There are many fears, but essentially they are all derivatives of a single fear - branches of one single tree. The name of this tree is Death. It is important to realize that all other fears are ultimately subjugated to this one. Because when you know the true root, something can be done to remove all fear once and for all.
If death is the fundamental root of fear, there is only one antidote which can eliminate this fear: The consistent experience of an indestructible deathless consciousness (Sanskrit: Amata-Dhatu). The stable experience of the deepest aspect of conscious awareness is paramount to realization and full enlightenment and is also referred to as fearlessness, or the Lion's Roar.
Only deep meditation can confidently deliver this transcendent experience consistently and protect you from all fears, including the fear of death - nothing else - neither money, nor power, nor intellectual knowledge, nor devotion for a spiritual tradition or teacher. Only accessing consciousness through deep meditation away from the world of the senses exposes your true nature. These states may be initially accessed through devotion, through chanting, through the breath, etc...but stable confidence happens through joyful concentrated effort and discipline.
Deep Meditation (Sanskrit: Dhyana Pali: Jhana) reveals to you that your body is going to die, that your cognitive mind and your temporal identity will die, but - that a deep awareness exists
beyond the mind-body-experience - a timeless existence that is without beginning and without end. By returning to deep states of meditation in time you will become free from fear, anxiety and the felt state of routine calamity being just around the corner.
It has always been, and you have always been in innumerable forms and innumerable lives and you will know this with an experiential and unshakable conviction.
And you will be free from all Doubt and Fear. Once freed from Fear you will be free to live, to be yourself without concern for meeting social conventions or expectations. You will live with integrity - meaning that there will be a beautiful and ongoing coherent relationship between how you think, your speech and how you feel about life and the world around you.
The truth is until you face and let go of the Fear of Death you cannot truly live, and until you forgive yourself for being anything less than your innate pure potential, and until you forgive the circumstances and situations you have put yourself in due to limiting your own unbridled imagination you cannot move forward.
You will be then free to dream, and to truly love limitlessly. And to truly live without parameters - expansive and creative - a life without limitations beyond time and space, beyond the material and immaterial, beyond perception and non-perception is like coming home to your true heart - to your true luminous nature. You will be simply and profoundly grateful just to be.
A year from now you will arrive, the question is where will you be? In fear, or free? Let the dynamic grace of pure presence wash over you like poetry, allow it to bring you to your knees willingly. May you experience that which cannot be named - the deathless, and may you be free from fear.
"I dream of painting and then I paint my dream." - Vincent Van Gogh
Why are you so afraid of silence, silence is the root of everything. If you spiral into its void, a hundred voices will thunder messages you long to hear. - Rumi
May you be happy, may you be well, safe, peaceful and at ease
Compassion
How can you trust the mind that sees things so differently in different moods?
In the same moment, in the same place...
When anger is present, your ego will demand that reality be different than it is. When the mind is colored by anxiety, you will create a projected mental space that hasn’t happened that is so awful that even you couldn’t stand. With a mind imbued with depression you will create non-existent needs that you are helpless to do anything about. A mind that feels guilt will irrationally decide that you have done something so wrong that your own value and worth as a dignified human being has been diminished.
Try and imagine how even the space you’re in now would appear with and without these emotions present. Now try and imagine a relationship with and without these, expand this out to your life and your world. Just imagine how your life would appear with and without these destructive emotions.
Because you did not fully cultivate and refine the ability to observe emotional mood states come and go without attachment you will suddenly find that you have become the person you never wanted to be. You will become frightened by the monsters of your own making. No medication will save you. You must learn how to use the innate power of your mind.
You are not temporary emotional states, nor do these states belong to you - and again - emotional states are not you or yours. Stop seeking different states and you will finally see that emotional states are illusion-like waves on the ocean of unchanging awareness.
Contemplation....let’s see how well you know yourself: mentally review the past day and count as many changing moods and emotional states as possible and see if you are able classify and identify what type of states those were exactly. Since these emotional states are very likely the lens you were seeing through and subjecting yourselves and others to, it would seem as a responsible, kind and empathetic person that you would indeed have an extraordinary interest in such a query. Afterall, you are not a sociopath and you frequently believe that you care about others, and perhaps even believe you are deeply sensitive. Surely you would not like to bring yourself or others pain unnecessarily? Of course, because the pain is simply too great you would obviously take the time each day to train the mind in meditation to observe passing emotions without attachment.
As long as you live, keep learning how to love all that rises and falls on the playgrounds and fields of conscious awareness - for all that appears is inseparable from the primordial and luminous nature of mind itself. A mind that can observe these empty shifting spontaneous emotive experiences without attachment is free, and therefore we can say that this mind is imbued with compassion. This is what we refer to as Bodhicitta
In Loving Kindness
Metta
Michael
