Overcoming Violence and Fear

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Overcoming Violence and Fear

We must understand, the need for violence is essentially fear. The more fearful you are, the more the tendency for you to become violent. You will see people who are fearful, first thing is they’ll get verbally violent. If they have, if they find that whoever is in front of them is physically of less capability, they will also become physically violent. Where there is no fear, the need for violence will come down dramatically.

So why the fear? What is the fear about? Essentially the basis of fear is just this, in this vast expanse of creation, this cosmic space, if you identify yourself as a little body, this small little person in this vast cosmos. Fear is natural. Most people are living in ignorance and trying to avoid fear. But if you really look at it, you’re in the middle of nowhere. Maybe you think you are in Los Angeles or New York but actually in this cosmos you are in the middle of nowhere. Your GPS cannot tell you where you are.

If you really look at this tiny piece of life. If you identify or live with your biological self, this tiny piece of life should shiver in terror. One way of avoiding this is not look at all of those things. Think you are the greatest nonsense on the planet and go on. That will work for sometime and when life and death gives you a taste of it then fear will come anyway.

But transcending fear, what it means is if you allow your life to happen in a certain way to you. If your experience of life transcends the boundaries of your physicality. If you handle your body in such a way that your body is as competent as it can in the physical world and your inner experience is beyond this physicality of who you are, you will see fear will become equanimous. One thing is you’re physically competent which makes you physically efficient and competent to handle the physical world.

One who is physically fit walks into physical situations without much fear simply because of physical competence. This must be done right from a very young age. Half the children going to school, you will see, they turning like pumpkins, drinking corn syrup. When you become like a pumpkin as a child, then Halloween works for you. Everything is fearful. If you are fit and competent and you’re ready to fight the dragons, then your physical self is competent because of that. A whole lot of fear is taken care of.

Another dimension is your inner experience is transcended your physicality. Then there is no fear at all. Now you have transcended violence on both levels because physical is always under threat. We need to understand. Physical is not a permanent fixture. Physical is under threat. When we say we are mortal, what it means is physicality is under threat always. That’s the nature of physicality. Physicality is not an indestructible process. Physicality is a fragile process. We can make it strong, but it’s still a fragile process.

These two dimensions are handled. That physical competence of a certain caliber and an inner experience which is beyond physicality. Fear is handled. If fear is handled, transcending violence naturally happens. A discipline which brings an enormous physical competence. At the same time, there is a medatative dimension to it which is striving to bring the experience beyond physicality.

It is not about fighting somebody. It is about bringing yourself to the ultimate possibility that you can bring your body and mind to, and then work on your spiritual process to transcend these two things. Transcendence is not an avoidance. Transcendence means you’re building something as a solid footstep on which you can stand or you can use to step over. Because the fear is essentially the fragility of physicality, and because of this fear, the need for violence.

Violence means just this, when my physicality is threatened, I choose to destroy your physicality. That all violence is. So if my physicality is not threatened, the need for destroying your physicality has considerably gone down. There may be other reasons, but still considerably gone down within me. If there is no threat to my physicality, the need to destroy your physicality or harm your physicality has gone down dramatically within my self. That is one level. Another level is to have an experience beyond my own physicality that even if my physicality is threatened, the need to destroy the physical nature of the other has gone down because my experience of life is beyond my physical nature.