There is a very strange characteristic of fear. When we are afraid, we try to take shelter in something that makes us secure. Some mental story, belief system, community, position, or money. Over time, we become quite fearful of losing that shelter. We are afraid of dying, because death is a reality of life. We take shelter behind the concept of "X" or "Y" or "Z" God. We start believing that nothing will go wrong to us and that God will take care of us. Then somebody points out that the God we believe in is just an image that many fearful people have created together and planted in our minds. We get frightened by this. How can somebody dare to shatter the image of God that gives us so much security? We start disliking that person who shows us the mirror.
In life, so many ups and downs come. We pass through crises, and as and when a crisis comes, doubt enters our minds about our own defence system. Then the cunning mind thinks whether the psychological defence system it has relied upon is reliable. However, critically examining the defence system makes it feel so vulnerable that it prefers to stay with the psychological defence system. There must be something good for me in the crisis. God is more intelligent and experienced and must have thought something good for my future. There must be something great in it for me. The mind plays the trick, and we take shelter again in the old psychological defence system because that is easy. Sometimes, we curse that defence system momentarily, and then when something "positive" happens, we get back to the same shelter.
Sometimes we build our psychological defence system around some God, sometimes around a person or relationship, sometimes around wealth, and sometimes around some mental story. The more we become dependent on such psychological defence systems, the more we become weak from inside. The more we are afraid to fall, and the more tightly we hold the rope. The more tightly we hold the rope, the more dependent we become on it. That's why if anybody even hints at taking the rope away from us, or even says that by lending the rope, somebody is trying to control us like puppets, such a person becomes our greatest enemy. How can he say even a single word about the rope?
There is a fight for the rope all around us. People are busy proving that their rope is better than the others. We may hold on to an X rope or a Y rope or a Z rope. Will it make us feel secure? The longer we hold on to that rope, the more fearful and vulnerable we will be from the inside. But, at the same time, letting go of that rope is also not easy. We will fall down. I find one person utterly fearless in Indian scriptures, and that is Lord Hanuman. Why is he so fearless? Because he does not want anything for himself. He is completely merged with Sri Ram, and that's why he has no attachment to any outcome. The entire psychological fear is based on the apprehension of not "becoming" what we want or of "losing" what we have. We get conditioned about the "goodness" of what we want to become or what we want or what we have, from a very early stage in our lives, and there is hardly any occasion to look at that, or to examine that critically. It's not possible to keep sitting inside our flat and also to look at the building. Critical examination requires stepping out of the building of our own belief system and looking at it. I feel that is the biggest courage in this world. To look at the psychological defence system we have built for ourselves and destroy that by our own hands, and then to reexamine the fears and vulnerabilities in their true form. It's definitely for those who want to live a comfortable life. It is meant only for those who can't negotiate for anything less than the truth.
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