fear

Verse 1.29: My whole body is trembling, my hair is standing on end, my bow Gāṇḍīva is slipping from my hand, and my skin is burning.

Your pulse starts to race, your mind starts to spin and your gripped in it's clutches. Fear.

The Gita is so invaluable because it teaches one to become fearless. The reason fear arises is due to our identification with the material. Namely, the material body. That's right, that prized possession of yours which you decorate everyday and identify your "self" with is the cause of fear. It actually makes sense if you stop and think about it. Every single thing we are afraid has some connection with our body. Whether it be direct physical harm to our bodies, a wrongful perception of our body, the bodies of those who are close to our body etc etc...

As a result of that fear, different symptoms start to manifest outwardly. And, as most of us have experienced, there's no way to prevent that from happening. Just like the the presence of heat in the body results in redness, similarly fear results in our body exhibiting that condition in multifarious ways.

Although many self-help "experts" and persons claim to have tricks for overcoming fear, they can't claim to eradicate it completely. Why? Because they are all presenting material solutions. Albert Einstein once said, "“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Similarly, fear is a problem we have due to our identification with the material - our bodies. Hence, trying to overcome fear while identifying with the body is an futile attempt to solve a material problem on the material platform. Guess what? It can't be done!

Only spiritual intelligence and knowledge can present the solution. This is the gift that the Gita bestows upon the eager and sincere reader. It gives us the knowledge and evidence that we are not this body. We are spiritual beings having a material experience. Part of that material experience is having a material body which is a cause of so many of our problems.

Instead if we can actually realize that we are spiritual, it pulls us out of our illusion. It gives us a new perspective and more importantly, reveals to us our true identity.

Material identification is what binds us and now we'll find out how to break free.