One morning before daybreak in North Calcutta, a teenage boy was bathing in the Ganges when he saw something floating near him. Some people on the shore saw it too, and shouted: “Crocodile! Crocodile! Come out quickly!” The boy immediately rushed towards the shore; but he stopped while still standing in the kneedeep water and thought to himself: “What are you doing? You repeat day and night, ‘Soham! Soham!’ [I am He! I am He!] And now all of a sudden you forget your ideal and think that you are the body! Shame on you!” He immediately went back into the deep water and continued his bathing. Fortunately, the crocodile had left. (Source: God Lived with Them)
Vedanta says that a knower of Brahman becomes fearless. Fear originates from duality. Because an illumined soul experiences the nondual Brahman, he can never fear anyone. Once while in the Himalayan region in Tihiri-Garhwal, Turiyananda was living in a thatched hut that had a broken door. One night he heard the villagers cry, “Tiger! Tiger!” He immediately put some bricks behind the door to protect himself. Just then he remembered a passage from the Taittiriya Upanishad that declares that even at the command of Brahman the god of death does his duty like a slave. His awareness of the Atman awakened, and defeated the body idea. He kicked the piles of brick away from the entrance, and sat for meditation. Fortunately, the tiger did not show up. (Source: God Lived with Them)
One early morning Turiyanada went out for his morning ablutions. He saw a big tiger seated above a rock looking around. From a distance they looked at each other, and then after a while the tiger left. Turiyananda’s burning renunciation made him fearless. Hunger and thirst, disease and death, cannot overpower a knower of Brahman. (Source: God Lived with Them)
In later years Turiyananda underwent several surgeries, but he never allowed the doctors to use chloroform. He simply withdrew his mind from the body like a yogi; he showed no sign of pain during surgery.
“At one time,” Gangadhar (Swami Akhandananda) said, “in a Himalayan village I took shelter in a house and spent the first part of the night along with others and their cattle. But at midnight a tiger roared, and they were shivering out of fear. I silently got up and thought: ‘What! I am a monk. Am I afraid of death?’ I left the house and spent the rest of the night in meditation under a tree.”
“It has been said,” wrote Christopher Isherwood, “that Brahmananda was so entirely fearless that others could not feel fear in his presence. Once, when he was walking with two devotees in the woods of Bhubaneswar, a leopard appeared and came straight towards them. He stood still and confronted it calmly until it turned tail. Again, while he was going along a narrow lane in Madras, attended by two monks, a maddened bull came charging to meet them. The young men tried to protect their guru, who was already an elderly man, by standing in front of him; but he pushed them behind him with extraordinary strength and fixed his eyes upon the bull. It stopped, shook its head from side to side, and then trotted quietly away.” (Source: God Lived with Them)