Fear inheres in human nature. It’s an instinct that defines her essential being. But fear invites to be conquered and subjugated. Fearlessness is not absence of fear, it is triumph over fear.
Fearlessness, deemed a great virtue is, in fact a manifestation of ignorance.
When a child wants to hold a burning flame, he is not fearless, he is simply ignorant. But when he braves a raging fire to rescue someone, it is the noblest expression of fearlessness.
Most fears arise out of anticipation of pain, harm or hurt, of failure, an unease about the unknown. Fear prevents one from risking, braving something that one has not foreseen and may bring harm. Failure is one big fear. Trying to do a thing also risks fear because it risks failure. And yet, as Leo Buscaglia will have us believe, ‘risks must be taken because the greatest hazard of life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing does nothing, has nothing, is nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow, live, and love.’ To fear fear is death.
Conquering fear is exhilarating, it is also sobering and sublimating. It humbles but does not encourage hubris. It does not inflate your ego, it nurtures your confidence. If it makes one feel happy, it also takes you a stride ahead in evolution. It teaches modesty, is seldom known to lead to bravado.
Conquering a fear for death must, therefore, be one of the rarest realisations one can hope to experience in one’s life time. I can not claim with certainty that I don’t fear death any more but I can surely find it far less intimidating and overwhelming.
When on a dreary lightless afternoon of 6th December,2020 I was rushed from Vidisha to Bhopal (70 kms away) on oxygen support, I had no inkling of the impending horror, pain and trouble that I was heading towards. The thought that it could perhaps be my last journey alive and that I was on way to a most painful, agonising, stifling, suffocating and completely disorienting journey to encounter and experience death or near death, had never crossed my mind. I have no intention of dwelling at length on the torture, misery, helplessness and the sense of utter loneliness while I was struggling with life for over two months in the ICU of a private hospital.
Except that the extreme sacrifice of my wife- Ambica- and the complete devotion of my son-Vinayak- ensured that my life was not extinguished and my worldly existence continued then. I recovered, emerged victorious, drawn back from the certain edge of a precipitous oblivion called death.
But the indescribable pain and suffering of those days brought about an entirely unexpected transformation in me, one I had never either hoped or anticipated. The close and continuous encounter with death for such a long length of time, took away from me all fear of death. I now know for sure what one goes through when one is dying. That it is painful and agonising, that its imminent occurrence completely overwhelms and overawes one, is so clearly registered in my mind that the physical aspect of death does not trouble me anymore.
I still dreadfully fear the pain and the suffering preceding death with intense misery but its inevitability does not bother me any more nor does its timing. The thought of sensory experiences when I will die does trouble and torment me but no longer its certainty. I am ready to embrace it whenever it decides to claim me.
And still, It is a pretentious claim. It is, perhaps, a clearer experiential understanding of a mysterious and opaque phenomenon called death, whose defining reality is its certitude.
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