Description
Speaking live from New Jersey, Mohanji says only two kinds of people are truly fearless: the one who has gone beyond body consciousness and the one who is mad. For everyone else, fear has a real purpose. It is the firewall of the survival instinct, the alertness that tells every creature whether to fight or run. The trouble is the fears we pick up on top of that. They grow out of ownership, of our position, possessions, relationships and expectations. Whatever we believe we own, we become afraid of losing, even though we arrived with nothing and will leave with nothing.
He takes the big fears one at a time. Fear of failure comes from fixing our eyes on results, when only the effort is ours to give. Fear of death is really fear of losing what we have collected. And there is a quieter one, the fear of liberation. Many people would rather keep coming back to what feels familiar, and it shows in how inconsistent their spiritual practice is. The remedy is awareness. Destiny already decides the time, place and events of our lives, so most of what we fear is illusion. He tells the story of a fearless avadootha who watched Kali dance on the funeral pyres and turned down her boon, because he knew he was the eternal one living inside the body. The path forward, he says, is connection with conviction and consistency, while still carrying out our dharma in the world.
In the Q&A he explains that free will is not about changing events but about how we respond to them. Resisting something only gives it more energy until it becomes our destiny, while accepting it lets it pass through. He also speaks on divine grace, what prayer means on the path of knowledge, what happens to the sense of "I" at liberation, and why postponing desires that keep asking to be fulfilled carries them into the next life.