|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
by Eckhart Tolle
How does fear arise, and why is there so much of it in people’s lives? 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 that you don’t put your hand in the fire is not because of fear; it’s because you know 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 physical violence, you might experience something like fear. This is an instinctive shrinking back from danger, but not the psychological condition of fear we are talking about here.
The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete, true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear always relates to something that might happen, not to something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. 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. Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defence mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and sees itself as constantly under threat. This is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident. Remember that an emotion is your body’s reaction to your mind. What message does the body continuously receive from the ego, the false, mind-made self? “Danger!” “I am under threat.” And which emotion is 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. 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, and 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 unidentified with your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference at all to your sense of self, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, disappears. You can state clearly and firmly how you feel, and what you think, without any aggressiveness or defensiveness. Your sense of self then derives from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the mind.
Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you unidentify with it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will 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.
People, who are identified with their minds, and, therefore, disconnected from their true power, will have fear as their constant companion. The number of people who have surpassed 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 varies, fluctuating 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.
From The Power of Now, copyright 1999 by Eckhart Tolle. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA, 800-972-6657 (ext. 52), $14 US, $15.75 Canada, trade paperback, New World Library and Namaste Publishing. www.newworldlibrary.com, www.namastepublishing.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
