Suppose some small children are afraid of the dark. As they grow up and become more educated about the nature of reality, they will no longer be that afraid. In contrast, children who might have no fear about playing with toxic chemicals will learn to fear them when they get proper education.

In our life too, what we fear is transformed by education. We may initially be afraid of bad things happening to us, and that fear is understandable. But as we become philosophically educated, we start understanding that such bad things don’t happen randomly — they happen as consequences of our past bad choices, even if the exact connection between particular choices and particular consequences may not always be clear to us. 

Nonetheless, we can become more careful about making good choices henceforth and prepare a brighter future for ourselves. The Bhagavad-gita (03.35) urges us to cultivate the healthy fear of making indiscreet choices that militate against our nature and disrupt social order; it reiterates the theme when stating a well-informed intelligence knows which actions are to be feared and which to not be feared (18.30). 

In fact, the more we take the responsibility to choose well during the normal course of life, the more we develop the habit of choosing wisely, thereby becoming better positioned to make the best choice when bad things happen to us. 

Thus, Gita wisdom helps us to arrive at a more nuanced approach to reality, whereby we don’t seek to reject all fears or become dominated by all our fears. Instead, education modifies our fears, so that we can avoid self-created dangers and create a better future. 

One-sentence summary:

Education enables us to grow out of some fears and grow into some fears. 

Think it over:

  • List any fear that education helped you to grow out of.
  • List any fear that education helped you grow into. 
  • Is there anything you fear that you shouldn’t? Or anything that you don’t fear but should?

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18.22 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.