Knowing What to Fear: Intelligence in Goodness

You wake before the alarm with your heart going hard, and the thing you are afraid of is a message you have not yet received about a payment that is not yet late. Or it is a remark somebody made in a meeting. Or it is your standing, your income, the impression you are making on people who will forget you. You have been told you feel too much, that you should learn to relax. I want to tell you something different, and I want you to receive it as encouragement, not accusation. The Bhagavad-gītā does not first classify fear as a disorder of the emotions. It classifies fear as a question of intelligence. Kṛṣṇa places the capacity to know what deserves fear inside His own definition of buddhi in the mode of goodness. Your alarm is not broken. It has been trained on the wrong objects.

Knowing What to Fear: The Gita's Definition of Intelligence in Goodness

Look at how Kṛṣṇa organizes the eighteenth chapter and you will see that He refuses to treat intelligence as raw processing power. He takes buddhi, the discriminating faculty, and grades it by the three modes of material nature, exactly as He grades faith, food, charity and happiness. A man may be quick at calculation, fluent in four languages, and expert at closing a contract, and his intelligence may still be sitting in darkness, because the Gītā measures buddhi by what it can correctly separate, not by how fast it runs. In Bhagavad-gītā 18.31 the intelligence in passion cannot properly distinguish dharma from adharma, or work that should be done from work that should be avoided. It knows the categories exist. It applies them wrongly. In Bhagavad-gītā 18.32 the intelligence in ignorance goes further and inverts them outright, accepting irreligion as religion, striving always in the wrong direction. So the highest intelligence is not the one that knows the most. It is the one that sorts correctly. And when Kṛṣṇa lists what the sāttvika intelligence sorts correctly, He includes something that no textbook on the intellect would think to include. He includes the discrimination of danger. Hear the definition in His own words, in Bhagavad-gītā 18.30.

pravṛttiṁ ca nivṛttiṁ ca kāryākārye bhayābhaye bandhaṁ mokṣaṁ ca yā vetti buddhiḥ sā pārtha sāttvikī

— Bhagavad-gītā 18.30

Translation: O son of Pṛthā, that understanding by which one knows what ought to be done and what ought not to be done, what is to be feared and what is not to be feared, what is binding and what is liberating, is in the mode of goodness.

Purport: Read the middle line again: kāryākārye bhayābhaye. What ought to be done and what ought not to be done, what is to be feared and what is not to be feared. Kṛṣṇa has set fear inside the same operation as duty. To know your work and to know your danger are the same act of discrimination, performed by the same faculty, and when that faculty is clear it is called goodness. Notice that the verse never says the sāttvika person fears nothing. There is a bhaya on the list as well as an abhaya. Fearlessness is not the absence of the alarm; it is the alarm knowing its own business. And this places your anxiety, whatever it is costing you tonight, in the department of knowledge rather than the department of character. That is a merciful relocation. Knowledge can be received. Character feels like a sentence.

Bhayabhaye: Discrimination Is Listed as a Function of Buddhi

So examine what your alarm has been trained on. It goes off when a colleague is promoted ahead of you. It goes off at the sound of a notification, at a delayed reply, at the possibility of looking foolish in front of people whose good opinion you will not be able to take with you. Kṛṣṇa describes this condition with terrible precision in Bhagavad-gītā 16.11-12, where those absorbed in sense gratification are bound by immeasurable anxiety that lasts until the moment of annihilation, tied in a network of hundreds of thousands of desires. Immeasurable anxiety is not a failure of nerve. It is the arithmetic of an intelligence with too many objects to protect. That is precisely why Kṛṣṇa says in Bhagavad-gītā 2.41 that resolute intelligence is one, while the intelligence of the irresolute is many-branched and endless, and why He warns in Bhagavad-gītā 2.44 that minds bewildered by opulence and enjoyment never arrive at fixed determination. Meanwhile the one genuine danger goes unwatched. Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 11.2.37 states it without ornament: fear arises from absorption in the external energy, from misidentifying yourself as this body, from forgetting your constitutional position as the servant of Kṛṣṇa. Against that danger, hear what Kṛṣṇa guarantees in Bhagavad-gītā 2.40.

Most Anxiety Is Fear Pointed at the Wrong Object

Now let me say something plainly, because this teaching has been misused by careless people and I will not have it misused on you. If your sleep and your appetite have broken down over weeks, if your thoughts have narrowed to a wire, if the body will not settle, that is a medical condition and it warrants proper treatment exactly as a fever or a fracture warrants treatment. Go to a competent physician and stay under care. Nothing in the Gītā forbids it, and anyone who tells you that medicine indicates weak faith is speaking from his own imagination and not from śāstra. Kṛṣṇa Himself legislates about your body. In Bhagavad-gītā 6.16 He says there is no possibility of becoming a yogī for one who eats too much or too little, who sleeps too much or does not sleep enough, and in Bhagavad-gītā 6.17 He says that one regulated in eating, sleeping, recreation and work can mitigate all material pains through practice. A teacher who sets your bedtime is not a teacher who despises your nerves. What I am placing before you is the soul's dimension of this matter, which no tablet reaches and which no honest physician claims to treat. Take the medicine. Keep the physician. And begin the recalibration alongside them, not instead of them.

nehābhikrama-nāśo ’sti pratyavāyo na vidyate sv-alpam apy asya dharmasya trāyate mahato bhayāt

— Bhagavad-gītā 2.40

Translation: In this endeavor there is no loss or diminution, and a little advancement on this path can protect one from the most dangerous type of fear.

Purport: Two promises are packed into this verse and you need both. First, nehābhikrama-nāśo 'sti: on this path there is no such thing as a wasted beginning. Every other investment you have made can be wiped out, and much of your anxiety is simply the accurate knowledge that it can. Here nothing is lost, not one chanted round, not one verse read at midnight. Second, sv-alpam apy asya dharmasya trāyate mahato bhayāt: even a very little of this practice delivers you from mahato bhayāt, the great fear. Kṛṣṇa does not say it lowers your fear. He says it protects you from the one that matters, and He attaches no minimum qualifying amount. This is the only insurance policy in existence that pays in full on a partial premium, and it is the exact opposite of everything else you are currently defending.

Even a Little Progress Protects From the Most Dangerous Fear

Now go deeper, because the recalibration has a definite object. Kṛṣṇa says in Bhagavad-gītā 8.6 that whatever state of being you remember when you quit the body, that state you will attain without fail, and in Bhagavad-gītā 8.5 that one who leaves the body remembering Him alone at once attains His nature. This is the actual exposure. Everything your alarm currently guards expires on a date you have not been told. The consciousness you have cultivated does not expire; it carries, and it selects your next situation. That is why Kṛṣṇa gives the practical order in Bhagavad-gītā 8.7 to remember Him at all times and fight, mind and intelligence fixed on Him. He does not say retire to a cave. He says do your duty with the alarm correctly set. And in Bhagavad-gītā 13.8-12, among the items He calls knowledge itself, He lists the perception of the evil of birth, death, old age and disease. Perceiving that clearly is not morbidity, and your present suffering is not evidence of any failure in you. Suffering is the condition of the material world and it visits the devotee and the atheist alike. Kṛṣṇa said as much in Bhagavad-gītā 2.14, calling the arrivals and departures of happiness and distress as regular as winter and summer. The question is never whether you will be afraid. The question is what your fear is watching.

So take shelter, and take it in the plainest way available to you. Kṛṣṇa's final instruction in Bhagavad-gītā 18.66 is to abandon all varieties of religion and surrender to Him, and He closes that verse with two words He would not have needed to add: do not fear. He knows what you are carrying. Then chant His holy names, Hare Kṛṣṇa Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa Hare Hare, Hare Rāma Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma Hare Hare. Chant when the mind is racing and chant when it is dull, and do not wait for the racing to stop first. He promises in Bhagavad-gītā 18.58 that in consciousness of Him you will pass over all the obstacles of conditioned life by His grace. Your alarm will keep ringing for a while yet. Let it ring, and turn it, one round at a time, toward the only danger that can reach you.