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Face Your Fears Fearlessly

It is alright to lose prestige

Like morality, prestige also gives rise to fear. Prestige, name and fame, social status – all these give rise to fear. These fears are nothing but fear of hurting your own ego. What prestige are you trying to cover? Just live with inner fulfillment and dignity; that is enough. The people who guard their prestige tend to be hypocrites.

They are also the people who live in constant fear. Their so-called prestige is so much in control of them.

A small story:

A man was fishing in the river one day.

He was sitting for a long time without catching any fish.

He dozed off with the fishing rod in his hand. Suddenly, a heavy fish caught the bait and tugged at it.

The man just tumbled into the water before he could wake up.

A boy was watching this from a distance. He asked his father, 'Dad, was he catching the fish or was the fish catching him?'

With prestige, you have to be very careful. When prestige becomes larger than life for you, it will start consuming you.

Prestige makes you feel that you are extra-ordinary. It gives you a solid identity in society. People with money and prestige do all sorts of nonsensical and immoral things and get away with it. People talk about them behind their backs and greet them to their face because of their power and prestige.

This is the kind of prestige they are trying to guard so carefully. Understand: Existence will never choose you if you are like this. In the material world, you may get what you want, you may appear successful, but in the eyes of Existence, you will remain poor. Existence has its own ways of choosing.

Understand that prestige, name, fame and power are all your own imagination. You give life to them. You create them and develop a fear about losing them.

Just live with infinite love for everyone and everything around you. Feel deep love for anyone and anything that comes your way. If you live this way, automatically prestige will come to you. People will respect you for your quality, not for your quantity. And with this kind of prestige, there is no fear of losing.

You don't have to guard it all the time.

Feel deep love for anyone and anything that comes your way. If you live this way, automatically prestige will come to you.

Fear of hurting your own ego

Even fears like fear of public speaking are fear of losing one's prestige in a way. When you are afraid of talking in front of a gathering, you are actually afraid of what they might say about you. You are afraid that your ego might suffer because of something that they might say about you. And so you get into stage fear. It is a passive form of guarding your ego. Fear is very much a manifestation of ego. Understand that.

So what if people don't approve of your talk? The moment you are afraid of what others will say, you are only guarding your ego.

Fear of the ego suffering is also the reason why people get afraid when they go into meditation. When you go into meditation, there is always the fear of losing yourself – to Existence, to the Existential energy that is surrounding you. So you hold on. You resist meditation. Instead, if I tell you to chant something, you will happily chant. There will be no fear.

Your ego is so afraid that it will dissolve. If it dissolves, all the labels with which you identify yourself will also dissolve. You become a nobody! So you resist and remain somebody at least to