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“Fear is the raw feeling generated by the ego’s struggle to stave off oblivion. To awaken, your awareness must penetrate to the deepest levels of your fear, to your core, and disidentify from all selfing.
As you meditate into your core emotions, they become more empty, vulnerable, and obscure. Emptier states reflect energy liberated by profound unknowing, the most raw or “naked” of which is the pure, undiluted fear of death, or terror. People want to be liberated from this core terror and the garden variety anxiety on its surface but proceed in the wrong way by avoiding it. Paradoxically, wanting to end anxiety is its ever-renewing cause. Seeing anxiety for what it is without trying to get rid of it ends it. Try to be with it fully without grasping or avoidance. Stay with it. Feel it so clearly and profoundly that it dissolves into Formlessness.
Terror defines selfing: a feeling of existence we assume is real, similar to a constant stomach cramp whose cause we never question because it has always been there. We try to get rid of it by resisting it, but this strengthens it and keeps it going because it is caused by resistance. We think that we have to resist fear to get rid of it, but instead we must accept it. Resistance strengthens it, and radical acceptance destroys it. To find Freedom, you must investigate the terror in your experience fully, accepting what you find there all the way down to the root.”
-James Wood, Ten Paths to Freedom
This is not a typical post for this blog… but good information!
“Positive information isn’t as crucial to immediate survival as it is to long-term survival. Noticing that the river has fresh, clean water is important, especially if you’re thirsty or deciding on a place to camp, but there’s not the same urgency to act on these data. Thus, our brains give less time and attention to positive than to negative information… We tend to take the positive for granted while focusing on the negative as if our life depended on it…
Rumination about negative events in the past leads to depression, while rumination about potentially negative events in the future leads to anxiety…
Research indicates that women are much more likely to ruminate than men, which helps explain why women suffer from depression and anxiety about twice as often as men. Although some of these gender differences may be physiological in origin, culture also plays a role. Because women have historically had less power in society than men, they’ve had less control over what happens to them and have therefore had to be more vigilant for danger.”
From Self-Compassion, by Kristin Neff
“Fear is only our reading…the mood reflected in our contraction, our recoil from infinity, our attempts to survive, our narcissism. If instead of holding on – to mind and emotion and body and relations and the world itself – we release it all, there is no fear whatsoever.
Fear is only the reflection of the holding on.”
-Adi Da, The Religion of the Whole Body, 1977
