In
formulating the ideas for this talk, I am indebted, besides
the inspiration of my Master, to the teachings of Sri Ramana
Maharshi, Krishnamurti, the Master DK (through Alice Bailey),
and the Lord Maitreya.
Fear,
I suppose, has to be the most obnoxious, destructive, corrosive,
limiting, inhibiting emotion to which we are prone. It seems
that there is nobody in the world, except the Masters, who is
free from its grip. We are enjoined to overcome fear, to be fearless.
Every teacher of any note who has spoken to humanity, shared
his wisdom, insights, with humanity, has made this a number one
priority of living.
The
question is, is it possible for us to live free of fear? Can
we go beyond fear?
We
all think we know what fear is. We may not know how it comes
about but we certainly know what it feels like. There are many
different types of fear, coming from different circumstances,
needs, situations which we meet in life. Most people, when we
talk about fear, will immediately think of fear of accidents,
of death, the natural fears that condition our lives. From the
very cradle we are fed information which conditions our reactions
to all the phenomena of life, and this, I believe, is the root
of our fear. If the child were left unconditioned it would know
no fear. It just would not enter the mind, and you will find
that fear is always the result of some movement of the mind,
of thought.
The
animals know no fear. They react to fearful situations, situations
of danger, that is. We, too, react to such situations, usually
with fear, because we are conditioned to respond to potentially
dangerous situations with the reaction we call fear. It is built
into our response apparatus and is the product of our minds.
If we had not been conditioned by that information and therefore
thought it likely to happen, we would know no fear. The antelope
runs from the lion, not because it is afraid, but because it
is intelligent. It knows that if it does not run it will become
the lion's dinner, so it runs as fast and as well as it can.
You must know, from previous experience of it, that if you are
in a fearful situation and react with fear you are not very efficient
in your reactions.
All
of us at some time have had dreams in which we are overcome with
fear, some terrible thing is happening, we are being chased by
some monster, our father or mother, our big sister, big brother,
some monstrous creation of our fear-ridden mind, and we cannot
move, our efficient running deserts us and we are caught in a
kind of morass from which we can only with the greatest difficulty
move. Then of course we wake up, we are so glad it is all over,
we are in a cold sweat of fear, because we could not move, could
not escape from this threat. Action becomes impossible because
of the fear. Fear inhibits.
How
is it possible, then, that as soon as an antelope sees the leopard
or the lion, as soon as the rabbit sees the dog, it skitters
away as fast as it can? Is it because of fear? Has it thought, "Oh,
that is a lion, that is a dog, oh, I am scared"? Because if that
were the case most probably it would lie 'doggo' and hope that
the dog or the lion would not recognize it as a rabbit or an
antelope. In fact, it runs as fast as its legs can carry it away
from this potential danger. But fear does not enter into it.
It is an intelligent, instinctual reaction of the body, caused
by the flood of stimuli into the adrenals by the sympathetic
nervous system.
We
have two nervous systems, the sympathetic, and the parasympathetic.
One produces in animals the reaction of flight, and in us the
dry mouth, the inability to run, contraction, the sweaty hands,
whatever is our own individual reaction to fear. The other, the
parasympathetic, functions on the pleasure principle and creates
saliva, bright eyes, expansion, a sense of joy, happiness - pleasure,
in a word.
Our
life seems to be lived out in the controlling of one and the
pursuit of the other; the controlling of, or escaping from, our
fear reactions and the pursuit of our pleasure reactions. Why
should we take such trouble to do this, to go through our lives
seeking pleasure and controlling or escaping from pain, fear,
suffering, whatever is causing that which we call pain? If we
look at the causes, I think we will find that it has its source
in our view of ourselves in relation to that which we see as
the not-self, other than the self, that which is outside. The
only thing we can control, obviously, is our response to various
events, and we spend our lives figuring out ways of escaping
from the pain and prolonging the pleasure. This is the action
of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems, the
mechanism of our body, and as long as we identify with that we
will know fear. Why need living be such a struggle? Why should
it be so painful?
Fear
is pain, we all know that. So far, I have talked about fear in
terms of the physical, but there is another fear (I think we
are all aware of this, and prone to it) which we have to call
psychological fear. It is the fear which enters the mind in a
psychological situation, in which we feel threatened in some
way, not necessarily physically; we are not necessarily going
to be run over or eaten by an animal, or anything drastic like
that.
Fear
of death, I suppose, is the greatest fear, so strong that we
do not think about it, but push it down to the back of our mind
although we know that one day (hopefully when we are very old
and do not care any more) we shall have to face this fear. But
it is there in almost every situation in which we find ourselves
and it is tied up, I believe, in the corresponding fear of life
itself. The fear of death is a result of our conditioning, the
fact that we separate death from life.
There
are two aspects to our experience of life: this 'living' aspect,
as we call it, in which we go to bed, wake up and are still there. Here
we are again with another day to get through, to live, to experience.
The
other aspect begins when we do not wake up, when we 'die'. The
big problem is how to live (and die) without fear. In every situation
we cannot help feeling fear because it has become, not an action
of the conscious mind but an unconscious reaction in all situations.
Is there any way in which we can overcome it? You cannot know
yourself, freedom, the nature of reality, happiness, joy or bliss,
if you have fear. And if you have any fear you have all fear.
Is
it possible to get rid of fear, and if so how do we do it?
Let
us see if we might change our approach to reality, so that we
can experience reality as it is and not through this fog of fear,
this inhibiting, crushing, astral reaction which is fear. If
you go into it you will find that all fear is the result of thought,
an action, a movement, of the mind. We are taught as children
that if we go too near the fire we will burn our hand. Of course,
if we had gone too near the fire and burned our hand we would
soon know from the pain that would result that one just does
not do that. And so an instinctive mechanism, an intelligent,
instinctual reaction, is built into the child. It knows from
that moment on not to go too near the fire. But if you say to
the child, "If you do not do what I say, I will spank you", then
you are introducing a completely different notion into the child's
mind, and, of course, if you are true to your word and the child
does not do what you say and you spank it, it hurts, and it tries
to please you from then on; and in this trying to please you,
to not be hurt, the child's spontaneous reaction to life has
become distorted.
This
has happened to all of us, in one way or another, to a greater
or lesser extent. Every single one of us has built in to our
response to life a series of inhibitions which together add up
to fear. Fear has become so deeply embedded in the unconscious
mind that even as we look at it from the conscious level, we
cannot change. We can rationalize, see that it is there; we can
analyze the mechanism of it, but still, if we are honest, we
can see that the fear goes on. It is something which we have
to approach on another level.
Some
people resort to hypnotism. Fear so rules their lives that they
become incapable of even the most normal actions: doing the chores,
going to work, shopping, driving a car, all of these things become
so fear-ridden that the person's daily life is disrupted. Hypnosis
can be done by somebody else or it can be self-hypnosis. The
hypnotist, whether another or the person himself or herself,
gives the suggestion to the unconscious mind to obliterate the
fear reaction. If the suggestion is strong enough, and the person
susceptible enough to that suggestion, for a time it works. They
seem to be free from that inhibiting fear, whether it is the
fear of heights, of going to the dentist, of flying in aeroplanes,
the fear which makes them rush to a cigarette or a drink every
time they are faced with a situation in which they are afraid.
What
are these situations; how do they come about?
Largely,
I believe, because our educational systems are based on conditioning
into competition. We are made to compare ourselves, competitively,
with everyone, everything, every situation we meet. Instead of
having a friend next door called Jack, we are a better or a worse
boy than Jack. Instead of being a different boy from Jack, with
different needs, hopes, talents, qualities, we are always better
than Jack or not as good as Jack. We are always set in a situation
of competition.
I
believe it is that competition which is the origin of our fear.
From all of this we create a notion, an image, of ourselves as
adequate or inadequate, superior or inferior, and of course the
one is as deadly as the other. We are either superior to everyone
around us, and have, therefore, the necessity of maintaining
that illusion of superiority, so that in every situation in which
it is threatened, we experience fear, we fight it, run away from
it, enlarge it, give it energy, propagate it and keep it going;
or we have the idea, the image, that we are less than adequate:
why cannot we be like Jack next door, who is tall, obedient,
nice, always says the right thing, does as his parents ask, who
runs errands all the time, and is a very nice, good, obedient
child? We are always put into this situation in which we are
seen in our parents' eyes - and therefore in our own eyes - as
inadequate to deal with the life which they are proposing to
build around us.
All
of that, I believe, creates the conditions of fear so that, in
every situation we come to, we cast ahead of us this image. If
we feel capable, adequate to the task, we do not feel fear, until
the task gets a bit harder and then we do. All of this is the
result of our experience of ourselves in the past, our thoughts
about ourselves, our qualities, our abilities, our experience.
How did we deal with this situation before? Was it painful, was
it pleasurable? If it was pleasurable, let us try to maintain
it. Was it painful? - then let us try to get rid of it, escape
from it. Our lives, it seems, are taken up with this constant
attempt to escape from fear and to maintain pleasure. Both of
them are the result of the movement of thought, of the mind.
If
we did not think, we would not feel fear, nor would we feel pleasure.
The Frenchman said "I think, therefore I am." I think he should
have said, "I think, therefore I have fear." It is precisely
because we think that we have fear. That is why the animal does
not know fear. It looks like fear as we see it running away from
the predator, but it is a simple, instinctual reaction of intelligent
activity to escape from death. Fear is something else.
Fear
is the product of thought. In fact, fear is thought itself. The
question is, can we experience life without thought, without
fear? All our fears are the result of our experience of living
in the past. We look at our past, we are the sum total of all
of that; everything that we are, everything that we know about
ourselves, everything we know about life, every experience we
have which makes us able to cope, all of that is the result of
thought.
Am
I saying that we should get rid of thought? Obviously, that would
be ridiculous. We cannot live our lives without thought, build
roads or bridges without thought, we cannot do our work without
thought. So there is an area in which thought is essential to
everyday living. But that is on a purely practical level. Is
it possible that we can maintain to the utmost efficiency that
area of thought, apply it to the mechanism of our daily lives,
without transferring it to the psychological level, thus experiencing
psychological fear, because that is exactly what we do? We see
ourselves as this, as that: I am a British Conservative, bulwark
of the nation, and I do not like those Socialists who are trying
to get into power, because if they do they are going to sweep
away all my privileges. They are envious of my money, of my rather
comfortable style of life, and they want it for themselves. Of
course it would never occur to me that we might all have it,
but the point is I have it, and they want it, so I feel afraid,
threatened. So I keep them at bay and I use every mechanism of
political strategy to maintain the status quo.
We
all do exactly the same thing on the personal level. We have
an image of ourselves and we try to make that better. Why? To
be better, more colourful, more important, more influential,
to make a bigger impact on life, to get on, to have more money,
a bigger house, a bigger car; to shine, to be noticed, to be
somebody, to not be dull and boring and tedious, the kind of
person that others ignore. We do this in order to feel comfortable,
to prolong the state of pleasure.
When
I say pleasure I do not mean just sex pleasure, or drink pleasure,
or eating pleasure, or pleasurable interchange with people of
like minds, or the pleasure of listening to music. I mean a position
in which we feel comfortable, at ease, not threatened, secure.
We are pursuing this all the time. We do this by inhibiting every
opposite experience, which of course is pain, sorrow, suffering,
fear. All our energy is drained into these two mechanisms, the
maintaining of pleasure and the running away from fear. What
a waste of energy. What a tremendous drain of energy from the
human psyche.
That
is the reason why most people have no etheric vision, for example;
why most people cannot think logically for more than a few sentences.
It is the reason why most people live, from the psychological
point of view, crippled, stunted lives, totally uncreative, or
relatively uncreative. We drain all our energy into these two
mechanisms: the running after, the longing for, the desiring
of, the maintenance of, comfort, pleasure and security; and the
running away from pain, suffering, fear. Can we get away from
both of these? If both of these responses to life are the result
of thought, is it possible to live in such a way that the thought
process is involved only in the mechanics of living, the practicalities
of living: in driving the car, making sure that there is gas
in the car, that you have the money to pay for the gas, all these
things? You are going abroad - is your passport in order, can
you get on the ship in time, which means getting the train on
time - all of that is the mechanism of thought in its correct
use. Without it we would all be in a chaotic state of inanition,
we would never be able to do anything.
The
wrong use of thought is that thought by which we create the images
of ourselves and of our fear and our pleasure, because the fear
and the pleasure are equally the result of thought. They do not
exist outside thought. So can we overcome the thought? The overcoming
of fear is related totally to the overcoming of the wrong use
of thought. We are all terribly interested in tomorrow. We are
afraid of tomorrow. We want security. Above anything in life
we want security and security means first of all having enough
to eat, of course, so we want food. It has to come from somewhere,
we have to be able to buy it, that means we need money; that
means we have to have a job. Not having a job is a trauma, having
a job is also a trauma - either way we are caught in this cleft
stick of wanting and not wanting: the fear of losing the job,
the fear of not getting a better one, the fear that we are going
to meet people in that job who are cleverer than we are, smarter,
who are going to take our job from us; all of that enters into
every situation of our lives.
We
go through life competing, and the effect is stress, strain,
a corroding fear which limits every possibility of correct, spontaneous
action. Few of us can react spontaneously to life. We do not
know what life is, experienced spontaneously as it is, without
bringing in fear, desire, wanting it to be different, to be the
way we want it. We build a thoughtform, an idea, an image of
how it should be - that is, as we know it: that with which we
are familiar, feel comfortable, secure, unthreatened. We want
relationships in which we are never threatened. We want our wife
never to stop loving us, or our husband never to look at another
woman.
We
want to feel secure in every psychological way, in every situation.
Is this possible, does this seem rational? Is it possible that
we can live our lives without this overriding fear, this dependency
on other people for our happiness, because that is really what
it amounts to? We become dependent because we are afraid. Since
our thoughts make us afraid, since we project into tomorrow or
next week or next year our image of what we are, according to
our knowledge of ourselves in the past, we create conditions
in which fear is an intrinsic element. We cannot get away from
it. We take our fears of the past and project them into the future,
so that we never, in any real sense, experience what is happening
now. We never live now, always in the past. We are our experience
of the past, the sum of all our reactions - fear and every other
reaction - to the events of the past.
If
we look at ourselves, experience who we are, we find that we
are nothing but a bundle of fears making up a sense of the self
we call 'me' whose major effort is escaping from these fears.
We are escaping from ourselves, from this notion of ourselves
that we are carrying around with us moment to moment. We are
trying to escape from fear, which we have created by our thought,
and are seeking to create security, pleasure, continuity of life
as we know it, without anything unknown. I suppose the biggest
unknown is the unknown we call death. That is what we are all
escaping from.
Fear
of life
I
think basic to every single fear, however subtle, is the fundamental
fear of death, which is the fear of life. Every one of us lives
under the fear of life itself. No wonder, because we have made
of life a kind of hell, an arena in which we are gladiators fighting,
with inadequate weapons, powerful adversaries better equipped
than ourselves. We are put into positions in which we feel inadequate,
under-trained, under-prepared, living a kind of confidence-trick
to others and to ourselves. There is no real joy, no real happiness.
We are just getting by, avoiding too much pain, suffering and
fear, and running after, fighting, competing, for the pleasure,
the security, we long for. Why do we long at all? What is this
mechanism of longing? Why do we desire that life should be different
from what it is?
We
are trying to make life in an image which we project into the
future, and that makes us afraid. It creates the conditions in
which fear is inevitable, because we are competing, and when
we are competing we are in confrontation, there is conflict.
Wherever there is conflict there is fear. We are adversaries
in an arena and we are taught from infancy that this is the natural
course. Those of us who are parents know how difficult it is
to educate a child without imposing our fear of life. We all
do it. I think a child brought up without fear is probably the
rarest child on earth, the most gifted child, because it has
the greatest gift of life, whether it has money or possessions
or not: it is to be free of that conditioning, to experience
life as it is without fear, without running after it, without
running away from it, without wanting anything at all.
Is
it possible to experience life, to go through the various movements
of life, of interaction, of relationship (I am talking now about
psychological fear) without experiencing fear, without entering
into competition, and therefore into conflict, which produces
fear? All opposition, all conflict, produces fear. Is it possible
to live without desiring anything at all? Because if we can do
that we will be free of fear. We will be free, period. If we
can live without the desire principle governing our responses
to life we can live freely, without fear.
Every
time we impose our desire on life, whether it is desire for comfort,
for safety, for absence from fear, we give it energy, we prolong
the fear by engaging with it. We all avoid confrontation with
our superiors. Can we get away from the notion of superior and
inferior? This seems to me to be basic to this problem of fear.
So long as we have the idea that some people are superior to
us, and therefore that we are inferior to them, we will have
fear. We will fear being overwhelmed by them, people will like
them better than us.
One's
wife might like that man better because he is superior. My husband
might fancy that lady because she is obviously prettier than
I am, and so on. These are fears which well up moment to moment
in every person's life. They are the results of this comparison
between superior and inferior. These are built into our subconscious
by our parents, our teachers, by every situation in which we
are placed. Every single one of us is conditioned by that approach
to life: that some are superior, some inferior, some pass exams,
some do not pass exams. What exam has ever been formulated which
could possibly measure the quality of life of one person as against
another? What exam can do this? Yet throughout our school life
(and for many people in their adult life) we are faced with examinations.
Day
to day we give ourselves an examination. We say, "How do I match
up in comparison to that person?" Am I better than him or is
he better than I am? Why did I not think of that? Then we begin
to imitate. Comparison implies imitation. We imitate that which
we admire in other people and we lose the sense of ourselves.
We enter a vicious circle of comparison, competition, imitation,
and we are nowhere at all in the middle of all of this. We are
living a life which is simply a series of response reactions
to various stimuli which bring about fear or pleasure, one or
the other, both of which are created by our own mind. Is it possible
to live without feeling superior? Is it possible to look at life,
at other people, to come into relationship with people where
we are not making this judgement - because this is a judgement,
is it not? Is it possible to meet people, situations, without
making that sort of comparison? Can we rid ourselves of this
poison of competition? We can see its effect on the political
level, in the economic sphere.
It
is easy to see how destructive, corrupting, competition is. And
yet we engage in it; we all do it. Is it possible - not to avoid
it, because that would be running away from it - is it possible
to overcome it, to go beyond it, to approach people, psychological
situations in which fear would be engendered, without competition,
without making comparisons? Try it. We have to try, to see if
it is possible. All this competition, comparison, instinctual
avoidance, self-preservation, is an attempt to preserve what
we take to be the self, unaffected by pain, fear, which are very
destructive and highly unpleasant emotions, and which can become
so strong that they completely devour our life. Is it possible
by looking at fear in a certain way not to give it energy, not
prolong it? When we give it expression or try to avoid it; when
we try to escape from it, or to control it; when we try to inhibit
it, we give it the energy to persist, and so it never goes away.
Can we look at it in such a way that, of its own accord, it disappears?
One
of the great trials of Hercules, if you remember, was the slaying
of the many-headed Hydra. The Hydra lived in a cave, and had
nine heads, one of them immortal. Hercules was enjoined to conquer
the monster. "One word of counsel only I may give," the Teacher
said. "We rise by kneeling; we conquer by surrendering; we gain
by giving up. Go forth, O Son of God and Son of Man, and conquer." Hercules,
the great warrior, the great hero, went to the Hydra's cave.
He was not afraid. He cut off a head and immediately two grew
in its place. He cut off another and, again, two grew. He cut
them all off and two grew each time so there were twice as many
heads as before he started. Even he, eventually, got a bit tired.
Not just tired of this game, but actually tired. He was unable
to cope with this constant renewal, twice over, of these horrible
heads. Then he had an idea.
When
he was getting so tired that he could not continue the struggle,
suddenly an awareness grew in him of what to do. He did not think
it out, it came to him. He suddenly became aware of the weakness
of the monster, where the truth lay. He grasped the monster and
took it up into the light of day, out of this dark cave where
he had been fighting. And in the light of day the monster suddenly
expired, all heads died, except one which he cut off and put
under a stone. That is the legend: it must mean something. Why
has it been preserved? That, I believe, is the only way you can
deal with fear. You have to bring it up into the light of day,
and of course the light of day is the light of the soul. The
light of the soul playing on the monster killed it. The light
of the soul kills fear.
How
can you, at a word, call on the light of the soul and focus it
on fear? Not this little fear, or that one, but all fear, so
that fear itself does not recur? I believe it consists in doing
nothing at all, which is very difficult to do. Always, when we
feel fear, we try to control it, to inhibit it, to escape from
it. We seek pleasure, a drink, something, anything, to get away
from this fear.
We
never simply look at it. We think about it, with our conscious
mind we analyze its mechanism, of course to no avail; it never
goes away because it is built into our subconscious. It is an
unconscious mechanism, a conditioned reflex, and not to do with
the conscious mind at all.
Only
the light of the soul can really deal with fear, and to come
into the awareness of that we have to do nothing at all. We have
to let it happen. It happens when we look at the fear without
trying to do anything about it. We have this fear of death, of
the future, of the past, of what might happen because of what
did happen and made us feel afraid. We know that if that situation
is repeated we will feel afraid, and since we do not want to
feel afraid we try to avoid its repetition. But, can we, on the
contrary, not run away from fear but simply look at it, without
condemning it, escaping from it, criticizing it, without criticizing
ourselves, without saying "I shouldn't feel this fear, I am grown
up now and that fear is childish"? The only reason it is childish,
of course, is because it was built in in childhood. Can we look
at the events of life in such a way, as they are happening, without
condemning them, without running away from them, without seeking
anything different? In other words, can we do it without desire?
We desire something different: security, what we call happiness,
pleasure, absence from fear, from pain. We build a picture, an
image, of life as we would like it to be.
Desire
is the basis of all fear. We desire security, love, happiness,
we desire other people to be to us what we would like them to
be. It is this movement of desire, this longing, this yearning
for comfort, love, easeful situations, so that we are never troubled,
never jealous, never made angry, never feel uncomfortable, humiliated,
never at a disadvantage with anything or anybody. That is the
basis of the desire principle: we are longing to be, and to be,
and to be - to become. Desire is becoming.
Is
there something else which is not becoming? Is there something
else which does not have to go through this process of becoming,
of desiring, to change or to remain the same, to be secure in
that which we know? In other words, can we go beyond what we
know? So long as we are looking at life and knowing it - knowing
the people, the events, what is going to happen, what to do,
what not to do - we feel secure. But is it possible to look at
life without desiring that knowledge? Because that knowledge
is the outcome of past experience, it is memory, it is dead.
It is not a living process; it is the past. It is the action
of our mind, which we then project as an image, a construct of
ourselves.
What
is this 'self'?
What
is this 'self', this construction? What is it we are running
away from? Perhaps we are running away from our own emptiness,
our loneliness, our sense of not being at all. While we are becoming
we are not Being, and if we explore the essence of the feeling
we have in our deepest, most profound fear, longing, desire,
hope, belief, we will find that it is the desire to know that
we are, that we have Being, rather than this sense of endless
becoming, wanting, desiring.
That
desire process is at the opposite pole from the reality of Being,
and that is why we have fear. Is it possible to go beyond this
experience of the process of becoming, which is the result of
identification with ourselves as body, mind, thoughts? Identifying
with that, we create the circumstances of fear. Whatever we identify
with, we are. We look at a person, we say, "That is Mary, she
is superior to me." Immediately I am afraid of Mary, because
I know she is superior to me. She is older, wiser, cleverer,
better-looking, all of these things. I am immediately afraid
of Mary. Is it possible to look at Mary and not experience that,
not make this division? Is it possible to see that we are not
really experiencing ourselves at all but an image of the past?
There is nothing there, it does not exist. What does exist is
a body, a mind, a set of emotions.
They
exist, not beyond death, but up to death. That is why we are
afraid of death. We know that at death that body with which we
identify, which we see in the glass; these emotions which react
with fear or pleasure; that mind which builds the thoughts by
which we know all of this, are going to be no more. Therefore
at death we are going to be no more. The whole of our desire
life is the prolongation of that nothingness, that thoughtform
which we have of ourselves, which essentially does not exist
at all. It is the notion that what we are experiencing - the
fear, longing, hope, ideas - is somehow separate from ourselves.
They are not. They are ourselves; whatever we identify with is
ourself. There is no way we can experience anything in life without
seeing it as part of ourselves.
This
is the truth behind our experience of fear. We identify with
the pain of the body so we are pain. We identify with the fears
of the mind so we are fear. We cannot identify and be separate
from that with which we identify. Is it possible to go beyond
that kind of identification, to not identify with the body, not
identify with the fear reactions, the emotions? Is it possible
not to identify with these constructions of the mind, because
if we can, we will come on an experience of ourselves which goes
beyond ourselves, the only state in which we are free, the only
state in which we really are Being.
Our
immortal Being
That,
I believe, is what Maitreya calls the Self. The Self, He says,
is the most important thing in life. The Self is our immortal
Being and the Self uses the experiences in time and space to
realize the process of its becoming. Is it possible to change
our view of ourselves, our identification, away from these vehicles,
the mind, body, emotions? Because if we can we shall set ourselves
free immediately from all fear. There are many techniques we
can use which will gradually mitigate the effect of fear, but
is it possible, all at once, to rid ourselves of fear? I believe
it is possible if we can come into relationship with our Self
as the Self, and not with that accumulation of experiences that
we call 'me', in which fear is inevitable because it is created
by thought; all of that 'me' is created by my thought of me.
Is it possible to go beyond that and to experience the Self directly?
If
we can do this we will find an entirely different view of life,
a different capacity to live, more intensely, more vividly, more
spontaneously. If we can simply look, without condemning, at
what happens, at what is, without judging, making comparisons,
being in competition; without feeling superior, or inferior;
looking, simply looking, at what is, at the moment it is, looking
at it, experiencing it; then, I believe, we can enter into communion
with the Self, which is all Being, and know from then on the
absence, the overcoming, of fear. It is not something anyone
can teach you to do. I recommend you to try to do it and to find
in the doing the achievement of it. As soon as we do it we achieve
it. We cannot achieve it until we do it.
It
is not a technique, a practice, it is simply doing nothing at
all, simply being who we are. When we are who we are, we know
all there is to know. We are free from fear, from desire, from
longing; we do not need anything or anybody, we can approach
anyone, by one or by thousands. We can relate to them directly
as they are, which is as we are, without the sense of separation,
the sense that they are superior or inferior; without judging,
without allowing our conditioning - competition, comparisons
- to get between us and them. Then we find that we are living
in a constant state of joy. That is joy.
Take
your thought of yourself and ask yourself, "Who am I? Who experiences
this thought? Who is doing the experiencing? Who am I? Who has
this thought, of myself sitting here, who is doing it?" Ask, "Who
am I?"
Don't
give yourself a name. It has nothing to do with a name but an
experience of the Self.
Reprinted
with the kind permission of Share International Magazine.
| Authors
Details:
Benjamin
Creme.
Benjamin
Creme is the British chief editor of Share International,
an artist, author, lecturer and esotericist.
His
telepathic contact with a Master of Wisdom allows him to
receive up-to- date information on the Christ's emergence
and to expand on the Ageless Wisdom Teachings. |
|
