Everyday Bhagavad-Gita: Fear.

Verse 1.29: My whole body is trembling, my hair is standing on end, my bow Gandiva is slipping from my hand, and my skin is burning.

 Your pulse begins to race, your mind spins and before you know it, you’re gripped in it’s clutches: Fear.

The reason fear arises is due to our identification with the material world. In particular, the material body. That’s right, that prized possession of yours which you decorate everyday and identify as your “self” is the cause of fear. It actually makes sense if you stop and think about it. Every single thing we are afraid has some connection with our body. Whether it be direct physical harm to our bodies, a wrong perception of our body, or the bodies of those who are close to our body, etc.

As a result of that fear, our bodies exhibit their fearful conditions in many ways. And, as most of us have experienced, there’s no way to prevent this from happening, just as the presence of heat in the body results in redness.

And, although many self-help “experts” and persons claim to have tricks for overcoming fear, they can’t claim to eradicate it completely. Why?

Because they are all presenting material solutions.

Albert Einstein once said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Similarly, fear is a problem we have due to our identification with the material, e.g., our bodies. Hence, trying to overcome fear while identifying with the body is an futile attempt to solve a material problem on the material platform.

Guess what? It can’t be done!

Spiritual intelligence and knowledge is the only real solution.

This is the gift the Gita bestows upon the eager and sincere reader. It gives us the knowledge and evidence that we are not this body; instead we are spiritual beings having a material experience and part of that material experience is having a material body which is a cause of so many of our problems.

And so, if we can actually realize the teachings of the Gita and put them into practice, then we are pulled out of our illusions. We gain a new perspective and more importantly, come to perceive our true identity and the crux of our existence:

Material identification is what binds us and causes us to suffer and the Gita provides us a way out.

 

Vrindavan Rao was born into the bhakti tradition and grew up enveloped in it. However, her personal discovery of the bhakti path began in 2004 when had the opportunity to go to a Vedic College in Belgium and from that time she has embraced it completely. Her love for travel has given her the opportunity to study Vedic texts, such as the Bhagavad-gita, in places such as India, Canada, Belgium, Ukraine and the United States under the guidance of several advanced practitioners. She especially loves the Gita and refers to it as her “Guidebook for Life” since it contains practical answers for complicated questions and is currently writing a daily blog on every verse of the Gita.

Her background is in science and she not only has a Bacherlor’s degree in Biochemistry, but also a Masters in Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology. In her free time she loves to write, read, give presentations, sing and work out.

Editor: Thaddeus Haas

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