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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3457, Sunday, March 1, 2009, Editor: Mark
Awakening is just another word
for "willing to remember."
The cost of recall that fear
has threatened you with
is far less -
no matter how monstrous
the threats loom -
than the price you have paid
all of your lives in heartbreak,
despair, illness, and broken
relationships; all in the name
of the false promises of forgetting.
- Emmanuel
Habituation and Karmic Momentum
We have in all living beings - and so this is something that we
all experience - what's called in Buddhist terminology, a karmic
momentum. It's like a wind inside of us that drives us to always
keep moving, always keep doing something, always move away from
this underlying restlessness. There's this kind of underlying
restlessness that's in all beings. It's called a karmic momentum
or a karmic wind. All you have to do is sit still for a little
bit and not be busy to connect with that restlessness. It's very,
very easy to connect with it.
We experience it as uneasiness or restlessness or slight anxiety,
anxiety building. It's slight, almost pre-panic panic. When
you're not completely hooked yet, but it's there. There's like a
pre-thought level of just moving away from that restlessness. We
do it with our actions, with our words, with our minds -
continually, all the time. Moving away.
- Pema Chodron
To Experience Fearlessness, It Is Necessary to Experience Fear
Commentary
The essence of cowardice is to not acknowledge the reality of
fear. Fear takes many forms. We are afraid of death, we are
afraid that we can't handle the demands of our life, and there is
abrupt fear, or panic, when new situations occur. Fear is
expressed as restlessness: how we move, how we talk, how we chew
our nails, how we sometimes put our hands in our pockets
uselessly. We have to realize our fear and reconcile ourselves
with fear. However, acknowledging fear is not a cause for
depression. Because we possess such fear, we can potentially
experience fearlessness.
- Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
What do we mean by fear? Fear of what? There are various types of
fear and we need not analyse every type. But we can see that fear
comes into being when our comprehension of relationship is not
complete. Relationship is not only between people but between
ourselves and nature, between ourselves and property, between
ourselves and ideas; as long as that relationship is not fully
understood, there must be fear. Life is relationship. To be is to
be related and without relationship there is no life. Nothing can
exist in isolation; so long as the mind is seeking isolation,
there must be fear. Fear is not an abstraction; it exists only in
relation to something.
The question is, how to be rid of fear? First of all, anything
that is overcome has to be conquered again and again. No problem
can be finally overcome, conquered; it can be understood but not
conquered. They are two completely different processes and the
conquering process leads to further confusion, further fear. To
resist, to dominate, todo battle with a problem or to build a
defence against it is only to create further conflict, whereas if
we can understand fear, go into it fully step by step, explore
the whole content of it, then fear will never return in any form.
As I said, fear is not an abstraction; it exists only in
relationship. What do we mean by fear? Ultimately we are afraid,
are we not, of not being, of not becoming. Now, when there is
fear of not being, of not advancing, or fear of the unknown, of
death, can that fear be overcome by determination, by a
conclusion, by any choice? Obviously not. Mere suppression,
sublimation, or substitution, creates further resistance, does it
not? Therefore fear can never by overcome through any form of
discipline, through any form of resistance. That fact must be
clearly seen, felt and experienced: fear cannot be overcome
through any form of defence or resistance nor can there be
freedom from fear through the search for an answer or through
mere intellectual or verbal explanation.
For example, one is afraid of loneliness, afraid of the ache, the
pain of loneliness. Surely that fear exists because one has never
really looked at loneliness, one has never been in complete
communion with it. The moment one is completely open to the fact
of loneliness one can understand what it is, but one has an idea,
an opinion about it, based on previous knowledge; it is this
idea, opinion, this previous knowledge about the fact, that
creates fear. Fear is obviously the outcome of naming, of
terming, of projecting a symbol to represent the fact; that is
fear is not independent of the word, of the term.
I have a reaction, say, to loneliness; that is I say I am afraid
of being nothing. Am I afraid of the fact itself or is that fear
awakened because I have previous knowledge of the fact, knowledge
being the word, the symbol, the image? How can there be fear of a
fact? When I am face to face with a fact, in direct communion
with it,I can look at it, observe it; therefore there is no fear
of the fact. What causes fear is my apprehension about the fact,
what the fact might be or do.
It is my opinion, my idea, my experience, my knowledge about the
fact, that creates fear. So long as there is verbalization of the
fact, giving the fact a name and therefore identifying or
condemning it, so long as thought is judging the fact as an
observer, there must be fear. Thought is the product of the past,
it can only exist through verbalization, through symbols, through
images; so long as thought is regarding or translating the fact,
there must be fear.
Thus it is the mind that creates fear, the mind being the process
of thinking. Thinking is verbalization. You cannot think without
words, without symbols, images; these images, which are the
prejudices, the previous knowledge, the apprehensions of the
mind, are projected upon the fact, and out of that there arises
fear. There is freedom from fear only when the mind is capable of
looking t the fact without translating it, without giving it a
name, a label. This is quite difficult, because the fealings, the
reactions, the anxieties that we have, are promptly identified by
the mind and given a word. The feeling of jealousy is identified
by that word. Is it possible not to identify a feeling, to look
at that feeling without naming it? It is the naming of the
feeling that gives it continuity, that gives it strength. The
moment you give a name to that which you call fear, you
strengthen it; but if you can look at that feeling without
terming it, you will see that it withers away. Therefore if one
would be completely feree of fear it is essential to understand
this whole process of terming, of projecting symbols, images,
giving names to facts. There can be freedom from fear only when
there is self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the beginning of
wisdom, which is the ending of fear.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti, from The First & Last Freedom
As we have seen, when you are trying to make something happen,
you are not trusting the natural order; you don't trust that
Essence itself will manifest in the way it is needed. The first
point of departure from this trust is always a rejection of the
now. To apply the perspective of basic trust, of true will, you
must have the complete confidence that staying completely with
what you are experiencing in this moment, will result in what
needs to happen, without your having to think about a certain
outcome. When the confidence is there, your awareness of exactly
what is happening in you will allow you to see that your organism
will do the best it can in the situation. Your mind, however,
doesn't allow that complete Presence in the now; it thinks it
knows what is best for you, but of course it knows only what has
happened in the past, and can lead you only in ways conditioned
by your history.
- A.H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book 2