Transcription
Okay, so going further into this question of fear and anxiety. And want to explore in particular a number of possible approaches that the contemplative path and meditative path might make available. So just some of the possible approaches. One thing that's quite interesting: we experience fear, and we actually suffer in relationship to fear. But oftentimes, because fear is unpleasant, we withdraw from it, and we're not always that clear exactly what it is we're withdrawing from. Exactly what is fear? What is the experience of fear? I mean, on one level, we all know exactly what it is. What is anxiety?
But it's worth, I think, going into, in a way, and having a really close look at what makes up fear, as part of the meditative approach. So, we can take a good, close look at the experience, and what we find is, it's actually a constellation or an aggregate of experiences. And we can break that down, not for the sake of complexity or being anal or anything, but just actually because, in that breaking down, it offers various possibilities of approaching it. What do we see when we approach fear and the experience of it?
(1) Well, there is usually a bodily component of fear -- in its extreme manifestation, heart thumping, butterflies in the tummy, maybe hands sweating, whatever. Bodily sensations are often a part of the experience of fear. And usually, they're unpleasant. So unpleasant bodily sensations are a sort of basic characteristic of the fear experience. And with those, with the unpleasant bodily sensation, is a reaction. Their being unpleasant, we basically -- our reaction is, we don't like it. We want to get rid of these unpleasant bodily sensations. That's just there as a sort of aspect of fear.
(2) Thought, oftentimes -- not always, but oftentimes, there's a lot of thought activity going on in the experience of fear. Interestingly, don't know if you -- maybe people notice this -- oftentimes, the thoughts are future-based. Have you noticed that, how fear thinking is often about what will happen? Even if it's only a few seconds from now, it's future-based. But thought is, a lot of the time, it's part of the package. Thoughts and assumptions, and assumptions about all kinds of things, about oneself, about a situation, about another, about the future. But interestingly, oftentimes, the assumptions are not always seen. They're not always totally conscious, and that, again, is part of a package of fear. And again, usually, these thoughts, these fear thoughts, are unpleasant, and there's a reaction to them. The mind be whirling around with thought and difficult thought and fearful thought, and there's a reaction to that. The body, unpleasant sensations, a reaction; a thought, usually unpleasant, and reaction.
(3) And the third, you could say, component of fear is what you might call -- it's a little bit more subtle to explain, but what you might call the felt experience of the climate or the texture of the mind. So usually, in fear, the sense of the mental space kind of shrinks. Have you ever had to perform anything or present something at work? And you get up there in front, you look, and there's a sea of faces, and the mind shrinks to about the size of a couscous grain or something. [laughter] There's this sense of just, woop. And usually, when we're relaxed, the mind is more open. Human beings generally like the experience of the mind, the mental space feeling more open. So again, that mental constriction is unpleasant, and the unpleasantness -- there's a reaction to it: don't like, want to get rid of, want it to go away.
So those three aspects -- (1) the body (unpleasant sensations, the reaction), (2) the thoughts (unpleasant, reaction), and (3) the mental space constricting (and a reaction to that) -- that knotted ball of spaghetti makes up the experience of fear. Why that might be interesting is because they each provide us with avenues of approaching and working with the fear. It's not to be anal or over-complex. They provide little strings that we can pull on and follow in working with fear.
So as I said this morning, perhaps the most basic approach to working with fear is actually bringing the mindfulness, bringing the attentiveness to the fear itself. So if you're very new to meditation -- this came up in the question period this morning -- usually we think about meditation as, "I'm going to pay attention to my breath or this or that." In this tradition, Insight Meditation tradition, actually, every element of our experience, every element of our lives is open to investigation, to bringing that same kind of attentiveness and inquiry as we bring to the breath. So we can bring our awareness, our investigative mindfulness, to everything. And that includes the experience of fear. And the most basic place to start would be with the physical sensations of the manifestation of fear, and just allowing the awareness, in the same way it touches the breath, to touch those sensations, to open to those sensations, and in a way, to become familiar and intimate with them.
[6:43] Usually, when there's fear, as I said, we're actually afraid of fear. We fear fear. Because fear is unpleasant, we actually are afraid of drawing close to it. So there's fear of fear. I'm going to come back to this. But what that means is, we don't often let ourselves draw close to the basic experience of fear, and actually draw close to, "What is this? Can I just be with it, find out what it is, and let the being become intimate with it, let the awareness become intimate with it?" So mindfulness of the basic kind of sensations of fear.
And actually, I have to sort of backtrack just slightly here. Equally important in working with fear, as well as what I've just said -- putting the mind onto the physical manifestations of fear and just being steady with them -- is doing the opposite and taking the mind off the sensations of fear and putting it somewhere in the body where there is no experience of fear. So you feel afraid. Something's going on. Everything's rumbling and beating away, etc. How are your earlobes doing? [laughter] Is the fear manifesting in the earlobes? Toes -- how are the toes? It's quite rare. I have yet to come across someone who's told me their toes are feeling fear. There will be parts in the body that feel quite okay.
Now, this is important, because sometimes, our attention, it's dragged. Not sometimes, a lot of the time, it gets dragged into where there is a problem. And it gets dragged into it in a way that's actually not helpful, and in a way that makes the problem area, the fear, feel huge and all-encompassing. One of the characteristics of fear is that it can begin to take up everything, take up all the space of consciousness. It's really worth just taking a step back, finding a couple of areas in the body that just feel okay, putting the attention there, just for a few moments, maybe longer. It's not the exclusive practice, but just to have some sense of relief, but also sense of perspective, because that's often one thing that we lose with fear is a sense of perspective. So really checking into areas of the body where there is no manifestation of fear.
[9:10] So that stance, in complement with the other approach of diving right into the fear and actually letting oneself open to it and explore it, the bodily sensations. Now, this exploring of the bodily sensations is absolutely key. Gradually, over time, we can develop a capacity to open to fear and to be with fear. And by letting ourselves, by practising in this way, and drawing close to the physical manifestations of fear, gradually, slowly, over time, we develop our ability to just be with the sensations of fear. We develop that capacity. That's priceless, absolutely priceless.
Now, sometimes, in meditation, when one is not feeling fear, there's actually a relative degree of calmness and quietness, to whatever degree. If that ever happens ... [laughs] When that's there, actually, no fear is around, you can, if you want, decide to explore and actually sacrifice some of that calmness, and just bring to mind what it is that brings fear up for you, brings up anxiety. And deliberately, in the stillness of the meditation posture, in that period of meditation, you just drop in a few thoughts of whatever produces fear for you usually. And just watch what happens. Watch it reverberating in the being. Watch it ricocheting. The blessing of that is that, for the most part, the meditation period, and the meditation posture, is actually a safe scenario. It's a safe area. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to appear any way, or look good, or not look bad, or act in a certain way, or decide this or that. It's safe. Nothing's happening there. Doesn't matter what you look like. So just to drop it in, in the stillness, for the sake of practising, practising being with the sensations of fear. Just dropping it in, and using the meditation posture and the period, just to develop that capacity gradually.
What happens over time is that we can develop a confidence with these sensations of fear. If there's one thing that's usually lacking when fear is around, it's exactly that: confidence in the face of fear. Fear comes up, and we don't feel confident in relationship to it. We don't feel confident with the physical sensations of fear. One of the reasons why fear has so much clout and so much authority is because we lack confidence. So mindfulness of the sensations, hugely important, the sort of basic practice.
[12:30] Second piece: what is the relationship with the experience of fear? What is the relationship to these sensations of fear? Usually, almost exclusively, there's aversion to those sensations. As I said, they're unpleasant, and we're actually afraid of them. We have fear of fear. And we flee them. We want to flee. We want to get rid of these unpleasant sensations, the unpleasant experience of fear. Very understandable, very normal. Unfortunately, that fleeing does not come without a cost. It's not a neutral factor in this kind of soup of fear. The fleeing actually makes the experience of fear increase. Our very fleeing from fear increases the experience of fear. It also makes it feel more difficult. What feels like the most natural instinct -- to remove ourselves, to get rid of this experience of fear -- actually makes it worse and makes it feel more difficult. It's not neutral, our reaction to it. Our reaction is actually part of the constellation of fear. It's part of what makes fear up.
What happens? Here I am, feeling some fear. The tummy's churning or whatever. I don't like those unpleasant sensations. I want to get away from them. I flee them. Where do I flee to, usually? Where do I flee to? Right up into the head. The energy goes way up into the head. It's as if all the energy goes fleeing the physical sensations in the body, gets up into the head, adds energy to what's already whirling around there in that vortex, because I'm fleeing the anxious sensations in the body, and creates a spiralling in terms of the thought and the mental energy. Now, usually, the kind of thinking that's already present in fear is not very helpful. It's not kind of lucid and helpful. It's usually stuck in a loop of unhelpful thinking. You've just injected a tremendous amount of energy into it, and the whole thing's increasing. So there's an increase in the fear.
[15:03] So the reaction that we have -- this actually applies to everything, but especially with fear -- the reaction that we have is actually part of the anxiety. It's not separate. So we can tend to think, "There's the fear." And then, "Okay, I have a reaction to the fear or response to the fear, or relationship with it." But they're not two separate things. If I take away my reaction to the fear, if I am able to relax that or take it away, what I notice, what I will notice is that the fear cannot support itself. The fear cannot support itself without my reaction to it being one of aversion and fleeing, and fear of the fear. So please, not to just take it for granted just because I'm saying it or someone else says it or whatever. But this is something we can actually experiment with. We can play with this in our practice. What we realize is that the more we can relax that reaction to the fear and take it away, so to speak, the more the fear cannot stand, cannot support itself. The reaction is part of it.
So this is really important. Just generally speaking, what is my reaction, response, relationship to the experience of fear in the moment? Am I putting a pressure on it to be different, a pressure on myself or it to be different? Because that kind of pressure, it basically acts as a kind of pressure cooker. We put pressure on the situation. It just agitates the whole situation, the whole experience of fear.
Am I judging myself because there's fear there? Do I assume fear shouldn't be here, and that the presence of fear right now means that I'm weak, or unspiritual, or stupid, or whatever it is? That judging oneself is also a pressure. It's also a pressure that we add, and it's not neutral. It actually increases the fear.
[17:16] What am I assuming the presence of fear means about myself or about my practice? What am I assuming? "Because I've been meditating for X years, and here I am feeling fear again," what am I assuming? Remembering that incredibly unremarkable story that I started with from the Buddha. Well, that story was, it doesn't say exactly when, but it was somewhere after, sometime after leaving the palace -- and many of you know the story with the prince, and he left the palace and went to practise. Sometime after leaving the palace and before complete, unexcelled liberation, total awakening. It was a period of six years. So somewhere in that six-year period, he was quaking as the wind blew through the trees, because he thought it was ghosts or something. And only a short period before complete, unexcelled liberation, this guy, supposedly. So not to judge what it necessarily means, just because we have fear, about ourselves, about our practice.
Is it possible that kindness can come in? Is it possible that kindness can embrace our experience of fear? This is so key. Actually, in the question and answer period before, it came up, this practice of loving-kindness. The Buddha introduced it as an antidote to fear.[1] It's really, really crucial. So to acknowledge how human it is to have fear, to have anxiety. Can we, in a way, see our own humanity and meet that with kindness?
If sometimes, actually talking about that loving-kindness practice that we were mentioning in the question and answer period, you know, one wishes oneself well: "May I be well. May I be at peace. May I be happy, etc. May I be at ease." And sometimes we have fear. And it's almost as if "May I be well" means "May I be well when this fear is gone." We exclude the fear. In that moment, you could say, "Who am I? Who is the self in that moment? It's me, with fear. That's who I am, not someone else." And to very much include that in the sense of our selves and our humanity, and what the kindness actually meets.
[20:00] And we can also, in a way, have or practise another approach. We can practise having kindness towards the fear itself. And what I mean by that is, as I said, usually, when there's fear, we're afraid of it. We want to get rid of it. We want to push it away, the experience of fear. What if, instead of focusing so much on the awareness of the fear that I was talking about before, and "What does it exactly feel like, and what's the experience?", and getting very intimate with the sensations, and "How does it feel?" -- instead of the emphasis on that, sometimes, what would it be to have the emphasis, as much as possible, on welcoming, totally welcoming the physical experience of fear?
Now, that might sound bonkers. I don't know. What would it be? Usually, we're pushing it away. What if we just open, open, open the awareness and welcome these difficult sensations, emphasizing that welcoming, emphasizing that acceptance? That's actually an extremely powerful way of working with fear, extremely powerful. What's happening then is one is undermining this fear of fear. One's doing the opposite thing of the tendency to get rid of the fear. You're saying, "Welcome, welcome, accept, open, open, open," not worrying so much about the clarity of the mindfulness, etc., and the intimacy, just welcoming. And one's taking away that fear of the fear. It's very powerful. So all this, I'm really wanting to just offer things to experiment with, to play with.
I remember -- I can't remember exactly when it was -- some years ago, four or five years ago. It was actually a little while before taking that trip to India that I was talking about earlier, working with the leprosy community. And I was on a personal retreat, a solitary retreat at Gaia House. And my health was not that good at the time. I was struggling a little bit with my health. I had this trip to India coming up, and noticed very quietly, in the sort of background of the awareness, this anxiety, just a subtle kind of nagging anxiety about the health and how it would be in India. And I had been to India twenty years before that, and actually got quite ill there, and not really been the same health-wise since then. And just practising with this and noticing this very, very subtle sort of gnawing anxiety in the background. And being an experienced meditator, was sort of trying all kinds of meditative kung fu ... [laughter] To basically get rid of it, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And at some point, it finally just [snaps fingers], "Ah!" It hit me: "I'm basically trying to get rid of this. I'm trying to push it away, and I'm not embracing it." And so it was very clear. And then I just shifted to really welcoming it and really embracing it. And all the thoughts -- "Oh, I'll get ill again. It's going to take ages to get better," etc., and just embracing all that, embracing it.
And quite soon afterwards, there was a shift. Just as soon as I did that, it began to soften it, and there was a shift. So this turning towards, opening and embracing, and what happened was the whole experience began to soften. And then it sort of felt like the fear was still there, but somehow my self and the fear, which felt like a very young fear, like a sort of little boy or something, my self and this fear were going to go to India together and kind of check out India. [laughs] The sense of, yeah, going together. And then all the kind of excitement and the sort of openness and eagerness was actually able to come back into the experience. And actually, then, after that, the fear itself just dissolved. But it was all in just shifting that movement and opening to allow, to embrace, to welcome.
[25:03] We said that one of the aspects of fear is this mental constriction. The mind shrinks on itself. And this is quite an interesting one. It's quite an interesting facet of fear. I've noticed, for myself in the past, and meeting many people, and working with many people in their practice, there are times in someone's life -- for some people this is relevant -- some times where anxiety can actually become a habit, that the mind kind of just keeps gravitating towards anxiety, towards a state or a sense of anxiety. It's almost like the mental groove has become one of anxiety. It can be quite common, and either for long -- you know, sometimes, for some people, decades of this. And for other people, sort of shorter periods.
What I've noticed -- and this really isn't the whole story at all; it's one part, but I think it's quite significant in many cases -- is that oftentimes, anxiety is a habit when there is an ongoing climate of self-judgment. When there's an ongoing climate of, in a way, a lack of self-love, that somehow, that's a perfect inner environment for anxiety, as a habit, to take root. And the mind just keeps going back there. It's a very interesting kind of phenomenon. What's going on there? Why is that the case? If we think about this quality of loving-kindness we were talking about earlier, the kindness and love, in the way that that manifests, it has a very calming quality to it, kindness and loving-kindness, a very calming and spacious quality. Now, anxiety is, by definition, not calming, not spacious, something opposite to love there.
[27:15] When there are self-judging thoughts around and self-criticism and all that stuff, they actually feel like they cramp the mind. They're oppressive. To judge oneself in that way feels oppressive to the consciousness. One is kind of shrinking the mind, constricting the mind, which is an element of anxiety. As I said, it's one of the elements. And so it's just a short nudge over from this kind of constricted self-judging state into anxiety. Certain kinds of fear are bred -- in a way, they fester very easily in that climate of not such great self-love, not-so-developed self-love. And so, particularly, fears like fear of failure, fear of being a failure, fear of not being good enough, fear -- and this is an interesting one, quite common -- fear of being bad or discovering that one is actually a bad person deep down, that the truth of oneself is a kind of unworthiness and a badness. And to some people that might sound a little strange. But actually it's quite common, extremely painful at an existential level, to consider that one is kind of afraid of looking inside, lest one discover that one is bad or evil, even. So kindness and love -- really, really necessary, really indispensable in working with fear, especially when fear has become, or feels like it's become kind of more of a long-term habit pattern of the consciousness. Really, really important, that aspect of kindness.
The mind constricts, as I said, as part of fear. So partly, what can be really helpful is actually doing the opposite thing, opening the mind up. So sometimes when there's fear about something, the mind constricts around something. What if we just went and did something else? Go play, you know, badminton. That's quite a craze now at Gaia House -- not as part of the retreats, but ... [laughter] the managers and things. Just do something that has nothing to do with what the mind is obsessing about. It's actually quite skilful. Play badminton with someone who's much better than you, and they've got you running all over the court, and you ... [panting noises] [laughter] It's actually quite skilful. Just take the mind off that thing.
Still on this constriction of the mind, the mind constricts. It can be very skilful, meditatively speaking, to pay attention to physical space. It's quite an interesting one. This room, for instance, it's not a small room. It's got some space to it. You can actually open up the awareness, open the eyes, and take in the space of the room. Again, when there's fear, consciousness shrinks. Start paying attention to space or looking, you know, sky-gazing, looking at the sky, taking in a lot of space. And the consciousness, in a way, follows the vision and gets broader, more spacious, moving away from that constriction of anxiety. So very, very skilful to pay attention to physical space -- skilful in a lot of ways, but particularly around fear.
[31:05] So there's the mindfulness, and particularly the mindfulness of the sensations, and the bare sensations, and touching the bare experience. There's this investigation into the relationship with fear -- very important, the fear of fear. And can I actually counteract that by completely welcoming?
Sometimes, often, we need to undermine the authority of fear by actually deliberately challenging it. Now, oftentimes, through our lives, we have unfortunately developed a habit of being dictated to by fear. It's fear and anxiety in our minds that have the power and have the authority. Fear says, "Do this," and we do that. Fear says, "Don't do that," and we don't do that. It has too much authority, in a way. And so part of the path with fear, it's not just about meditation and sitting on the cushion and sitting quietly, etc. It actually involves working in the life and challenging it by doing, because usually, as I said, when fear's around, we do what it says, and we don't do what it says not to do. Or we flee the whole experience. So can we find ways to begin challenging fear in our lives by actually doing the opposite of what it says?
Now, this is so interesting. But as I said at the beginning, some fear in our life is not that tangible. We're not that sensible of it. We don't recognize it. But if you think about such basic things in our life as food and sleep, and how much fear there can be around that: "What if I don't get enough sleep?" It's not something the heart's going to be thumping over, usually. But as a sort of quiet, subtle fear that runs through the life, it's an example of something that can have a lot of power. Now, our lives, I think, are actually full of these kind of things -- in relationship to food, to what people think, to sleep, and all kinds of things. And part of the sort of call of practice is to begin uncovering them, and begin to be willing to practise with them. So what would it be? Just say, "I'm just going to take two hours less sleep one night." Just, to hell with it. To hell with the power that fear has, the unquestioned authority that it has. Or food: "I'm just going to fast one day. Not diet, but fast. Or miss a meal, or whatever."
[33:53] Oftentimes, in our lives, we're not actually aware of this stuff. And it's interesting being at a retreat centre so much of the time, and working in that environment, because there, people are kind of right face-to-face with a lot of this kind of level of fear that one doesn't actually meet, because one has so much control in one's everyday life. One doesn't realize that a lot of that control is actually just keeping fear at bay. It's just keeping fear at bay. And in a way, what the Buddhadharma is saying is, shake it up, shake it up, shake it up. No big shoulds here. Just for the sake of exploration, for the willingness to explore and to see -- what is my life? What has my life become? What can it be?
Now, you know, we have this tradition of dāna, generosity. As teachers in this tradition, we live solely from what's offered to us out of that dāna and generosity. And I had a student a while ago -- she's still a student, but this was a while ago. And when she first started working with me, she would give really a lot of dāna. She would give me really a lot of money for, you know, in gratitude for the teachings -- which is great, you know, wonderful. But at a certain point, I just began questioning her about it and just saying, you know, "Where is this coming from?" I didn't mean, "Where is it ...?" [laughter] "In yourself, where is it coming from?" And it did turn out that actually it was coming from a fear of being perceived as stingy. Now, usually, most people, it's exactly the opposite. There's quite a fear of giving, lest I won't have enough, "And what if I need it?" And again, money -- huge amount, and now we've got this recession, so in the banks and all that. And it's, ugh! You know, understandable. But the Dharma keeps saying, "Have a look. Be willing to shake it. Be willing to shake it up." Not easy, but in a way, if we're going to follow a path like this, this is what it's about. Usually it's the other way around, but in this case, it was a fear of being perceived as stingy.
[36:05] Or you have a meditation practice, and you're used to, every day you sit for half an hour, forty-five minutes, and that's it. And that's what one does at retreat. What would it be to just sit longer sometimes? Sit for an hour and a quarter or something. Sometimes there can be fear around that. And just to shake things up.
Could actually be the opposite. I remember I was teaching in France with some friends, and we were sitting around, and one friend, Dave, said -- we got into this conversation about who sat every day. It was sort of not, you know, teachers, just a bunch of practitioners. And so he was asking, "Do you sit every day?" And people were saying different answers. And he came to me, and he said, "Rob, do you sit every day?" And I said, "Yeah, I sit every day." And he said ... [laughter] He said, "Okay, when was the last day you didn't sit?" And I was like, "Hmm." And I thought, "Oh! It was that day I was under general anaesthetic at the hospital." [laughter] But I realized, what's going on there? I mean, partly I just love it. But partly, actually, there's an attachment to keeping hold of the pristine, radiant consciousness or whatever. [laughter] There's actually a very, very subtle fear operating there. Can I shake it up? Can I explore it? Can I challenge it? So, just to repeat, though, no shoulds in this. It's actually a movement of kindness. It's a movement of kindness and exploration, curiosity, inquisitiveness.
So we challenge by doing. We also challenge in thought. As I said, one of the aspects of fear is thought. A lot of thought involved in fear, often. Now, meditatively speaking, when we work with thought, for us to observe thought and work creatively with thought, in a useful way with thought, we need to be anchored in the body. So that mindfulness of the body sensations needs to be there, because thought is so slippery, and so quick, and so seductive. Usually, we try to follow thought, and we just get dragged somewhere. But if the mindfulness of the body is there, it's a kind of anchoring from which to observe thought, for the most part.
[38:34] But challenging anxiety in thought -- what am I believing about this situation? What am I believing about this? This is really important, because these beliefs are going to be feeding the fear. What am I believing? Can I bring that to consciousness? Can I have a look in this bag of assumptions that are often unquestioned? And just rummage around in there, and say, "Goodness me! Look what's in here!" What's operating that keeps the fear active, and actually is strengthening it, supporting it? Because I will be reacting to that, to those unquestioned beliefs and assumptions -- about the situation, about myself, and about another. So I'm afraid what someone or some people might think of me -- what am I assuming? What am I believing? Very important, very interesting to inquire into.
We have a lot of thoughts as human beings. I don't know how many. [laughs] But an awful lot. If we believe all our thoughts -- boy, you know, that's a nightmare. That's a guaranteed recipe for suffering, right there: to believe our thoughts unquestioningly. So questioning these assumptions. For myself, one of the things that I struggle with periodically is -- well, it's ill health. So I have Crohn's disease, which some of you will know. Some of you maybe never heard of it. It's a disease mostly of the digestive system. And they haven't figured out a cure for it yet. Basically, it comes and goes, and it's a not a very nice thing to have. And so there are these periods when I'm really fine, and others when I'm ill. And also periods when one's fine and feels oneself on the edge of getting ill. Kind of, you know, I think, "Oh, am I going to get ill now, or what?" And usually, when one gets ill, it really takes quite a while to get better. It takes sort of a long time.
I began to notice, at a certain point, that in that period, when one feels the beginning of the symptoms come, and "Oh no, oh no! I'm getting ill," that there was a whole bunch of perceptions operating just below the radar. And I was assuming, "Oh, if I get ill, it's going to stop me working. It's going to stop me socializing in the way that I want to, maybe get in the way of intimacy with a partner, etc., would stop me travelling, etc." All this was kind of operating just underneath the radar of awareness. Began to uncover that, and actually began to turn around and question those assumptions. And I thought back on all the times I've been ill. Did it stop me working? Actually, no, it didn't. It didn't stop me working. What it did is slowed things down. But actually, I still worked. Didn't stop me, you know, being social, etc. It had some effects on that. It didn't stop me being with a partner. Didn't stop me travelling. It got more complicated, more of a hassle, but didn't stop it. And the assumption was that "It will stop me ... dot dot dot." And actually it wasn't true. We want to investigate a lot of these assumptions with fear, because a lot of them just aren't true. They're just not true. And yet they're operating. They have their power, and they go unquestioned.
[42:26] So sometimes it's worth going to the end of a thought chain with this. We say, "If this happens, then ugh ..." You know. What is the dot dot dot there? What is the dot dot dot? Can we actually take the trouble to go to the end of the thought chain and see? "So what if ...? So what if they think I'm stupid? So what? So what if you think I'm stupid? Really, so what?" To actually go there and question, "Would that really be so bad?" And how much fear we have in terms of social anxiety, what people think of us. "So what if they think I'm stupid? So what if they think I'm boring, ugly, whatever it is? So what? So what if I fail at something?" There's life in this question, "So what?" It's not just words. "What does it mean? What would it be to fail? Would that be really a problem?" Or with the sleep thing: "So what if I'm tired?" Sometimes we just don't go to the end of the thought chain and question. "So what if I lose weight because I'm ill? So what?" And sometimes this can be so, so strong, this kind of sense of not wanting to give fear power, too much power. "So what I die, even? So what if I die?"
I used to live in Boston, and was living there at the time of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. And I don't know how it was over here, but over there -- Boston was one of the places where some of the hijackers took off from, and the level of fear was unbelievable in the one, two, three days immediately after. People didn't know what was going on. It was mayhem. I think in one day, every army surplus store had sold out of gas masks and things like that. People were just expecting -- didn't know what to expect. They'd just gone completely bananas with fear.
And I think it was two days after the attacks, there was a Buddhist Peace Fellowship which had a chapter in Boston, and I was a little bit part of it. And we kind of decided to hold a peace vigil. So the implication was, "Okay, now, march into Afghanistan, and start blowing everything up." We wanted to just go and hold a peace vigil in Boston. And so we decided to do that, and they were issuing -- I didn't think they'd do it in this country, but they had levels of terrorist alerts. Do you have those? Per day, I can't remember if it was a red alert or this alert -- different kind of, how likely it is that something, a terrorist attack, would take place that day. And this day, two days after, was a high degree of -- I can't remember if it's a red -- a high-degree alert.
And we went and had this peace vigil. Quite a number of people had this peace vigil on a little patch of grass underneath the tallest building in Boston. [laughter] It's like, "I'm going to stand here for peace, and I don't care if this thing falls on my head!" I mean, it wasn't really likely to, as far as I was concerned. But it's more like, seeing all the fear around, just saying, "You know what? I am actually not interested in living that way. I'm not interested in living a life that's run over, that's riddled through, diseased through with fear. Even though everyone seems to be agreeing on it, just don't want it. I'd rather die." Incidentally, the tallest two buildings in Boston are insurance buildings. [laughter] Says something about how big fear is in -- how big business. Fear is big business. It also sells a lot of in terms of entertainment. It's huge. Fear is huge.
Assumptions -- what are the assumptions that I'm making about what I need to be happy; about what I need, but particularly about what I need to be happy? I remember I was reading the New York Times a while ago. And there was an article about this high school, a very academic high school where kids would get sent and really kind of churned through this academic system to try and get them, get better grades, and get on in life. And they were about age twelve or thirteen. It was a boys' school. And they had special exams where they were going to be divided up into streams -- you know, A stream, B stream, etc., the bright ones and the less bright. And they were interviewing some of the boys, and they were all expressing a high degree of stress and anxiety. It was quite amazing. One of them said, "If I don't do well on these exams, I won't get into the A stream. If I don't get into the A stream, I won't get into Harvard [I think it was]. If I don't get into Harvard, I won't get into [I think it was] Yale Law School." So these are very, if you don't know, it's a bit like Oxford and Cambridge of America. "Won't get into the Yale Law School. And if I don't get into Yale Law School, then I'll be on the street." [laughter]
And we laugh. For him, it was a totally clear, like, "This joins with this joins with this joins with this joins with this." Now, we laugh at that. Actually, I was also sent through that kind of system, and I know the stress of that. But the thing is that we also have our own 'join the dots,' where we don't question the movement from this dot to this dot. And we really, really, really need to do that.
[48:27] So why is it, for instance -- or actually, it's separate, in a way, but this assumption about what we need, and particularly what we need to be happy -- why is it that the approval of others has so much power in our lives? Why is it that there's so much fear around what others think of me and whether they think I'm okay, whether they approve of me? Why is that? Why should that have so much clout?
It's an interesting one, but partly, it's because we don't have the inner resources yet. Our inner reservoir of happiness is not built up enough. In a way, then, we're almost like beggars to other people: "Tell me I'm okay!" It's not quite so blatant, but in a way, that's what's going on, partly because we don't have that inner reservoir of happiness. And so we don't feel confidence.
So this is really, really significant in the teachings. What's going to give us that confidence? What's going to give us that confidence, so that we actually feel like we have enough, and we're less dependent on what others think of us, or what we think others may think of us? Because oftentimes it's actually just about that. So I mentioned earlier, oftentimes with fear, it's future-based. There's future thinking. Here's a question: do we really, really, really, really, really know how to take care of the future, really? Do we really know how to take care of the future, in a very fundamental way in our lives? Partly, Dharma teachings say, what that involves is learning what it is that leads to happiness, in terms of what qualities of mind and heart one can cultivate that bring a sense of well-being, bring a sense of happiness, because that is your best possible investment portfolio. [laughter] You know, those words from financial ... whatever it is. Institutions.
[50:47] Probably, to a lot of people, that sounds stupid. It sounds flimsy. It sounds naïve. Actually, to a person of practice, takes lot of maturity of practice to actually realize where the naïveté lives, where the naïveté lies. That really, a really deep and mature practitioner realizes where the best investment is. And that's where they put their energy. And of course, in our life, there's a place for bank accounts and investments and all of that. I'm not putting that aside. But really, what's the really crucial investment? It's quite rare for someone to have that maturity of practice, where they know that, and they're living that, they're living that out.
So how do we take care of the future? (1) One is by cultivating the beautiful qualities of mind and heart, over time, that lead to happiness, that lead to well-being, that lead to a sense of peace and of inner abundance -- massive, massive proportion of what the Dharma is. So cultivation is taking care of the future. We cultivate. We invest in what needs investing in. (2) And we also take care of our relationship to the present moment. When the relationship to the present is one of interest, awareness, openness, kindness, connection, then the present unfolds -- in a way, the future takes care of itself, because we're taking care of the relationship to the present. Those two things together take care of the future.
And really, really, in a very genuine way, we can move towards much less worry in our lives about the future, how it will be for me in the future, "Will I be okay? Will there be enough? Will there be enough money? Will I be secure where I'm living, and this and that? Will I be alone? Will I meet someone? Will I not meet someone? Will they leave me? What happens if they die?" All this -- very understandable and normal human fears. But we can actually move towards, in a very genuine way, actually just being quite free in relationship to that level of worry.
[53:23] I'm going a little over. I hope that's okay, if we're still awake. Yeah? Is that okay? [laughter] I have to check with the boss. [laughter]
You could say something very fundamental about fear. What does fear need to exist? It needs a sense of self. All fear is in relation to this, my sense of self. Now, actually, that's not what I'm going to explore in the last ... [laughter] But just to say, deepening in meditation practice -- that's a real question that we go into and we explore: the nature of this sense of self. Is it what it seems to be? The answer, Dharmically speaking, is no, it's not. And we need to uncover that, because fear is like the axle of a wheel. It's like all fear spins around that centre, the self, the sense of the ego, the sense of self. That needs exploring, because without that hub, the fear cannot sustain.
What I want to explore just for a few minutes is, typically, we have a situation or a thing or an event, and we have a response of fear to it, in relationship to it. Now, it's very normal to assume that here's this thing or event or situation that's going to happen, and this is how I'm relating to it. I'm relating to it right now with fear. The situation is the situation. I'm relating to it out of fear. But I could have a number of responses. I realize that right now, I can't; I'm just in fear. But I could have, theoretically, a number of responses. I could have a response of non-fear, a response of equanimity, of steadiness, a response of disinterest -- you know, all kinds of things. So we tend to assume that here's something, an object, a situation, a thing, and then the relationship with it is something separate, and somehow independent. So the situation remains what the situation is, and I can have all kinds of different relationships to it -- fear or equanimity, or love, or whatever is, greed, whatever.
But actually, Dharmically speaking, as we go deeper into it, that's not actually the nature of reality. It's not actually the nature of reality. We can see this. It's not that an object or a thing or situation and the relationship with it are independent. It's not that. Fear, we can see in our lives, fear colours our perception of something or some event or some situation. It colours our perception quite heavily. It colours our thoughts about an object, a situation, an event. You know, there's fear, and you're walking at night, and there's a shadow. You know, we see a big ... [laughter] Some scary monster thingy. It's actually that the fear is colouring the perception. On one level, that's completely obvious. We all know that. But actually, we need reminding of it. We really need reminding of it.
But in a way, we can take this to another level. We said fear has to do with the future, usually. If I believe that the present, the present moment, is something that exists, in a kind of way, independently, in a real way, independently from the way I'm looking at it, and I would say that it has independent existence -- if I believe in that, then fear of the future is inevitable, if I believe in the present as being something independent. But what I can see, if I investigate this, is that the present moment is always being coloured by the mind state, by the heart state, by the mood, by the consciousness. Perception is always being shaped and fabricated. There is no midpoint of perception which doesn't fabricate a way we are seeing things. So the present moment does not exist independently of the way that I'm looking at it. Typically we believe that it does, and if I believe in a present moment that exists independently, then to borrow an analogy from the Buddha, fear of the future will arise as surely as ... what's the analogy? [laughs] The wheels of the ox-cart follow the ox that pulls it.[2] Believing in an independently existing present moment inevitably brings fear of the future. It's just a matter of time, that it brings fear of the future.
If I begin to look into this and realize that the present moment actually doesn't exist independently, nor does the past -- look back at the past. I think back on my past, and think back on my childhood or my education and see, well, depending on what mood I'm in, or relationship to the past -- that's an interesting one, you know, romantic relationships of the past, and looking back at them, depending on the mood I'm in, how different they are! The past has no inherent existence independent of the way I look at it. Nor does the present. They depend on the mood, the state of mind, all the other factors that are colouring perception. The future is the same. The future is only going to become the present, and going to become the past. It's on its way. So, same thing.
[59:15] When I really begin to look into that deeply, in a way, that's, you could say, the real king of the fear breakers. It's the most powerful that dispels fear: seeing the emptiness of a present moment and a future and a past. When one begins looking in this way, it's almost like the underpinnings of fear begin to crumble. You can't really believe in fear and what it says so strongly any more.
We covered quite a lot of ground, a lot of possibilities. And actually, there's more than I even have time for today, a lot of possibilities for working with fear. But the important thing is, are we working with, are we finding some of these approaches, and actually just beginning, and trying this and trying that? They're all available. They're all available for us to try. As human beings, we have fear. We have the ability to work with and through fear.
According to the commentary to the Sutta Nipāta, the Buddha taught the Mettā Sutta (Sn 1:8) as a protective discourse to a group of monks who were experiencing frightening visions and sounds produced by hostile deities. See Bhikkhu Bodhi, tr., The Suttanipāta: An Ancient Collection of the Buddha's Discourses Together with Its Commentaries (Boston: Wisdom, 2017), 566--7. ↩︎
Dhp 1. ↩︎
