Fear of God

"Most people today are fearful and especially are fearful of God.  They flock to temples and holy shrines.  They visit temples so that they may not have difficulties in life.  People claim that they are God-fearing.

Fearing God is a disqualification.  One could fear a snake, a wild animal or a dangerous person but don't fear God!  Rather, we should be God-loving and not God-fearing.  Why?  Love has no fear.  Trust knows no fear.  Where there is fear, there is no love.  The child has no fear because it is by the side of the mother.  The child loves the mother, so there is no fear.

Yet, we are saying "Mata Pita Daivamu Mari Antayu Neeve: You are myFather, You are my Mother, You are my Guru" .... but I am afraid of You!"  It is nonsense!  So, let us be God-loving and not God-fearing.

It is a wonder that we should be fearful.  To the rich and the pauper, literate or illiterate, there is the one common fear of death.  No one says, "I love death".  Indeed, everyone is afraid of death.

Now, if we fear God, it is meaningless because God is verily life.  No one is afraid of one's life.  Of death, yes.  So the correct spiritual logic implies that when God is life and we love life, it follows that we love God.

During his last days, Ramana Maharishi was asked whether he was going to die?  His reply was that he was never born.  "I was never born" was the reply of the sage.  Can the question of dying concern the one who has no birth and hence there is no question of death at all.

If we ponder that there is no birth or death, then what is death?  What is birth?  Birth is the appearance of the body and death is the disappearance of the body.  That is all.  Then, what follows?  We are like a channel through which water flows from start to the end through the channel.  The water goes out through the other end.  The body is similarly so, through which life passes (via this canal), endless and beginning-less.  So life is infinite.  It is only the body that has a beginning nd nturally, it has an end.  Obviously then, we are afraid of death but we should not be afraid of God."

(From the book "Sai-Chology" by Prof. K. Anil Kumar)