The Bhagavad Gita’s Approach to Conflict Resolution

Allow The Fear

Fear Is a By-Product of Desire:

What is fear? First: fear is always around some desire. You want to become a famous man, the most famous man in the world – then there is fear. What if you cannot make it? – Fear comes. Now fear comes as a by-product of desire: you want to become the richest man in the world. What if you don’t succeed? You start trembling; fear comes. You possess a woman: you are afraid that tomorrow you may not be able to possess, she may go to somebody else. She is still alive, she can go. Only dead women won’t go; she is still alive. You can possess only a corpse – then there is no fear, the corpse will be there. You can possess furniture, then there is no fear.

But when you try to possess a human being fear comes. Who knows, yesterday she was not yours, today she is yours…Who knows – tomorrow she will be somebody else’s. Fear arises. Fear is arising out of the desire to possess, it is a by-product; because you want to possess, hence fear. If you don’t want to possess, then there is no fear. If you don’t have a desire that you would like to be this and that in the future, then there is no fear. If you don’t want to go to heaven then there is no fear, then the priest cannot make you afraid. If you don’t want to go anywhere then nobody can make you afraid.

If you start living in the moment, fear disappears. Fear comes through desire. So basically, desire creates fear.

Don’t Resist the Fear Allow the Fear: Fear has a beauty of its own, a delicacy and a sensitivity of its own. In fact it is a very subtle aliveness. The word is negative, but the feeling itself is very positive. Only, alive processes can be afraid; a dead thing has no fear. Fear is part of being alive, part of being delicate, part of being fragile.

Categorical Condition

Krishna is saying that the person who is doing rituals and following the words of scripture is not sannyasin. The real sannyasin is one who lives in the world and renounces his desires for the fruits but does act as real sannyasin. Whose actions are categorical conditions: and that condition is awareness, meditation.

Looking at life from the standpoint of self-ignorance is sansara, the world. Looking at life from the standpoint of self-knowing is sannyas.

Therefore, whenever someone says that he has taken sannyas, the whole thing seems very false. This ‘taking’ of sannyas creates the impression that it is an antagonistic act against the world. Can sannyas be taken? Can anyone say he has ‘taken’ knowing? And will any knowing that is taken like that be, true knowing? A sannyas that is taken is not sannyas.

You cannot put a cloak of truth around you. Truth has to be awakened within you. Sannyas is born. It comes through understanding, and in that understanding we go on being transformed. As our understanding changes, our outlook changes and our behavior is transformed without any effort. The world stays where it is, but sannyas are gradually born within us. Sannyas is the awareness that ‘I am not only the body, I am also the soul.’ With this, knowing the ignorance and attachment inside us drops away. The world was outside and it will still continue to be there, but inside us there will be the absence of attachment to it. In other words, there will be no world, no sansara inside us.