Fearless by Attainment

Nirbheni nobat vagiyo re, Madiya mohanrai…

Nishukulanand Swami

All across the writings of the paramhansas one finds a celebration of being made fearless by the attainment of God. And I’ve often sung these lines or read these words and pretended to know what they meant but the truth is I have no experience of fears that God’s attainment has removed. What’s more, I don’t think most people living in modern, educated societies understand it either.

The paramhansas are celebrating, among other things, the fact that attaining the Supreme Being removes all fears of other forces and lesser beings. A person in the court of the greatest King would never fear the vassals and lesser lords of the kingdom. Similarly, the paramhansas joyously sing a release from superstition and the fear of devas and shaktis interfering in daily lives. This is a concept that seems so weird and foreign. Most of us no longer fear that little beings or forces are out to make us sick or poor. For most us it is difficult to understand how debilitating and defeating such a fear can be.

Personally, I didn’t quite understand it until I went traveling in the adivasi villages of South Gujarat. One night, after having been traveling for a few days, I was able to get some time to just sit and chat with the locals. We sat for a few hours and I got to learn things about their marriage customs, their collective history, their festivals, etc. It was one of the best nights I had the whole month I was there. One of the interesting details that revealed itself during the marriage conversation was that it was hard to find people willing to serve food during weddings. I was a bit surprised, especially since they had just told me that whole villages emptied out to attend. When I asked why, a man told me, “Everyone is afraid. ‘What if I give a lady a little less rice than she wants; she’ll curse me.’ And if by mistake a person serving falls ill a few days later, they’ll automatically assume it was because of a curse.” I was shocked! Really?! They were afraid that giving someone a little bit less than they wanted would mean they’d be cursed?! No way! But, that’s the truth. The reason that such a thing is so debilitating is that if you think you’re sick or poor because of a curse or because some Shakti is against you, it’ll be hard to pick yourself up and move on. You feel helpless. How can you fight against a horrible curse or a goddess? Some people try to move on but they do so blindly and end up making matters worse. A lady’s daughter ran away with a boy she fell in love with. The girl had not been in touch for days and mother was very worried. She began to feel like the house she lived in was possessed. She believed spirits had, among other things, misguided her daughter to run away. She insisted her husband perform mystical rites to get rid of the spirits and to bring their daughter home. In just the five days that the daughter had been away when I met this family, they had spent more than 50,000 rupees to have sorcerers perform special ceremonies.

This is the stuff that the paramhansas were talking about. And the thing is you see their words proved true in those same regions. You meet Swaminarayan satsangis who have attained Bhagwan Swaminarayan and realized him to be supreme and you see that they have no fear. They are not paralyzed by constantly wondering if their actions will bring on curses. When they are ill, when they face economic obstacles, when their grades are not great, they don’t fear other people’s meddling because they know their Lord is watching after them and that no lesser vassal is going to able to touch them. They get medicine, find solutions, and work harder. They refuse to remain down; they tie their laces, pick up their heads and move on. They are completely unburdened; they feel free and emancipated. This is what the paramhansas are celebrating in their writings.

But if that were all, those lines would have no meaning for us today. And that’s why we must look deeper.

It is when we look deeper that we realize that there are more basic fears, almost constant fears that are more painful and more severe than even superstitions. Those fears are the fear of being alone, unloved, or unaccepted – or even worse the fears of being unlovable or unacceptable. From when we’re still little children, we’re begin to try to fulfill society’s definitions – at that age it’s what it means to be a “big boy” or “big girl”. From that age we start measuring ourselves against visions of what we should be and we take our shortcomings hard.

 We call these fears insecurity and most everyone in the world suffers from them. Truly accepting God and Satpurush removes these fears and thus makes us fearless. The paramhansas’ celebration of fearlessness also includes this definition.

 Anathapananu menu utaryu, sada thaya sanath…

The spurs about my being husbandless have fallen away; I am eternally married to my Lord.

 As the Paramhansas were writing in 1800s Bharat, they often use the analogy of woman who has finally found a great husband to be her Lord. According to the beliefs of that time when a woman married a man, she gained protection, a person who could stand up for her honor and interests. This sense of protection is the cause of the fearlessness we addressed in the first part of this discussion. But a woman gains more than protection in a marriage; she also gains a person who accepts her and loves her as she is, someone who stands by her and supports her progress.

It is when we apply this part of the analogy to our discussion of fearlessness that we attain a deeper understanding of how Maharaj and Swami make us fearless. In attaining Bhagwan Swaminarayan and Mahant Swami Maharaj we gain someone who accepts us with our flaws and supports and encourages us as we strive to improve. No matter how many mistakes we’ve made, no matter how much we have sinned, he is willing to accept us as his and forgive us.

Gunatitanand Swami says, “Bhagwan to jiva gunna samu jotaj nathi, ne jo koi jiv hath jodi ne kahe ke ‘hu gunnegar chhu’ to Bhagwan tena guna maaf kare chhe.” ‘God does not look at the faults of jivas and if a jiva fold his hands and says “I am a sinner”, God forgives him.’

But why such compassion? Because as Swami says in his talks, “We think that we love God, but God and his Sant loves us more.”

All of us experience this on some level. We know our own flaws and Pramukh Swami Maharaj knows them as well. He knows our conscious and unconscious thoughts yet never has he made us feel that he knows. He has never judged us or refused us. We’ve written him thousands of letters confessing our flaws and yet he has written with patience every time and greeted us with a smile at each meeting. When we worry what the world will say about our body, our clothes, our wealth; Swamishri looks past all of that and see us as souls filled with potential divinity. When we don’t believe in ourselves, he does. We never feel unloved or unaccepted in front of him; we never feel unlovable or acceptable in front of him. It is this aspect of fearlessness that makes the paramhansas’ celebration completely relevant even today.