Fear / Fearlessness

Key Lesson: What is past is colorless; neither does it have texture, any taste or odor. To lend any one of these qualities to what is no more is to transform what may be useful now into a prison of painfully pre-determined outcomes.

Key Lesson: Starve a fear and feed your freedom. Key Question: How can we be devoured by any thought? Might as well believe that a shadow can consume the light that creates it! Second Key lesson: The more any painful thought or dark feeling asks of you, the less you must give it.

Part 1: You cannot hide from what you fear; it is impossible. Part 2: You cannot believe in fear, and free yourself from it at the same time!

Freedom is what remains when we see -- with new eyes -- that we have never been anything else.

We can either spend our lives shaking in fear each time an unwanted moment arrives -- trying to protect ourselves from it -- or we can use that same situation to see through the false self that believes being fearful can lead to the end of being afraid.

The real cause of any fear, anxiety, or dark emotion isn't because of some unwanted condition that appears before our eyes -- it hides behind them. These dark, seemingly animated shadows are temporary creations; they are cast by a false light of some imagined, brighter time to come that -- even as we identify with it -- causes us to fear it may not come to pass.

Fear and anxiety do not exist outside of an old mind that -- moment by moment -- creates these dark states in a deeply divided space within itself.

No matter how challenging the condition may be, regardless how steep the learning curve -- or wide the gap between what you desire to do, and yet cannot -- the first limitation you meet in these moments is always one and the same as an invitation to transcend it. The first imperfection is spiritual self-ignorance.

In this life, death is inevitable; but living in fear of it... is not. And though it is a paradox, to be sure, to see that we live as “prisoners” of our own imagined fears reveals the unimaginable possibility of making the leap into a new, and higher level of being that never dies.

Where is tomorrow's fear other than in today's imagination? And, if this is true -- and IT IS -- then what to do with our attention in the here and now? Let it be swallowed up in the dark shadow of what "may be"...or hold it in the Light of awareness where no shadow can dwell, let alone its fear?

Whatever seems impossible, or otherwise impassible in life is inseparable from the extent of our resistance to it; a fear inherent in the way we're conditioned to see such moments. To realize the nature of this fear is to be released from it, no matter when or how it presents itself along the Way.

Imagine trying to see the whole of an ocean through a ship's porthole, and we have a pretty good idea why (our) life can so often feel small and confined; as if we have no choice but to be swept out to sea on a single wave of some fearful thought or feeling.