Beyond Fear

    Most of us like to have some control over our lives - some freedom. To actually exercise this freedom, we need courage. Fear can block all of this. Fear can keep us stuck as if in quicksand - for lengthy periods, even for life. 

    Caution is entirely reasonable. Climbing into a shopping cart on a city street, on top of a steep hill, then riding it down to see what happens is guaranteed to result in severe injury, pain or death.
    Extreme sports are far less ridiculous, yet offer transcendence: Maria Coffey. “Explorers of the Infinite. The Secret Spiritual Lives of Extreme Athletes – and What They Reveal About Near-Death Experiences, Psychic Communications, and Touching the Beyond.” 2008. My blogs quoting this SUPERB book: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Coffey

    Mercifully, deep spiritual practices eg deep meditation, are the safest, most tried-and-true paths by which seekers have, for thousands of years, attained transcendence - gone beyond ordinary limitations. ... a spiritual or religious state or condition of moving beyond physical needs & realities.
    The height of spiritual transcendence is described as a state of continuous, unshakable peace, joy, love & oneness that is independent of external circumstances - BEYOND FEAR!
    Again mercifully, regular meditation practice gradually brings about progressive felt improvements in our life reassuring us that we are indeed making progress along this well-trodden path.

    “The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance. Karl A. Menninger MD, psychiatrist

    The advice to 'be curious,' and instead of avoiding, to 'lean into challenges' cannot be overemphasized.
    The process of facing fears is called exposure. Exposure therapy involves gradually & repeatedly exposing patients to feared situations until they feel less anxious. After a while, anxiety naturally lessens.
    Meditation is a form of exposure therapy. Our basic fear is honestly meeting & being intimate with ‘the other’ - our Self, people, animals, environment, life itself. We use gentle mindfulness practices to slowly ease ourselves back into intimacy with ourselves & others. 

    “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.” Helen Keller

    All of life is exposure therapy - if we allow it. It is well-known that people who suffer from anxiety are most anxious about being anxious; those who suffer from depression, are depressed about being depressed. Can we be less afraid of our fear? Can we take all of our neuroses far less seriously, less personally?

     “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

    “Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones.” Thich Nhat Hanh

    “Thinking will not overcome fear but action will.” W. Clement Stone

    “I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.” Louisa May Alcott

    With loving awareness we do what is appropriate, which is always nurturing whoever & whatever is around us, so that we may all flourish. We must FIRST learn to let go of fearfully obsessing over 'me, myself & I.'
    This is a far more profound step than can be accomplished by a guilt-tripping sermon to stop being so selfish & self-centered. It requires a qualitative shift in consciousness: Dr. Jeffery A. Martin. “The Finders.” Integration Press, 2019. My blog on this PROFOUND book : http://www.johnlovas.com/2024/01/seriously.html .

    “What is fear of living? It’s being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity & spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself – for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don’t know what you’re here to do, then just do some good.” Maya Angelou

“See how we are called to not run from the discomfort,
and not run from the grief or the feelings of outrage
or even fear.
If we can be fearless to be with our pain, it turns.
It doesn’t stay.
It only doesn’t change if we refuse to look at it.
When we look at it, when we take it in our hands,
when we can just be with it,
when we keep breathing, then it turns.
It turns to reveal its other face.
And the other face of our pain for the world
is our love for the world.
Our absolutely inseparable connectedness
with all life.”
Joanna Macy 

    “Love cures people – both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.” Karl A. Menninger MD, psychiatrist

    “… one of the experiences people have on (meditation) retreats is a very intimate experience with the breath, with the body, with emotions, because there’s no separation. That’s kind of the essence of intimacy: nonseparation. It’s just oneself getting out of the way. The Chinese poet Li Po ended a poem with these words: ‘We live together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.’ So that’s kind of meditative. When we take ourselves out of the picture, then all that’s left is everything. To me, that is the definition of intimacy.” Joseph Goldstein

Artist: Molly Hahn buddhadoodles.com/new-gallery/

Our Mind, Emotions & Body

    It can be terribly frustrating to suffer from debilitating physical symptoms, for which one physician after another fails to find a cause or effective treatment. Though each clinician might strongly suspect that the cause is primarily psychological, they'll suggest more tests & more referrals to avoid angry outbursts, "Are you saying, 'it's all in my head?!'" and to rule out the progressively diminishing possibility that everyone might have overlooked a rare physical cause.
    Some sufferers (& clinicians) do gradually come to see the problem in a broader perspective. This clearly requires that their narrow, exclusive focus on their most glaring pain / discomfort opens up, so they see themselves holistically. Below is imho Helen Hamilton's exceptionally wise perspective:

    “When we are ... trying to find a belief that is reflecting as this body condition, illness, this dys-ease in the harmony of the body is a reflection of some idea that we’re holding onto, that we haven’t seen or looked at clearly. And of course you know that I’m just kind of saying that to put it into context because our body is trying to tell us, having to tell us, something that perhaps we haven’t looked at emotionally. Something that we haven’t looked at deep enough emotionally. So if we have a strong emotion – fear, or guilt, or unworthiness, even self-hatred – and we haven’t been able to feel that emotion for whatever reason. Maybe it didn’t feel safe to feel it, or we were told it was wrong, or whatever – we were in a situation when it was generated where we couldn’t feel it. Finding the beliefs is going to be looking at the emotions. What emotions do you feel on a regular basis that are reflecting as the body condition?
    Because every karmic pattern shows up 3 ways simultaneously as:
        1) thoughts – the unconscious beliefs, and as an
        2) emotion – a more gross manifestation than a thought, and then
        3) physically – somewhere in your body.

    So have a look at the negative emotions you feel. And mind will say, ‘You feel this emotion because you have this thing going on in your body.’ But in truth, that is separation – the emotion caused by what’s happening to the body. So if it’s life-threatening, there’s probably some fear there, and mind will say, ‘I’m scared because this thing is happening to my body.’ But in the truth, I’m scared because I think I’m a separate being, I’m in danger. And that’s reflecting. This belief is not allowing the fullness of the life-force to flow through the body, and it looks like illness & disease. And the more constricted the life-force is, the more severe the illness or disease will appear to be.
    So first of all, having a look at the negative emotions that you feel, and then working that back to the beliefs. My website has a list of emotions & hidden beliefs behind them, as a suggestion to go with, using the contemplation technique : “Emotions & their Stories”: https://www.helenhamilton.org/uploads/4/0/0/9/4009977/emotions_and_hidden_beliefs_6.pdf

    And still even, if you look at the body itself – a second way to look at this – the body is a very literal metaphor for what’s going on inside of us. So autoimmune disease is where your body is kind of attacking itself (as far as I know – my understanding might be limited here), the immune system is attacking tissues & systems that it shouldn’t be, so something is out of sync, there’s an attack going on inside. And this is symbolic of something happening deeper inside, where you’re attacking yourself, where you are criticizing yourself, where you’re hating yourself even if you look deep enough. And I know as I say this, most of us will say, ‘Well I don’t hate myself. It’s not that deep. I don’t have any such feelings I’m aware of.’ And that’s why the body’s having to show us, because we haven’t really seen it.
    It was astonishing to me that even after several deep seeings (awakening experiences), when I actually looked at what was going on because my life wasn’t still flowing – I finally dug out this kind of intense self-hatred, this self-loathing inside – that was still there after many seeings, experiencing peace & joy. But my life wasn’t flowing, so there must have been some belief stopping the energy moving down through the energy centers of the body and out into the greater manifestation.
    So looking at the metaphor - self attacking self - why would you be doing that on some level? Can you admit that that must be going on at some level and be willing to see that? Now others, especially this far along the path of awakening, want to see that, because we value love & truth & honesty. It doesn’t feel right & we don’t really want to look inside to find some kind of self-hatred still going on. We might not even believe. ‘Well I’m obviously not the egoic structure, I’ve seen what I really am.’ But that seeing, sometimes doesn’t penetrate deeply enough yet to undo this mechanism.
    It’s very rare that someone will have a seeing (awakening experience) powerful enough in one go to obliterate all these egoic structures that are still working. We only hear about the ones that do. But most of us still have to go in and look at these patterns underneath. So just listening to yourself when you talk, are you unknowingly criticizing yourself, diminishing yourself? How do you really feel about yourself? How you feel about your body too is a reflection of how you feel about you. How you feel about your abilities, & your mind, and all of that is a reflection of how you feel about you.
    For me, I had very negative feelings about my body. I had to admit eventually, that’s how I actually feel about myself. My body is just innocently reflecting to me – it doesn’t have any other choice about what I’m thinking & feeling, on a deep unconscious level of course. And that’s why it’s having to show us, because we can’t see it any other way.

    So I hope that gives you some direction to go with that. Have a go applying what I’ve said here. Do write back if you need to kind of fine-tune that. And my gut feeling is that it’s about some kind of self-hatred going on inside. And not blaming yourself for that, because that just adds to it. Each one of us has been functioning from mind’s perspective, and mind is taking a snapshot of our life looking at who he thinks we are, comparing it with where he thinks we want to be, need to be. When I get to this point in the future, I’ll be good enough, I’ll like myself, I’ll love myself. And it can never kind of arrive at that point there, because this one, where it thinks we’re starting from, is deeply flawed. We are not this separate being that mind thinks we are. So how can we ever go from here to there if the starting reference point is completely untrue? But mind thinks it’s true, so it keeps trying & failing to be this better person, more awakened, better father, better wife, better career, … all these things it’s trying to get to, whatever that is for you, where I’ll finally be happy & I’ll like myself. So recognizing it’s not your fault, not any of our fault. We have these deep feelings about ourselves and that is a natural byproduct of using the mind to try to navigate through our life to try to find happiness. That’s the only tool we had till now, so we can let go of the blame in that.”
    Helen Hamilton. “Awareness recognising awareness.” from the excellent video below:

Awakening Awaits

     Imho, we all have one of 3 dominant worldviews:
          1) The world's a mess & getting worse, we're all going to die anyway, end of story - nihilism.
          2) Things aren't too bad for me, I'll get by, my goal is to be happy with as little stress as possible - self-centeredness.
          3) Things are perfect AND could use some improvement - awakening.

     Many people are nihilistic - they've given up all hope because they realize that self-centeredness cannot make them happy. The vast majority of people are self-centered because they still haven't realized that self-centeredness is a dead end. Self-centeredness just morphs into nihilism.
     Increasing numbers of people are awakening to the realization that we are far, far greater than what our usual state of mind ("egoic rational mind") is capable of understanding. In fact, this liberating realization is qualitatively beyond, & is therefore strongly opposed by our ego. It can take a lot of meditation practice, & sometimes challenging circumstances that defeat the ego, before the ego becomes quiet enough to allow us to see "outside the box."

      "Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor.
      Perhaps, in a way, that's where humanity is now: about to discover we're not as smart as we thought we were, will be forced by life to surrender our attacks & defenses which avail us of nothing, and finally break through into the collective beauty of who we really are." Marianne Williamson

     "The perennial philosophy, which lies at the heart of the great religions and is increasingly said to represent their deepest thinking, suggests that consciousness is central and its development is the primary goal of existence. This development will culminate in the condition variously known in different traditions as enlightenment, liberation, salvation, moksha, or satori.
     The descriptions of this condition show remarkable similarities across cultures and centuries. Its essence is the recognition that the distortions of our usual state of mind are such that we have been suffering from a case of mistaken identity. Our true nature is something much greater, an aspect of a universal consciousness, Self, Being, Mind, or God. The awakening to this true nature, claimed a Zen master, is ‘the direct awareness that you are more than this puny body or limited mind. Stated negatively, it is the realization that the universe is not external to you. Positively, it is experiencing the universe as yourself.’ … Typical is the claim by an Englishman that to realize our true identity is to ‘find that the I, one’s real, most intimate self, pervades the universe and all other beings. That the mountains, and the sea, and the stars are a part of one’s body, and that one’s soul is in touch with the souls of all creatures.’ Nor are such descriptions the exclusive province of mystics. They have been echoed by philosophers, psychologists, & physicists. ‘Out of my experience … one final conclusion dogmatically emerges,’ said the great American philosopher William James (1960). ‘There is a continuum of cosmic consciousness against which our individuality builds but accidental forces, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea.’
     From this perspective, evolution is a vast journey of growing self-awareness & a return to our true identity. Our current crises are seen as expressions that arise from our mistaken identity. But they can also be seen as self-created challenges that may speed us on our evolutionary journey toward ultimate self-recognition.”
     Roger Walsh. "Human Survival: A Psychoevolutionary Analysis." ReVision 1985; 8: 7-10.

   Only when we recognize our true Self can we start to find peace, real happiness, & effectively help ourselves & our world. There are excellent contemporary guides - one of the finest imho is Helen Hamilton.

Helen Hamilton's EXCELLENT talk on recognizing our true Self :

What is Dependability?

     “The central fallacy of modern life is the belief that (materialistic / self-centered) accomplishments … can produce deep satisfaction.” 
                                                                                                                    David Brooks

     The vast majority of our precious time & energy is spent chasing after these accomplishments.
     Exponential year-over-year increases in corporate profits fail to deliver the deep happiness we hope for. Despite being (financially) richer than ever, we in 'developed' countries experience progressively rising rates of anxiety, depression, burnout, bullying, partisanship, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, hoarding, every imaginable addiction, mass shootings, suicides, destruction of the air / soil / water, and mass extinction of plant & animal species.
     Our exclusive focus on personal material gain appears to be a serious mistake.
     Can we take a close look at 'character'?

     “People with character ... tend to have a certain level of self-respect. Self-respect is not the same as self-confidence or self-esteem. Self-respect is not based on IQ or any of the mental or physical gifts that help get you into a competitive college. It is not comparative. It is not earned by being better than other people at something. 
     It is earned by being better than you used to be, by being dependable in times of testing, straight in times of temptation. It emerges in one who is morally dependable. Self-respect is produced by inner triumphs, not external ones. It can only be earned by a person who has endured some internal temptation, who has confronted their own weaknesses and who knows, ‘Well, if worse comes to worst, I can endure that. I can overcome that.’
     My general belief is that we’ve accidentally left this moral tradition behind. Over the last several decades, we’ve lost the language, this way of organizing our life. We’re not bad. But we are morally inarticulate. We’re not more selfish or venal than people in other times, but we’ve lost the understanding of how character is built. … Without it, there is a certain superficiality to modern culture, especially in the moral sphere.” 
       David Brooks "The Road to Character." Random House, 2015.

     May this Covid 19 pandemic help lift us out of "the shallows" and re-establish the centrality of depth of character. 

     Below, a poem from a time of great hardship, which forged the character of our grandparents & parents to not only survive, but thrive, despite two World Wars, the Great Depression, and countless profound personal existential challenges ...

And People Stayed Home

Kathleen O'Meara's poem, written in 1869, after the famine

And people stayed home
and read books and listened
and rested and exercised
and made art and played
and learned new ways of being
and stopped
and listened deeper
someone meditated
someone prayed
someone danced
someone met their shadow
and people began to think differently
and people healed
and in the absence of people who lived in ignorant ways,
dangerous, meaningless and heartless,
even the earth began to heal
and when the danger ended
and people found each other
grieved for the dead people
and they made new choices
and dreamed of new visions
and created new ways of life
and healed the earth completely
just as they were healed themselves.

www.etsy.com

Ground of Being

     From a strictly intellectual perspective ("head" only), it's probably not possible to understand any of the below quotes. Nevertheless, many much wiser people than myself, from very different traditions & times, continue to come up with a strikingly similar message: 
     The ground of being (True Nature, Essence, Being, the Universe, Nature, Brahma, Godhead, Holy Spirit, etc) delights in manifesting & thus knowing itself, in innumerable distinct ways. In manifesting physical form, apparent opposites & other apparent paradoxes (eg countless separate individual people, countries, races, religions, political parties, etc all with apparently different "self-centered" agendas) appear. At this time, a frightening number of people rigidly identify with partisan politics and live (& will probably die) exclusively in echo chambers. When, by somehow sensing our one common origin, we're able to see past ("transcend") apparent opposites & paradoxes, we will find ourselves right back in, & living from, our ground of being.

     “the task is to stabilize attention on the fluid, unpredictable, and contingent nature of experience as the ground that enables one to take ethical choices that are not conditioned by habitual reactive patterns of greed, hatred, and self-centeredness.
     … this (is a) shift in perspective from a life governed by attachments, to one founded on a vision of contingency & nonreactivity.”

        Stephen Batchelor. “Secular Buddhism. Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World.” Yale University Press, 2017.

     “The enlightenment instinct is the instinct for the ground of being to become fully conscious of itself.” Adyashanti

     “Nothing is finite which doesn't include the infinite. The finite is the byproduct of the infinite as such becomes the outer form, the mirror of the infinite, its external revealing image. Essence and form are inseparable. Essence is the eternal Being. But living form is its constantly ever new manifestation - everlasting revelation... I try to learn from the finite sciences the lessons of the infinite.” Arthur M. Young 

     “True Nature needs no object to know itself. When the mind disidentifies from all movement, we stand at the threshold of True Nature, as radiant Being that transcends, yet exists in all movements.” 
        Richard Miller. “Yoga Nidra. A Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation and Healing.” Sounds True, 2005.

Frederic Benaglia

From Fear Towards Love

“If you don’t become the ocean you’ll be seasick every day.”         Leonard Cohen 


When fearful self-concern settles - even for a minute, 
"I" disappear, and there is only 
loving wisdom, profoundly interconnected with all.


“One is never wounded by the love one gives; 
only by the love one expects.”                                                    Marty Rubin

 
“The heart has its reasons 
which reason knows nothing of.”                                               Blaise Pascal


“The important thing is not to think much, but to love much, 
and so to do what best awakens us to love.”                           Saint Teresa of Ávila


“Your task is not to foresee the future, 
but to enable it.”                                                                            Antoine de Saint-Exupery 

Meditation Practice

     Peacefully "gathering data", observing & learning to understand nature: the lawful unfolding of causes & conditions?  
     What IS this, right here, right now?

THEN

     Fearfully re-playing the endless "story of me" in the quicksand of obsessing about "I, me & mine"?

THEN

     Gratefully mindful that attention is noticed being off course, attention effortlessly, gently, patiently, seamlessly shifts back to reality: 
     "Just this" right here, right now.

THEN  ...

by Georgia Peschel     www.georgiatoons.com

Clinging to Suffering?

     “The entire teaching of Buddhism can be summed up in this way:

      Nothing is worth holding on to. 

      If you let go of everything,

            Objects
            Concepts
            Teachers
            Buddha
            Self
            Senses
            Memories
            Life
            Death
            Freedom 

      Let go and all suffering will cease. The world will appear in its pristine self-existing nature, and you will experience the freedom of the Buddha.”

       Jack Kornfield. “Living Dharma. Teachings of Twelve Buddhist Masters.” Shambhala, 1996.

Sand Castles

     “Some children were playing beside a river. They made castles of sand, and each child defended his castle and said, ‘This one is mine.’ They kept their castles separate and would not allow any mistakes about which was whose. 

     When the castles were all finished, one child kicked over someone else’s castle and completely destroyed it. The owner of the castle flew into a rage, pulled the other child’s hair, struck him with his fist and bawled out, ‘He has spoiled my castle! Come along all of you and help me to punish him as he deserves.’ The others all came to his help. They beat the child with a stick and then stamped on him as he lay on the ground. … Then they went on playing in their sand castles, each saying, ‘This is mine; no one else may have it. Keep away! Don’t touch my castle!’ 

     But evening came; it was getting dark and they all thought they ought to be going home. No one now cared what became of his castle. One child stomped on his, another pushed his over with both hands. Then they turned away and went back, each to his home.”

       from the Yogacara Bhumi Sutra, translated by Arthur Waley
          Jack Kornfield, Gil Fronsdal eds. “Teachings of the Buddha.” Shambhala, Boston, 2007. 

from the web

Life on the Razor's Edge

     What the heck does that mean? How about being fairly continuously aware of Ezra Bayda's "anxious quiver of being"? Can you acutely feel all sorts of needs - AND AT THE SAME TIME - know perfectly well that none of these can possibly satisfy? What about acutely feeling all sorts of aversions - AND AT THE SAME TIME - knowing perfectly well that avoiding these can't possibly satisfy either? Now what? 

     You've become fed-up with distractions, diversions, addictions, delusions! Self-centeredness has finally lost its allure.  
     The real world awaits. The heart-mind opens - outwards - to what is.
     

Authenticity, Certainty, Self-centeredness

     "All of us have had the experience of dropping our guard when engrossed in the natural world and living for a brief moment free of our mental discursiveness and language. We suddenly feel 'at home,' relaxed, and connected to the sights, sounds, smells, and sensations around us. In fact, this loss of self-centeredness and the accompanying sense of connectedness may be one of the reasons we appreciate being in nature. With this experience as a guide, we can begin to question whether this self-center is authentic or whether it is keeping us from something natural. Could our mental need to label and fix experiences into a rigidly certain world be the only inauthentic aspect of nature?"

       Rodney Smith. "Awakening. A Paradigm Shift of the Heart." Shambhala, Boston, 2014.


     "The small man builds cages for everyone he knows. While the sage keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful, rowdy prisoners."                                Hafiz
       http://wisdomandcompassion.us/

Core Purpose, Philosophy

     The high percentage of self-reported cheating among university students, and other suggestions of an apparent decay in ethics & rise in shallow self-centered behavior is frightening. One has to wonder if individuals are losing the sense of what it means to embody a meaningful philosophy. Faking it is so much faster, easier & seemingly popular. 
     Part of the problem may well be that large companies that once earned loyalty from their life-long employees, now use their employees to train off-shore temps, who then quickly replace their (now 'downsized') trainers. The company can treat & pay off-shore temps even worse. These same companies espouse the critical importance of "customer loyalty”.

     Individuals & companies must be held accountable to embody - not just espouse & advertise - a “core purpose” & “philosophy”, regardless of who they deal with - customers, employees, employers, family, friends. A core purpose or philosophy is fundamentally valuable - way too important to fake. Individuals & companies must learn congruence one way or another. Otherwise, one's life & products are cheap fakes.

     "As Simon Sinek says in ... "Start With Why", products don't create customer loyalty. A company's core purpose does. 
     People are attracted to Apple because of what Apple stands for. Not the gizmos. There are less expensive options out there.
     Yet Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world.
     People are attracted to Nike not because of the shoes, but because they are pulled to the philosophy of Just Do It - whether that pertains to getting fit, or popping the big question, or leaving a bad job or starting your own business."                      Terry O'Reilly, Under the Influence

        "Elevator Pitches" first aired on Monday, May 5, 2014
        http://www.cbc.ca/undertheinfluence/season-3/2014/05/05/elevator-pitches-1/

qhenson   www.dpreview.com