April 18, 2013
01 May 2013
Fear and The Everyday Mind
by
Colin Bondi
April 18, 2013
April 18, 2013
from
WakingTimes Website
Fear is a force to be reckoned with
there is no doubt about it.
There is hardly anyone alive on this
planet that does not to some extent have to contend with fear.
I want to be clear as to what I mean by
the word fear. Fear is a psychological state which has nothing to do
with real world danger. If you are walking down the street and a man
jumps out and sticks a gun in your face, you could say you would
react with fear.
However what happens in such a situation
is really a biological reaction to danger, it’s the
fight or flight response, and all animals have this to some
extent. It’s natural and part of the survival mechanism of the
species. Usually in an acute life threatening situation, the mind
and its thought processes freeze and we are thrust intensely into
present moment reality as the body forces us to deal with the
immediate crisis.
However unlike any other animal human
beings project a label on the intense energy of the danger response
and call it fear.
The problem with this is we create a
mental/emotional entity called fear which we then experience in
relationship to imagined situations that have nothing to do with any
real world event. We might fear that we will be robbed on the way
home or that we could be fired tomorrow, even though in the moment
neither of these things is happening, we feel a low level danger
response.
A mental construct is connected to a
biophysical response which gives a feeling of reality to the
imagined situations we fear. They seem real because we feel some of
the same physical response to them as we do to a real world threat.
Low level fear is often referred to as anxiety, and you could
say that almost all of us experience some level of anxiety
regardless of our life situation.
So why does the mind do this?
It is
an extremely dysfunctional way of existing as it distorts the
experience of life and puts the body under much unnecessary stress.
But that’s my point right there, the everyday mind is fueled by fear
and its counterpart, lack. The mind is often fearing some kind of
internal or external threat or it’s in fear of not having what it
wants whether that’s money, sex, love or a material object.
It’s a process of continual fear and
deprivation. At times this may not be apparent when things seem to
go well, but it’s just that these things are operating under the
surface and so aren’t as easily noticed. But again why does the mind
do this?
This brings us to the root of it. What
we call mind is simply a process of consciousness, the process of
thought and memory.
The mind is thoughts and without
thoughts there is no mind.
In a
state of complete internal stillness (called Samadhi) there is
no mind just consciousness or awareness. However, we tend to collect
bundles of thoughts and create an identity out of them and then take
that to be who and what we truly are.
We identity ourselves as being the body
and the mind, but the body is a temporary thing and the mind is just
a constant flow of thoughts. So this identification is both very
unstable and very limited. We’re so used to taking ourselves to be
the body/mind, to be something tangible that there is intense fear
at the thought that we might be no-thing at all.
The body was born and it’s going to age
and die. The body will get sick and it is very fragile and subject
to damage at any time.
The mind when you really look deeply
into it doesn’t exist except for thoughts that constantly come and
go. Both of these things are going to generate fear if this is all
we take ourselves to be.
Our existence is like a bubble on the front
of a wave. We usually deal with this fear by
distracting ourselves from looking into it. We project the fear and
its protective expression, anger, onto external objects such as
partners, governments, groups we don’t agree with, bosses, society
or just about anything that takes us away from looking within.
The
real distraction however is the
incessant thought process of the mind.
Most people’s minds almost never stop
except for deep sleep, and it’s a good thing for that because we
sure need that rest. The mind must remain in motion, that is,
generating thoughts or not only will it soon be shown to be
nonexistent but what we take to be the world will fall apart. The
world as most of us know it is a screen of our projections.
This is
why so many people have a hard time with silence and stillness and
deep meditation.
The mind cannot afford to be still lest
it lose its illusion of existence. Boredom is a version of fear in
disguise, causing us seek stimulation, anything other than being
still. The mind is very adept at keeping the illusion going.
None of this reflects our natural state
or who and what we truly are.
On a spiritual level I think the
challenge and the opportunity for us all is to confront the root
fear of our own nonexistence to
uncover the truth beneath that. This root fear of the mind is a
threshold we must pass through if we are to truly know ourselves.
To
pass through this threshold requires the absolute surrender of
everything we have ever taken ourselves to be.
The fear must be transformed into
fearlessness, the unknown embraced unconditionally. Given the
temporariness of the body/mind we really have nothing to lose in
this surrender that we aren’t destined to lose anyway.
Why not
consciously, intentionally dive right into the truth of who you
really are right now?
The gift is the freedom of reality but
that is nothing we can conceive of, all thoughts and imaginations
about the Divine are not it. What we are cannot be grasped by the
mind.
There is an intelligence somewhere deep
within us that is calling us home to the truth, to freedom, it’s
just a question of when we’ve had enough of the fear-based illusion...
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