June 23, 2026
In 2002, psychologist Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economics for a discovery: the pain of losing something is roughly twice as intense as the pleasure of gaining something equivalent. Losing a hundred dollars hurts twice as much as gaining a hundred dollars can make you happy. This phenomenon has been validated in studies conducted across more than ninety countries. In every culture, in every social condition, in every level of spiritual evolution: the fear of losing is more powerful than the joy of gaining.
This reveals something important right from the start: what you feel is not weakness. It is not a lack of faith. It is not a sign that you still have a great deal to work on. It is part of the deep architecture of the human ego. It is universal.
When you feel afraid of losing something — whether a relationship, a position you worked hard to earn, a period of abundance, a person — the most immediate response is: “I don’t want to lose this because it matters to me.” That is true. But it is only the first layer.
The second layer, more honest and more challenging, reveals something else: you don’t want to lose it because, without it, you don’t know who you are.
See how this works in practice. A person builds a business over many years. When that business begins to come under threat, the suffering they feel is not only financial. It is existential. As if the ground vanished beneath their feet. Because over time, they became that business. It stopped being something they have and became something they are.
The same happens with relationships, with positions, with family roles. When you say “I just want things to stay the way they are,” what that phrase reveals is that you have built your identity on top of a circumstance. And when the circumstance threatens to change, the entire identity trembles.
There is a spiritual law we need to comprehend: everything built from a place of fear will crumble at some point.
Existence, with the intelligence it holds, knows when we are building fortresses to avoid looking within. And at some point, it shakes that construction. Not to punish us, but so that we may finally come into contact with the fear that was buried.
Because the fear that is not looked at does not disappear. It governs from the shadows, shaping our choices, reactions, and relationships.
There is an image I like to use. Think of a trickle of water that you try to hold between your fingers. It keeps slipping through, no matter how tightly you close your hand. And when you close your hand out of fear of losing that water, what happens? You can no longer receive. A closed hand cannot open itself to what life wants to offer.
This is one of the cruelest illusions of the fear of losing: it presents itself as protection. But it is, in truth, a blockage.
True prosperity is not the absence of loss. It is the inner freedom that allows you to live fully, even knowing that everything is impermanent. Because those who know why they are here, and to what end, don’t need to cling to what they have in order to know who they are. The hand that lets go does not lose. It learns to receive what is still to come.
Namaste,
Sri Prem Baba
