Arriving Home – In Gita Verse 11.24 O all-pervading Viṣṇu, seeing You with Your many radiant colors touching the sky, Your gaping mouths, and Your great glowing eyes, my mind is perturbed by fear. I can no longer maintain my steadiness or equilibrium of mind.
Seeing the unexpected Krishna’s opulence form, Arjuna felt fear and became still. He is Arriving Home.
In my Bhagavad Gita Verse 6.38, blog I wrote – Fear has a beauty of its own, a delicacy and a sensitivity of its own. In fact it is a very subtle aliveness.
Fear Always Means the Fear of the Unknown: You will have to drop fear. And if it is a question of choosing between the inner feeling and the fear, choose the inner feeling. Don’t choose fear. So many people have chosen their religion out of fear, so they live in a limbo. They are neither religious nor worldly. They live in indecision.
Fear is not going to help. Fear always means the fear of the unknown. Fear always means the fear of death. Fear always means the fear of being lost, but if you really want to be alive, you have to accept the possibility of being lost. You have to accept the insecurity of the unknown, the discomfort and the inconvenience of the unfamiliar, the strange.
That is the price one has to pay for the blessing that follows it, and nothing can be achieved without paying for it. You have to pay for it: otherwise you will remain fear-paralyzed. Your whole life will be lost.
Try To Understand What Fear Is: The question is not of getting rid of anything; the question is only of understanding. Understand fear, what it is, and don’t try to get rid of it, because the moment you start trying to get rid of anything, you are not ready to understand it – because the mind which thinks to get rid of is already closed. It is not open to understand, it is not sympathetic. It cannot contemplate quietly; it has already decided. Now the fear has become the evil, the sin, so get rid of it. Don’t try to get rid of anything.
Try to understand what fear is. And if you have fear, then accept it. It is there. Don’t try to hide it. Don’t try to create the opposite. If you have fear, then you have fear. Accept it as part of your being. If you can accept it, it has disappeared already. Through acceptance, fear disappears; through denial, fear increases.
When you feel inner stillness at that time also – The old habits will continue; the thoughts will go on rushing. And your mind is always in a rush hour, the traffic is always jammed. Your body is not accustomed to sitting silently – you will be tossing and turning. Nothing to be worried about. Just watch that the body is tossing and turning, that the mind is whirling, is full of thoughts – consistent, inconsistent, useless – fantasies, dreams. You remain in your center, just watching.
When stillness comes on its own, when silence descends without your effort, when you watch thoughts and a moment comes when thoughts start disappearing and silence starts happening, that is beautiful. The thoughts stop of their own accord, if you don’t identify; if you remain a witness and you don’t say, “This is my thought.” You don’t say, “This is bad, this is good,” “This should be there,” “This should not be there.” Then you are not a watcher; you have prejudices, you have certain attitudes. A watcher has no prejudice, he has no judgment. He simply sees like a mirror.
At this moment not only Arjuna but we also feel we are losing steadiness or equilibrium of mind, as we are accustomed with mind and its function. But suddenly when inner stillness comes on its own, we feel that we have lost the equilibrium of mind. In fact in that inner stillness we entered into no-mind.
When you bring something in front of a mirror it reflects, simply reflects. There is no judgment that the man is ugly, that the man is beautiful, the mirror has nothing to say. Its nature is to mirror; it mirrors. This is what meditation is: you simply mirror everything within or without.
With your watching and watching, slowly the rush of thoughts starts getting less and less. Moments of silence start appearing; a thought comes, and then there is silence before another thought appears. These gaps will give you the first glimpse of meditation and the first joy that you are arriving home.
Tags: Arriving Home
