You mentioned fear as being part of our basic underlying emotional
pain. How does fear arise, and why is there so much of it in people’s
lives? And isn’t a certain amount of fear just healthy self-protection? If
I didn’t have a fear of fire, I might put my hand in it and get burned.
The reason why you don’t put your hand in the fire is not because of
fear, it’s because you know that you’ll get burned. You don’t need fear
to avoid unnecessary danger — just a minimum of intelligence and
common sense. For such practical matters, it is useful to apply the
lessons learned in the past. Now if someone threatened you with fire
or with physical violence, you might experience something like fear.
This is an instinctive shrinking back from danger, but not the
psychological condition of fear that we are talking about here. The
psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true
immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety,
nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of
psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of
something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while
your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. And if you are
identified with your mind and have lost touch with the power and
simplicity of the Now, that anxiety gap will be your constant
companion. You can always cope with the present moment, but you
cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection — you
cannot cope with the future.
Moreover, as long as you are identified with your mind, the ego runs
your life, as I pointed out earlier. Because of its phantom nature, and
despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable
and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the
way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident. Now
remember that an emotion is the body’s reaction to your mind. What
message is the body receiving continuously from the ego, the false,
mind-made self? Danger, I am under threat. And what is the emotion
generated by this continuous message? Fear, of course.
Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of
being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death,
of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In
this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your
life. For example, even such a seemingly trivial and “normal” thing as
the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other
person wrong — defending the mental position with which you have
identified — is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental
position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is
seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot
afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought
over this, and countless relationships have broken down.
Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or
wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the
forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which
is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can state clearly
and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no
aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then
derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the
mind. Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What
are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a
fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it,
you disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the
unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve. This is the end of all
arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships.
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is
within, and it is available to you now.
So anyone who is identified with their mind and, therefore,
disconnected from their true power, their deeper self rooted in Being,
will have fear as their constant companion. The number of people
who have gone beyond mind is as yet extremely small, so you can
assume that virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of
fear. Only the intensity of it varies. It fluctuates between anxiety and
dread at one end of the scale and a vague unease and distant sense
of threat at the other. Most people become conscious of it only when
it takes on one of its more acute forms.