Dissolving Fear
One of the biggest challenges of physical life is dealing with fear. The brain being a survival machine is prone to be “wary” of life all the time, it’s constantly on the guard, worried about the future, doubting the possibility of a +ive outcome, confused about existence & always wondering if its missing out on something. The 2 basics needs of a brain are 1. security 2. entertainment. In fact it cannot really enjoy entertainment unless it feels secure in some way. The brain can feel secure in a particular circumstance, mostly when it has the perceived “protection” of a stable job, a stable relationship & some stability in health, however, there is also an awareness that things can change anytime, & this uncertainty breeds fear, thus making you feel insecure even in the midst of an externally secure environment. On top of this, a brain is capable of creating random fears & phobias, sometimes totally childish fears which seem to have a grip nevertheless. Living a life as a prisoner to fear is about the most constricted life one can lead, finding relief only in a drugged state or in sleep.
Fear is not as a big deal as you make it out to be. The reason you stay a prisoner to fear is because you never see it for what it is – fear is very ordinary, it’s extremely limited in its power/intensity & cannot influence you if you just develop some understanding of it. Understanding fear is the 1st step, the 2nd step is to allow it’s the dissolution of its intensity till it comes close to “zero intensity”. The 1st step, of understanding fear, is about getting to know it as it is, by removing all your delusions about it. The 2nd step, of dissolving fear, is about bring an embrace/allowing (light nature) to fear (dark nature) so that it balances out into wholeness. Whatever you allow fully always loses its negativity – if you can just understand this pointer, there really isn’t much else to understand.
Understanding fear
Fear is the mind’s way of being protective of its existence, some fears of the mind are reasonable, some are just bogus, in either case the deal is not be a slave to the fear. If the mind has a reasonable fear, just allow it fully & the solutions required can start manifesting. If the mind has a bogus fear, just allow it fully & it will get dissolved in force. So ultimately the bottom-line towards freedom from the force of fear is to allow it fully. However, as soon as the mind fears something, we get worried, this is because of 2 reasons
1. We assume that the right response to a mind’s fear is to be afraid/worried about it. This is a wrong assumption & this assumption is at the root of why fear keeps gaining momentum in your being.
2. We don’t trust the well-being inherent to our life-stream & thus believe the fearful projections of the mind instead of being in the flow of letting life orchestrate the right events/timing, moving from inspiration, knowing that the force of life is on your side if you allow it to work for you.
Don’t take your mind so seriously. The mind is a very limited machine, it runs totally on its programming (natural & external conditioning) & has a very narrow vision. If you’ve lived enough life you will realize that your mind’s conclusions/projections are not always true & even when they are true it’s serves no purpose to worry about them because a solution can come in more quickly if you are open in you being. Your inner stability depends on how free you are from your mind – a person who panics at the slightest -ve thought in the mind is a total prisoner to the mind, with close to zero inner stability. Growing in inner stability is about becoming less & less influenced by the mind movement. When you see that the mind is just a machine, with a certain programming, you don’t take it to be your “master”, you don’t sit cringing about each of its thoughts – just let it be, even the act of trying to suppress the mind is an act of fear.
For me, the biggest moment of freedom was to realize that I don’t have to do my mind’s bidding, neither do I have to serve its tantrums or craving, neither do I have to sit reassuring it all the time. It’s just a neural network, a conglomerations of cells doing a job, not different than the microchips in your computer creating the illusion of intelligence – in truth, it’s just a mechanical intelligence running on its conditioning & past database. To me its seems almost ridiculous now, how I used to buy all the beliefs of the mind, all the random thoughts that it was producing & all its limiting judgments & opinions – to buy into everything your mind says is about the most limiting life you can ever live, it makes you a very “closed” person.
My mind, like any other mind, has opinions, fears, judgments, interests, inclinations, preferences, bias, attachments & desires, the only difference is that I also have a space where I am free of all of this & I thus have a choice in my relationship towards my mind – I am not at the beck & call of my mind, I am not a servant to it neither am I always opposed to it. I enjoy my mind, to me it’s the most entertaining unit possible even in its idiosyncrasies. You can’t enjoy your mind unless you are free of it. If your whole identity is based on what your mind thinks, you are a slave to it & hence you can’t really enjoy it. People who are way too serious about life are the people who take their mind’s opinions & perspectives too seriously – there is no space in them which is free of the mind’s influence. The mind is not a master, it’s just a machine, quit being so servile to it.
Develop an independence from your mind
The most important aspect of growing in awareness is to first come out of the shell of your mind. As I said above, my mind is capable of opinions, discriminations, judgments, bias, preferences & fears – but I am also free of it, at any moment I have the choice to either go with my mind or retain my “openness” & this is a huge freedom. When one is unconsciously lost to the grip of the mind, there is no choice but to go with the mind all the time. There was point when I actually made a commitment to no longer be a slave to the mind & develop an independent space within me that was free of the mind’s identities & beliefs. My mind had a very strong momentum of negativity going on & staying true to this commitment was highly challenging especially when it went into a rampage of fears with all the perfect arguments to defend its fears. The deal was that I understood the mechanics of a mind & hence I stopped buying into its pull. I just let it be, I call this state “relaxed awareness”, but really it’s just a commitment to not give in to the mind’s pull & stay in an open space of allowing it.
It’s not easy to stay allowing of the mind, without buying into its pull, when it has a strong momentum going for it. In fact, it’s really tough initially. However, once you have an understanding that the mind is just a machine & that its momentum comes from your attention to it, you realize that its momentum cannot last if you stop giving it attention. By “attention” I just mean belief/identification/trust/
Don’t look for security as soon as the mind pops an insecure thought – understand that it’s just a thought, a perspective of the mind, nothing more. You have the independence to not buy the perspectives of your mind & let yourself just stay in a space of “openness” (what’s called resting in the unknown) and let life bring you the required insights, understandings and solutions. For example, when the mind goes “I hate being alone”, don’t mull this thought, instead just let the thought be – don’t go around trying to appease your mind all the time, this way you will just become a slave to it. I am not saying that you should oppose your mind all the time, I am just saying that you need to develop a space of freedom within you where you have the independence to not be influenced by what your mind thinks.
Most of us just keep repeating what our mind says without even taking the time to question it, or introspect it, or to look more deeply at it – if the mind says “I hate this thought, I can’t bear it”, we just accept its opinion instead of understanding that its just the mind’s opinion & you have the freedom to not buy into it. You might just have had a break up & your mind is going crazy with the repetitive thought of “I can’t live without him/her” – if you have an inner stability you will have the space to allow the mind to have it moment of grief without getting into a twirl to reassure/fix it, knowing that its momentum will die away with time; On the other hand, if you lack inner stability you will end up sending a hundred texts to your ex, making it all worse. The therapists would go out of business if people just understood that they don’t have to fix their minds they just need to stop buying into everything it says & the mind will sort out on its own, time allows for the momentum of the mind to come down regarding any thought it might hold. Developing this inner stability is the basic foundation needed to have a balanced physical life.
Allowing dissolution of the force of fear
All fears are ultimately thought forces in the mind. To dissolve a fear you need to merge it with its opposite, which is fearlessness (openness). True fearlessness is about being allowing. So when a fear arises, if you become allowing of it, it starts dissolving in force. It’s a very simple logic & it works for even the most intense fears you might have – there is no other secret. You can discuss your fears with a multitude of therapists, take a bunch of medications, join a host of chat groups to discuss them & basically keep trying to get rid of the fear & nothing really changes except that the fear gains more momentum out of all your fights against it. But, the moment you allow the fear fully & totally, without looking for an escape, it starts losing its force automatically & the energy of the fear is transmuted into energy of creation (creating a reality with a solution that ends the external manifestation of that fear).
The word “allowing” is crucial & it’s important to understand the implication of it. Staying in a place of allowing is really not a technique, however you can start off initially by using it as a technique or a practice – what I call the practice of relaxed awareness, or staying in the space of being. But at some point you want to let go of the mindset of using it as a practice & make it your way of living. “Allowing” is not a practice, it’s a way of life – it’s not something you do to get rid of fear, it’s about connecting with your true body of spaciousness. The state of allowing is a pointer towards your natural state of openness, it’s not meant to just be a temporary technique to help you get rid of some specific fear that you are dealing with right now. A real allowing can only happen when you stop trying to protect yourself against fear, stop trying to get rid of fear, rather just become totally open to it.
The problem is that the moment I use words like “relaxed awareness”, space of being, or state of allowing, it always comes across as if I am giving a technique when I am actually just pointing to a state of being – a state of living life. If you say – “I’ve been allowing for 2 or 3 months & the fears are still there, so what else should I do” – it just means you did not get the point at all, and you’ve just been doing a “practice” to keep protecting yourself against fear, you’ve not really allowed the fear in to the point where you no longer fear it. The deal is that you can only become truly allowing of a fear when you stop fearing it & the question the mind keeps asking is “how do I stop fearing it”, this is the loop of confusion. The answer is – “just allow the fear in without holding distance”, & keep doing it until you no longer have to ask “how do I stop fearing it”. The only way a fear can dissolve in force is when it meets the space of true allowing, a true openness, a true embrace – only you can know if you are really allowing it, don’t just do it for the sake of practice, do it to know your own power of allowing – this is how you will find out how spacious/vast your being really is.
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