One Loving Awe Dissolves All the Other Fears

Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa

This short shalok of Guru Amar Das (the Third Mehl) names a truth most of us would rather not look at: in fear we are born, and in fear we die. Fear is always present in the mind. Fear is not an occasional visitor to human life; it is a near-constant resident. We come into the world afraid, we leave it afraid, and in between, beneath all our composure, fear hums on — fear of loss, of failure, of pain, of ending. To be an ordinary, unanchored human being is to live shadowed by fear.

And yet the shalok does not end in that shadow; it names a single fear that transforms all the rest: if one dies in the fear of God, his coming into the world is blessed. This requires care, because the English word fear can mislead. The bhau Guru Amar Das means is not terror or dread — it is reverent awe, the trembling wonder before something vast, holy, and beloved. It is the feeling of standing before the ocean or the night sky, magnified — awe shot through with love. And the remarkable claim is that this one awe heals all the ordinary fears. The soul filled with reverent love of the One is no longer at the mercy of its anxieties, because it is anchored in something the anxieties cannot reach.

So there is a profound paradox here, set up in the previous Pauree and completed in this one: the soul without the fear (awe) of God is overtaken by fear; the soul with it is set free of fear. The healthy fear drives out the unhealthy ones. To "die in the fear of God" is to live and die held in this loving awe — and such a life, the shalok says, is blessed and approved, its very birth made worthwhile. The dread that shadows an ordinary life is not defeated by trying to be braver; it is dissolved by awe, by falling in love with the One so completely that there is no room left for the smaller fears.