Stay Out of the Waves of Fear
Don't be afraid.
There's little doubt in my mind that all around you -- as within you -- fearful thoughts and feelings are flying through the air like ashes falling from a forest fire.
Certainly the world has never before seen anything like what you and I have been witness to in these last few days. But whatever fear you may be feeling -- born of some projected dark imagining -- and fueled by the flames of the masses of sleeping human beings -- is nothing compared to the suffering of the people in Japan. Remember them. And though you may not know it yet, whatever calm you're able to realize in the midst of such storms helps everyone, everywhere; of course, the converse is equally true: the degree to which you fear what the divided mind gives you to resist serves to inflame the situation for all involved.
Right now, misinformation -- disinformation is rampant, and always has been where individuals could find ways to profit from the pain of others. Looking for reliable guidance in times of such disruption as we are all now facing is like asking a spider to lead you safely from its web. So what is one to do?
Don't be afraid. All forms of psychological fear are the direct result of disinformation, only in this case this misery-making misinformation is born of your mind listening to itself (or like minds in the same state of fear, fascinated with the projection of their own dark imaginings).
The only thing of which you can be certain at any point in your life is what you are able to see about yourself in that moment. Which means the only way in which any troublesome time should be met -- and used properly -- is as a kind of looking glass in which one can see oneself as one is.
Fear rises and rules an individual in direct proportion to his loss of trust in whatever he may have formerly been attached to and identified with, describe these possessions as you will -- be they cultural, familial, religious, or economic in nature. What you are seeing in the world around us, and hopefully -- more profitably -- within yourself, is the indisputable evidence that your trust has been vested in the wrong "place."
Can you see the relationship between the extent of your fear -- and what you have trusted in up until now?
It often feels to us in times of difficulty that life is presenting us with difficult questions, situations that require some diligent, if not desperate search and struggle to find the appropriate answer. But life is not asking questions in times of trial; rather it's revealing to us both the need to see ourselves anew, as well as what is within us -- about ourselves -- that needs to be seen as being true.
In whom do you trust? Yes, there may be practical steps that need to be taken to properly protect and provide for ourselves, given the potential problem before us; that said, only passing time will reveal what, if any, these steps may be. But there's never anything practical about panic; there is no positive attribute to psychological fear.
I do not write these notes to console you; my intention is not to comfort, but rather to create -- if only for a moment -- a condition in which you may remember yourself, and what's important.
When one is caught in a wave it seems as though there is nothing other than the turbulence within which one struggles. How many times do we have to see -- experience, painfully -- that the answer to being a captive of some wave is not to create yet another one, and ride it wherever it takes us? The answer is always to remember that waves pass, and that our trust must be in the ocean itself, not in what it manifests.
My last thoughts, for now, are as follows: my wish for you is that you do the work needed to awaken within you this understanding -- the wisdom that is one and the same as unfailing trust: regardless of passing circumstances, nothing bad can happen to what is genuinely good in us.
