Here's a question from Pinki, one of my students who lives here in New Jersey.
She begins, "Nowadays, during the coronavirus pandemic, whenever I go shopping for groceries,
I worry about making a mistake and getting too close to other shoppers."
Pinki is certainly not alone in worrying about contracting the deadly virus from contact
with others who might be infected.
Some people are even afraid to step out of their homes.
Pinki continues, "After each shopping trip, I feel fearful and anxious for several days,
wondering if I accidently caught the virus.
How can I deal with this?"
Wow!
We happen to be living through an extremely stressful time due to the pandemic.
So, it's only natural to feel some fear and anxiety.
In fact, fear is an important and helpful human emotion; it's like a built-in warning
system that signals us about dangerous situations and makes us seek safety.
Also, it's often said that courageous people experience fear like everyone else, but they
don't let that fear stop them from doing anything.
Yet, it's also true that extreme fear and anxiety can be debilitating or emotionally
paralyzing.
It can prevent you from doing what needs to be done, and it can rob you of inner peace.
Many psychologists and counselors offer solutions to this problem, both in therapy sessions
and in the thousands of self-help books they've written.
But a very different kind of solution can be found in the wisdom of the ancient rishis,
especially in the teachings of advaita Vedanta.
We'll draw upon some of those teachings here.
To address the problem of fear, Vedanta distinguishes three different levels of reality.
One is the reality you're experiencing right now, while you're awake.
Another is the reality you experience every night while you're dreaming.
And the third is a more fundamental kind of reality that we'll discuss later.
These three have long Sanskrit names, but here, we can simply call them worldly reality,
mental reality, and absolute reality.
Right now, you're experiencing worldly reality.
You can see, hear, taste, smell, and touch things in the world around you.
You're also aware of your thoughts, emotions, memories, and so on.
You experience all this whenever you're awake.
That's your experience of worldly reality.
But when you're dreaming, you're no longer aware of the world around you.
Yet, you continue to be aware of everything that's happening in your mind.
All that you see, hear, taste, smell or touch is created by your mind with its tremendous
power of imagination.
While you're dreaming, you don't experience worldly reality at all; you experience mental
reality, the reality produced by your mind.
And, your mind creates that mental reality, not only when you're dreaming, but sometimes,
even when you're awake.
Suppose you walk down a dark alley and happen to see a snake on the ground, where there's
actually only a coil of rope.
That snake is part of your mental reality, just like everything you experience while
dreaming.
Anything you imagine, anything that's created by your mind, belongs to the level of mental
reality.
Even though the coronavirus itself belongs to the level of worldly reality, to imagine
that you're infected clearly belongs to the level of mental reality.
While you're dreaming, everything you experience seems quite real, until you wake up.
If you're violently attacked by a mugger in a dream, you find yourself completely uninjured
after you wake up.
And, just like the dream mugger can't really hurt you, the snake you imagine in the alley
can't hurt you either.
Nothing that belongs to the level of mental reality can truly hurt you.
If you imagine that you're infected by the coronavirus, the fact is, an imagined virus
can't hurt you at all, like the snake in the alley.
But there's a more complicated problem here.
Someone who has a lifelong fear of snakes is more likely to imagine a deadly snake in
an alley.
In the same way, if you have an exaggerated fear of the virus, that fear can predispose
you to imagine that you've contracted it.
That's the nature of mental reality, and none of it is real.
It's important to recognize the tendency of your mind to imagine things and create its
own reality.
If you understand this clearly, and remind yourself from time to time when necessary,
you can free yourself from a lot of excessive fear and anxiety.
But, don't ignore the fact that a real virus can indeed hurt you and those around you.
So, if you think you might be really infected, go and get tested.
Now, suppose you're actually infected with the virus and you feel overwhelmed by fear
and anxiety.
How can the teachings of Vedanta help you then?
To answer this, we have to consider the third level of reality, absolute reality.
Vedanta defines real as that which doesn't come and go, that which exists in the past,
present, and future.
So, that which is absolutely real is eternal.
Obviously, anything that's transient, anything that's fleeting or short-lived like a soap
bubble is not as real as something that exists eternally.
Now, look at this.
The mental reality you experience in your dreams comes and goes each night.
It's transient, so it's definitely not real.
And, when you're awake, all your experiences also come and go.
When this video comes to an end, your experience of me will cease.
Not only that, but your thoughts also come and go.
New thoughts emerge in your mind constantly as old ones fade away.
So thoughts, too, are transient, fleeting.
And so are your emotions, as you know very well.
Your emotions can swing from happy to sad as quickly as a rollercoaster.
It's clear that all your waking experiences are transient; they come and go just like
in your dreams.
And, all that's fleeting and ephemeral cannot be considered absolutely real.
What you're experiencing right this moment is certainly more real than a dream, but it's
not absolutely real, because it comes and goes.
Is there anything that's not transient, anything that doesn't come and go?
Yes, your own consciousness or awareness, the consciousness by which you're aware of
all your experiences as they come and go.
When you're awake and while you're dreaming, thoughts, emotions, and sensations continually
arise in your mind and quickly fade away.
But the consciousness or awareness by which you observe them as they come and go remains
present, always.
That consciousness is your essential nature.
The ancient rishis called it atma, the true, inner self.
They compared consciousness to the shining sun.
Just like the sun constantly illumines the earth as it revolves through periods of day
and night, so too, when you're awake and while you're dreaming, your consciousness constantly
reveals all your thoughts, emotions, and sensations.
In addition to waking and dreaming, you also experience periods of dreamless sleep, when
your mind becomes perfectly still and silent.
In dreamless sleep, your consciousness reveals the stillness and silence of your mind, like
the sun shining into the utter darkness of space.
So, your consciousness doesn't come and go.
It belongs to the third level of reality, absolute reality.
Consciousness is more real than the mental reality of your dreams, and it's even more
real than the worldly reality you're experiencing right now.
OK, then how can these profound Vedantic teachings help if you've actually contracted the virus?
Consider this.
The mugger in your dream and the snake you imagine in the alley can't harm you because
they're not as real as you.
They belong to the level of mental reality.
The coronavirus is certainly more real than the mugger and snake.
It belongs to the level of worldly reality.
But, even your experience of worldly reality comes and goes, so it's not absolutely real.
It's not as real as your consciousness, the shining light of awareness that constantly
illumines and reveals whatever's happening in your mind.
Certainly, the coronavirus can infect your body.
And your mind can also be infected, in a manner of speaking, by fear and anxiety.
But your consciousness, atma, the true self, can't be threatened in any way whatsoever,
by the coronavirus or by anything else.
This is an incredibly lofty perspective.
It's the view of someone who's enlightened, someone who's completely transcended fear
and anxiety.
You might wonder, "Is that even possible?"
Here's a metaphor that shows how.
You might know about a phenomenon called lucid dreaming.
It's an unusual kind of dream in which you're always aware of the fact that you're dreaming.
In a lucid dream, if you encounter a mugger, you'd feel no fear or anxiety at all because
you'd know he can't really harm you.
Yet, you'd probably run and escape him anyway, because no one wants to get mugged, even in
a dream.
If you were enlightened, your day to day experience would be a bit like a lucid dream.
You'd clearly know that the world around you is not absolutely real.
And you'd know that the coronavirus can't threaten the consciousness that's your essential
nature.
With this perspective, you'd be completely free from fear and anxiety.
But, just like you'd run away from a mugger in a lucid dream, you'd still wear a mask
and practice social distancing, because even those who are enlightened want to protect
their vulnerable bodies from the deadly virus.
This is the eleventh video in a series that answers questions submitted by viewers.
If you have a question that would serve as a good topic for a video like this one, please
email me at this address, and be sure to indicate "video question" as the subject of the email.
I'll try to address your question in a future video.