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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3162, Saturday, May 10, 200, Editor: Mark
If you imagine yourself as separate from the world, the world
will appear as separate from you and you will experience desire
and fear. I do not see the world as separate from me and so there
is nothing for me to desire, or fear.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj, posted to ANetofJewels
If a man considers that he is born, he cannot avoid the fear of
death. Let him find out if he has been born or if the Self has
any birth. He will discover that the Self always exists, that the
body that is born resolves itself into thought and that the
emergence of thought is the root of all mischief. Find from where
thoughts emerge. Then you will be able to abide in the
ever-present inmost Self and be free from the idea of birth or
the fear of death.
- Ramana Maharshi
Questioner: Hi. I want to have a conversation about fear.
Gangaji: Oh let us not talk about it. You have had plenty of
conversations about fear in your mind, have you not?
Q: Yes, that is why I want to talk to you.
G: Let us not have another one.
Q: I want to have one up here.
G: Yes, but it is the same. So what if we skip the conversation
and just invite it in?
Q: Must we?
G: Yes, it is time. It is like saying, "Well, let's have a
conversation about a kiss," or "Let's have a
conversation about an embrace."
Q: Oh darn.
G: Do you really want to spend the rest of your lifetime talking
about it? No, you would not be up here. You would be sitting in
your chair having another conversation about fear. Right?
Q: Okay.
G: So now that we are not talking about it, now that we are just
inviting it, where is it? Right now.
Q: Well, it happens during the nighttime.
G: No, right now. First we begin with now.
Q: I don't know. There is just maybe a little bit, but not...
G: Where? Find it. I would like to meet it.
Q: It is in my solar plexus.
G: Okay, so let's dive into your solar plexus.
Q: Okay.
G: And gently, lightly, drift down into your solar plexus, into
the fear. I love to meet fear. Fear is my ally. It is your ally
too. You thought it was a demon, but it is really an ally.
Q: Well, this is what I am not sure about.
G: Well, you cannot be sure; you keep backing out, and having a
conversation about it.
Q: I am having some doubts about that.
G: Yes, of course. Well, that is the dance, isn't it? That is the
two-step: one step forward, one step back.
Q: Right.
G: But I am asking you, for this moment, to forget the doubts and
just have the fear. The doubts are the conversation. Right? So
just for this moment stop, because your doubts are interrupting
our meeting.
Q: Yes.
G: Here I am holding your hand, and you are taking me into your
consciousness so that you can introduce me to your fear. But for
you to introduce me to your fear, you have to meet your fear.
Q: It is in my solar plexus and in my heart.
G: Yes, let us take a dive through your heart, and then we will
end up in the solar plexus. Is there space in your heart for our
combined consciousness to enter?
Q: Yes.
G: Great, let us enter it then. Just like that.
Q: I feel it expand.
G: Very interesting.
Q: And it kind of moves out of the realm of fear.
G: Yes. Perhaps it never was fear. Perhaps it was an excitement
that you doubted, an energy of anticipation.
Q: An energy. It is an energy.
G: Yes: an energy that you doubted equals fear.
Q: Oh really! Say that again: "an energy that you doubted
equals fear." Yeah.
G: And when (just for a second) you put the doubt aside (because
doubt is the story, is thought), and meet what you called fear,
it is an energy. And not only is it an energy, but as you said it
is expansive.
Q: Yeah. It really just leveled out.
G: Out and out and out, right?
Q: Out and out.
G: Out and out, and in and in, and deep and deep, and high and
high.
Q: And it did not seem frightening.
G: Yes. That is what I meant by ally.
Q: Okay, great! How do you, how does one make use of that in that
place between dream and waking?
G: Why would you want to make use of it?
Q: That is when it comes on.
G: Yes.
Q: Pure terror. And my response to a dream (I finally recognized
it as just an adrenaline response to a dream).
G: Excellent. Well that is very similar then is it not?
Q: Yes, it is the same.
G: - a response to a dream.
Q: I had a dream like this last night, which amazes me because it
occurred after being here with you yesterday.
G: Oh that is when the demons really come out of the woodwork.
Q: It did, big time. And I was just utterly in terror, with my
heart pounding. And it took me several minutes to calm down.
G: You do not have to calm down. You just have to meet it. This
used to happen to me when my life was shifting. There would be
some event in my life that was really good: like meeting the man
who would become my husband, or being successful in my work, or
really "getting" something. And invariably that night
the demons would come out of the woodwork. When the daydream was
shifting into one of more light and happiness, the night dream
got more intense.
Q: Well it is interesting that you should say that, because when
I started to experience this, about four years ago, it was at a
point where I was also having very profound awakening
experiences.
G: I am not surprised.
Q: Yeah. I never connected those two things, but now that you say
that...
G: Well, this is what Papaji said to me: "When someone
begins to awaken, all the gods and demons of the past come to
reclaim you." This is your own psyche, of course. These are
the grooves of the psyche. Just this morning I was saying that
the brain can literally be reprogrammed, but as that
reprogramming occurs, all the old hauntings, the hungry ghosts,
the old miseries, try one more time to make themselves valid as
entities in one's psyche. But right here in this meeting, you
were experiencing some fear.
Q: Yeah, at first. But then it was just like a big level pool.
G: Yes, well I am saying, and you can check this out for
yourself, that it is always like that. It just seems like fear
(and so we contract around that), because of our doubts:
sub-conscious doubts of our awakening, doubts of the truth of the
validity of our experience, doubts of the truth of the validity
of anything, self-doubt. This is tormenting, so it is a benchmark
when one can finally say, "Okay, okay." I remember
Papaji saying to me once, "If God comes down and tells you
that you are not the Self, you turn your back on God." And
that turning of the back is facing the fear. It is like,
"Okay, shoot me."
Q: Yeah, go ahead.
G: "Stab me."
Q: Yeah, "What is it you want?"
G: That is it; that is the lucid experience of fear. In the
dream, night or day, you say, "Okay, I meet you. If you are
in my heart, I enter my heart to meet you. You are in my solar
plexus, I meet you wherever you are." And then you find that
it does not involve only your individual psyche. We are talking
about the global psyche; nothing is excluded.
- Gangaji, from a Marin County, California Intensive, November
10, 2002
Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix forever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mold.
- William Cullen Bryant, Thanatopsis