However, it is the biochemical reactions that influence us most; internal secretions from various glands determine our conduct. With a change in the inner
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