Ashtavakra Gita

Once the delusion of being an individual self has fallen away, what is there left in the world for such a man to fear or to desire?

Fear and desire are traced back to a single root — belief in a separate, vulnerable self — and both are said to vanish together once that belief does.

Ashtavakra treats fear and desire as two faces of the same coin rather than as separate problems needing separate solutions: both depend on there being a bounded, individual self that could be threatened by loss or completed by gain. Chapter eighteen frames the disappearance of the individual-self delusion as automatically clearing out both, since a self that was never truly separate from the whole has nothing outside itself left to want or dread. This is a stronger claim than merely reducing fear and craving through discipline — it locates their actual cause and removes it at the root rather than managing the symptoms. What remains, in this account, isn't emotional flatness but simply the absence of anything left to chase or run from.

Ashtavakra Gita