Fearlessly Facing Our Ghosts

My primary school in the village I grew up in was a mile from home, and to reach it I had to cross a 50-acre mango orchard. In the middle of that orchard was a monument where the king of Amar Garh had been cremated. According to local belief, he had turned into a ghost who, from time to time, ran through the orchard and nearby farms in the form of a gigantic buffalo or a huge bull. Other ghosts often came to join the king, usually traveling in the form of snakes. But in the summertime, the ghosts took the form of dust devils. If a dust devil was big, people assumed it was the Raja Saheb, the king himself. To the villagers, and especially to the children, these stories were so credible that the very idea of snakes, roaming bulls, and dust devils was terrifying. I was no exception.

The next time I was confronted by one of these dust devils, I stood firm and recited the Hanuman Chalisa. The dust devil did not come near me, so I was convinced that the prayer worked. My mind was not yet contaminated by logic, and so I did not reason that the dust devils were caused by differences in temperature and that was why they traveled from one orchard to another. Instead, I was proud of my mother’s wisdom and happy that she shared it with me. My faith in Hanuman and in this set of prayers dedicated to him grew tremendously. My fear of ghosts living in dust devils, and even the ghosts which, according to local belief, lived in all deserted and dark places, vanished forever.

Like hunger, thirst, and sleep, fear is a natural urge in all living beings. It is instinctual and manifests in varying grades and degrees when our innate urge of self-preservation is triggered. Under proper guidance, fear can be transformed into faith and inner strength. In fact, this is the purpose of spiritual training.