Fear is not something to be ashamed of. When we read about geniuses and enlightened people of the past, we find that they all experienced fear at some point of their lives. But unlike many others who failed to develop their abilities and to become great achievers, they've learned to deal with their fears.
It is not a good idea to live in a state of denial. When fear is proclaimed as non-existent, it does not vanish. It just moves from our consciousness to subconsciousness, which makes it even more difficult for us to deal with it.
I would like to point out to three ingredients of fearless life: courage, awareness, and love. They all play important roles at different stages of our personal development.
Courage comes first. Courage is our ability to move on regardless of fear. A courageous person thinks that he or she is strong enough and capable enough to stand against frightening things. A courageous person believes in the final victory, and is determined to achieve it. In order to be courageous, a person needs a sizeable amount of self-knowledge and self-reliance.
This naturally leads us to the second ingredient of fearless life – awareness. Awareness is greater than common knowledge of who we are and what life is about. Awareness brings us into undiscovered depths of life and allows us to connect to the wisdom we've never dreamed about. There are different levels of awareness, and there is no such thing as complete ignorance. When we move from our current awareness to greater awareness, many of our fears miraculously disappear, because their lack of substance suddenly becomes evident to us.
Someone recently reminded me an idea which many people believe to be true – that the greatest fear is the fear of death, and once we get rid of it, all other fears drop away. Personally, I have strong feelings that some of our fears cannot be traced to a fear of death – but this fear certainly exists. It is impossible to deal with this fear on the basis of common knowledge. Still, many people find their freedom from this fear by rising their awareness. Like many other great thinkers, they come to the understanding that life is eternal, here and now. It changes its forms and shapes, its modes and planes of operation, but it never becomes extinguished.
From such a perspective, death is not an end, but a transition. The fear of death is, essentially the fear of change; and we experience such kind of fear quite often. We overcome is by awareness that all life is about change – there is no way to stay alive and to stay still. Even if we don't see what that change will bring to us, we may trust that our existence afterwards will be, in some way, a continuation of our present existence.
We also overcome fear by being aware that our life is meaningful. There is order and the process of orderly development in the universe around us, and we are part of it. We might not fully understand what is the meaning of a particular thing or experience, but still be aware of its existence.
Awareness changes our perspective. Things which were frightening to us, becomes small and insignificant as we rise up in consciousness. Awareness brings to our minds the fact that many of the things we fear but illusions. Knowing their unreality, we easily dismiss them and let them go.
