What is FEAR?

I was reading the news paper(TOI) yesterday, when I gazed through one of the statements in the Speaking Tree section. It was written by " Swami Sukhabodhananda". The statement was very wonderful, "It's not wrong to have expectations, but our happiness should not depend on them ." This made me think a bit deeper into myself and I landed upon a very subtle aspect of human existence, FEAR. There has been a lot of discussion on what is FEAR and where does it come from. I need to correlate Expectations and Fear, or else this assimilation of words would appear incoherent. Expectation is the root cause of FEAR. We expect things to happen, people to behave in a certain way, events to happen in a certain way. Now, FEAR comes from the fact that expected things may not happen, people do not behave in an expected way. Sometimes it is the fear of losing something or somebody, which we never expect to loose in life. As Swamiji says, Its not wrong to expect, one's happiness should not depend on them, I totally agree to it. Even though we expect things to happen in a certain way, if our happiness is not dependent on the expectation, our state of mind, our very existence will never be deterred by the things, events or people not meeting upto our expectation. Well in our lingo..its called the " Chalega" attitude and its the fun loving guy attitude or rather a happy-go-lucky attitude. Once our mind is not deterred by such nuances, FEAR no longer has an existence. Expectations do remain but their perception changes and the attitude with which one co-exists with his/her expectations is transformed from one of dependence to that of independence. FEAR cannot blemish the mind any further. And once FEAR goes away..where is the question of one not being HAPPY at any state. We need to seek this state of HAPPI-ness and FEAR-less-ness.

Thoughts on THOUGHT

It has been a really long time since I have discussed anything about thoughts. The "MIND" as we can understand is a bundle of thoughts. The MIND ceases to exist when there are no thoughts. Thoughts and mind are inter-related and depend on each other for their co-existence. On a subtle note, actually Thought and Mind are not two different things but the one and the same. Imagine no thoughts coming out from the vast sea of consciousness that we all live in. Well consciousness we will take up later in detail, but as of now, consciousness in brief is the knowledge or sense that I exist. This however is a very crude definition of Consciousness. If you observe the human mind, to be more exact, if you observe your own mind, you will see a chain of thoughts in a split second. The pictures of the thoughts are vivid if you just want to see them as they come. If there are no thoughts landing on the flexible wall of the mind, the mind is simply blank. It is the mind that gives form to the thoughts, or rather makes the visual play of the thoughts possible. So if we analyze things at more depth, the thoughts and the mind work in tandem and make the whole visualization process or the manifestation of the thought possible. One cannot work without the other. If the mind is absent, the thought cannot be manifested or visualized vividly and if the thoughts are absent, then mind has nothing to focus on and is idle. If the mind is IDLE it is as good as annihilation of the mind. Since both these entities are inter-related and cannot exist without the other counterpart, they are but one and the same entity, only thing is we are able to view them separately. One cannot distinctly say as to which is the cause and which is the effect because they are both inter linked and work together, giving rise to effects for every cause that is perceived as a cause by the mind or descends down as a thought in the form of cause. Well I need to seek more to understand things in a better way!!!