Fear, Anger, Attachment: One Disease, One Cure

You are afraid of something. Everybody is afraid of something — losing money, losing health, losing the affection of the persons you love, and at the end losing this body altogether. And because you are afraid, you are also angry, though you never connect the two. You treat the fear on one day and the anger on another day, as if two different patients had walked into the clinic. It is one patient. Kṛṣṇa, speaking the Bhagavad-gītā, never lists attachment, fear and anger as three separate defects. He welds them into a single compound word, vīta-rāga-bhaya-krodhāḥ, and He repeats that compound from chapter to chapter. That grammar is the diagnosis. Read it properly and the medicine stops being a mystery: it is named, it is available, and it has already cured many, many persons before you.

Fear, Anger and Attachment: One Disease With a Single Cure

Watch how the words behave. In the Second Chapter Kṛṣṇa describes the sage of steady intelligence as vīta-rāga-bhaya-krodhaḥ, free from attachment, fear and anger (Bg. 2.56). In the Fourth Chapter the same three are released together (Bg. 4.10). In the Fifth Chapter they surface once more as vigatecchā-bhaya-krodhaḥ (Bg. 5.28). Sanskrit does not compound casually. When three items are bound into one word again and again, the instruction is that they are one item wearing three faces. And Kṛṣṇa has already handed you the mechanism. Dhyāyato viṣayān puṁsaḥ saṅgas teṣūpajāyate: while contemplating the objects of the senses a man develops attachment; from attachment desire develops, and from desire anger arises (Bg. 2.62-63). The order is strict. You cannot fear losing what you never claimed. You claim it because you are attached, and you are attached because you have accepted this body and its extensions — wife, children, house, bank balance, reputation — as your very self. Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam gives the root in a few syllables: bhayaṁ dvitīyābhiniveśataḥ syāt, fear arises from absorption in the second thing, in the illusory energy, in anything other than Kṛṣṇa (Bhāg. 11.2.37). To fight the fear by itself, then, is to cut one branch of a poisonous tree. Kṛṣṇa does not cut branches. He states the cure as a matter of record — that it has been administered before, and to whom:

vīta-rāga-bhaya-krodhā man-mayā mām upāśritāḥ bahavo jñāna-tapasā pūtā mad-bhāvam āgatāḥ

— Bhagavad-gītā 4.10

Translation: Being freed from attachment, fear and anger, being fully absorbed in Me and taking refuge in Me, many, many persons in the past became purified by knowledge of Me – and thus they all attained transcendental love for Me.

Purport: Mark what is not said. Kṛṣṇa does not say they clenched their teeth and suppressed the anger. He says jñāna-tapasā pūtā, purified by knowledge of Me. The purification is the cure; the freedom from attachment, fear and anger is the symptom of the cure, not the labour that produces it. Mark the order also. Man-mayā mād-upāśritāḥ — fully absorbed in Me, taking refuge in Me — comes first, and the freedom follows after. Nobody becomes fearless and then approaches Kṛṣṇa. You approach Kṛṣṇa as you are, trembling, and the trembling ends there. And see the destination He names: not numbness, not indifference, but mad-bhāvam, transcendental love for Him. The heart is cured by being given a better object, not by being emptied.

Vita-Raga-Bhaya-Krodhah: Why the Gita Always Names Them Together

This is why, when Kṛṣṇa lists the qualities of one born to the divine nature, the first word He speaks is abhayam, fearlessness (Bg. 16.1-3). It stands ahead of charity, ahead of austerity, ahead of study of the Vedas. And immediately behind it comes sattva-saṁśuddhi, purification of one's existence. That sequence is the entire teaching in miniature: fearlessness is not a lucky temperament that some men are issued at birth; it is what purified existence looks like from the outside. A man who has understood that he is not this body has nothing left that can be taken from him. He is not brave. He is simply no longer confused. Kṛṣṇa also describes a second road to that same condition, the aṣṭāṅga-yoga of the mystics, and He describes it honestly — the seat, the vision held between the eyebrows, the breath suspended in the nostrils. He is not prescribing it to you, and neither am I. He is demonstrating that whoever arrives, by whatever road, arrives at one and the same three-in-one freedom. So take the following two verses as a photograph of the destination and as further evidence that desire, fear and anger are never dismantled one at a time. They go out together, the way a single lamp goes out:

Purification by Knowledge of Krishna, Not by Willpower

So what do you do tomorrow morning? You chant. Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa, Hare Hare / Hare Rāma, Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma, Hare Hare. Aloud, so that your own ears receive it, on beads, at a fixed hour, whether or not you feel peaceful that day — particularly on the days you do not. Then take the work already sitting in front of you and offer it: yat karoṣi yad aśnāsi… tat kuruṣva mad-arpaṇam, whatever you do, whatever you eat, do it as an offering to Me (Bg. 9.27). Kṛṣṇa did not order Arjuna off the battlefield and into a cave. He said mām anusmara yudhya ca, remember Me and fight (Bg. 8.7). Your office remains, your family remains, your duties remain. The proprietorship changes. And let this be said plainly, because a false conclusion here does great damage. A frightened man is not a fallen man. Arjuna's limbs were quivering, his mouth was drying up, his bow was slipping from his hand (Bg. 1.29-30), and Kṛṣṇa did not dismiss him as a poor devotee — He instructed him for eighteen chapters. Further, if your anxiety is a clinical condition, take proper medical help exactly as you would for a fever. Kṛṣṇa Himself prescribes regulated eating, sleeping, working and recreation for the yogī (Bg. 6.16-17). Neglecting the body is not renunciation. It is another variety of ignorance.

sparśān kṛtvā bahir bāhyāṁś cakṣuś caivāntare bhruvoḥ prāṇāpānau samau kṛtvā nāsābhyantara-cāriṇau yatendriya-mano-buddhir munir mokṣa-parāyaṇaḥ vigatecchā-bhaya-krodho yaḥ sadā mukta eva saḥ

— Bhagavad-gītā 5.27-28

Translation: Shutting out all external sense objects, keeping the eyes and vision concentrated between the two eyebrows, suspending the inward and outward breaths within the nostrils, and thus controlling the mind, senses and intelligence, the transcendentalist aiming at liberation becomes free from desire, fear and anger. One who is always in this state is certainly liberated.

Purport: There stand your three names again in one breath: vigatecchā-bhaya-krodhaḥ, free from desire, fear and anger. Not one first and the others later. Together, because they were always one thing. Now hear the caution, and hear it as instruction. Do not attempt this breathing process. Arjuna himself, a warrior of the first rank standing before Kṛṣṇa in person, told Him plainly that the mind is restless and its control is more difficult than controlling the wind (Bg. 6.34) — and Arjuna's situation was incomparably better than yours. In this age of Kali the duration of life is short, the mind is disturbed, the atmosphere is polluted; such mechanical yoga is not practical, and half-attempted breath control injures the body. Kṛṣṇa's own conclusion for this age lies elsewhere: kīrtanād eva kṛṣṇasya, simply by chanting the holy name (Bhāg. 12.3.51). Chant. That is the process.

The Liberated Sage Is Free of Desire, Fear and Anger at Once

Now go deeper, because there is an oddity in your fear you have never inspected. You fear death. But Kṛṣṇa says na jāyate mriyate vā kadācit — for the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time (Bg. 2.20). You are terrified of an event that cannot happen to you. The fear is real, but its object is imaginary. That is the precise definition of illusion, and no quantity of courage will correct an error of identity. Only knowledge corrects it. See how uselessly men attack the problem from the other end, by removing its objects. Hiraṇyakaśipu subdued the entire universe so that nothing could threaten him, and he remained a frightened man to his last breath, while his five-year-old son, tortured on his order, said: “I am not at all afraid of material existence, for wherever I stay I am fully absorbed in thoughts of Your glories and activities” (Bhāg. 7.9.43). The father removed every enemy and kept his fear. The son had no protection and had no fear. Here is the turn most men miss. You are not being asked to stop loving. Rāga is not to be amputated; it is to be relocated. When attachment is fixed upon Kṛṣṇa it is no longer called attachment — it is called bhakti. Know Him as the proprietor of everything and the well-wishing friend of every living being, and peace comes of its own accord (Bg. 5.29).

Therefore do not wait to become fearless before you take shelter. That is backwards, and it will never happen. Take shelter because you are afraid — that is what shelter is for. Kṛṣṇa's final word to Arjuna is not a philosophy but a hand held out: sarva-dharmān parityajya mām ekaṁ śaraṇaṁ vraja, abandon all varieties of religion and simply surrender unto Me; ahaṁ tvāṁ sarva-pāpebhyo mokṣayiṣyāmi mā śucaḥ, I shall deliver you from all sinful reaction, do not fear (Bg. 18.66). He closes the whole Gītā with the words do not fear. So begin tonight. Chant Hare Kṛṣṇa, read a little of Bhagavad-gītā As It Is every day, honour Kṛṣṇa prasādam, and let the three-headed disease starve for want of a patient. There is no other medicine, and for this one there is no charge.