Transcription
As Jackie said, welcome to this meditation day. And particularly, thank you to John and Jackie and the rest of the helpers for inviting me. So, where to begin? Just to pick up on what Jackie finished with, if you're new, a couple of things. The day is in silence, for the most part. If you're new, that can be quite a strange situation to walk into, socially. Here we are, don't know how many people are in the room, and no one's talking to anyone except me. It's for the sake of, in a way, letting, allowing the calmness to settle, allowing the mind and the heart to just kind of gather a little bit, so that there can be more of an inward focus and more of an investigation into our experience. So please, in a way, just give yourselves to that and give it a try, if it feels new. Some of you may have seen the schedule: we'll be basically alternating between sitting meditation and walking meditation, with quite a lot of teachings. And I'll give instructions for both sitting meditation and walking meditation, if you feel new.
Okay, so probably most people will be aware that there's a theme that I've chosen for today. And that theme is ... [shuffles papers, laughter] That theme is "Freedom from Fear and Anxiety." So I want to go into this question, this problem of fear that, as human beings, we experience. And we encounter it as actually a fact, and a factor, of the human condition. In a way, to start, there are a couple of things just this morning I want to say by way of introduction. And then this afternoon, to go into more specific approaches for working with fear -- how we, in our lives, can work with fear and approach fear, so that it becomes less of a problem, and actually moves towards becoming not a problem at all.
[2:27] But in sort of reflecting generally and kind of introducing, I suppose maybe the first thing to say is actually something very basic and maybe obvious: just how human and how common fear is. So there is not a human being alive, I don't think, who doesn't know the taste of fear, who hasn't experienced that, who hasn't struggled with that, who hasn't felt the pain of it, really. It's so common. It's a part of our human condition, of the human condition. It's extremely common.
The Buddha tells quite an unremarkable story just of practising before his awakening, and he would go sometimes to practise in sort of outdoor shrines, which were, in that time, at that time, believed to be sort of places where spirits and ghosts would congregate. And he would say, "Let me go there and practise." And he would be there practising sitting meditation, walking meditation, whatever, and the wind would rustle the leaves in the trees. And he would be overcome by fear. He said, "Trembling. The trembling would come," he said. And he just decided, "Okay, here it is. Instead of running away [which is what he felt like doing, getting up from the sitting posture, running away], what if I just stayed sitting [if he was sitting] or stayed walking [if he was walking], and I just worked with the fear until I subdued it?"[1] Very unremarkable story. It's unremarkable because fear is so common.
But there's also something in that that hints about the workability of fear, that yes, we are prey to fear. Yes, we experience the difficulty there, absolutely, as human beings. But it is workable. It's not a fixed sentence. There is room in there for manoeuvre and for making it something that's not, as I said, such a problem in our lives. And I think that even when we're in the grips of fear, or if fear is a very common visitor in our life or quite prominent in our consciousness, that we still, somehow, can have the whisper of that workability. We still, somehow, at some level, intuit the sense that maybe we don't need to be quite as much of a victim of this as it seems. And we can have that sense that, though we feel bound by fear, constrained by fear and anxiety, there's still almost like the whisper that freedom is available with it, that it's possible to not be so imprisoned by it. Sometimes, even when the fear is around, we can have that sense.
[5:31] Similarly, the fear itself -- it's quite a loud voice, fear, often. And it says this, or it says that, or it says, "This situation is like this," or it says a lot of what it claims to be the truth. And yet still, in the middle of that, it's almost as if we have this intuition, very quiet sometimes: "Maybe what fear is saying is not the truth of the situation. Maybe it's not the truth of how I am, or how this person is, or how the future will be." And also -- and this is, I think, becoming a more popular notion in the culture -- that there is a sense, when fear is around, that the heart actually closes. And our capacity, the capacity of our heart to love, to open in love, is actually shut down, to the extent that fear is there and it's running things. And there is, or there seems to be quite a sort of (what's it called?) inversely proportional relationship between fear and love. Basically, when fear is there, the love is shut down. And when love is there, it's quite difficult for the fear to take a foothold.
Actually illustrating this, four or five years ago (can't remember), I was in India, and working for a month with some other practitioners in a leprosy community in southern India. And I met a man there who started this community. His name was Baba Amte, and he's not at all a spiritual teacher or anything like that. And learnt his story from him -- quite a remarkable being. And he, in his youth, he was born into a very kind of aristocratic, wealthy Indian family. And at quite an early age, he befriended Gandhi, actually. And they were friends, and Gandhi said to him, "If you want to know another person, if you really want to know another human being and to serve them, you have to walk in their shoes for a while." Baba Amte was already, at that time, working as a lawyer and helping with the kind of disenfranchised in India. And Gandhi said this to him, and he thought, "Okay." So he decided to get a job, basically shovelling out the slime, the mess from the sewers in Calcutta, down there in the sewers, and doing that every day, working, putting himself in the shoes of other people. And he did that for nine months.
[8:25] And towards the end of that period, he was going home after a day's work. You can imagine what that must be like, to be down there, doing that with the other kind of untouchables. And it was dark, and he was walking home, and he tripped over something in the street on the sidewalk. And he tripped and looked back, and it was actually a man lying on the sidewalk, basically dying, with severe leprosy, and a severe sort of end case. And he was lying there, dying, and Baba Amte tripped over him. And he was so overtaken by fear in that moment, he ran all the way home without even realizing what he was doing. He got home, sort of panting, his heart thumping. And then it sort of dawned on him, "What have I done? What am I doing?" He decided to go back, and he found the man, and he took him back to his house and nursed him while he died over the next couple of days, two or three days.
Something was beginning to transition, and he sort of drew it out more. And he saw very clearly this relationship between fear and love, and how the fear was actually closing him. And he kind of made -- not a vow, but a sort of pretty powerful intention to keep challenging fear in his life, keep challenging fear, and keep moving towards love. What he did after that was he, again, considered his life situation. And he went with his wife, two baby boys, about four leprosy patients, and a lame cow, this ragtaggle bunch, and went and bent the ear of the Maharashtran government, one of the states in southern India, and convinced them to give him a large scrap of, basically, scrap land, desert land.
And now, fifty years later, it's this incredible community of thousands and thousands of people, leprosy patients and others -- tremendous place, beautiful place, all coming out of this insistence that he had not to give in to fear, not to give in to fear, because he saw the relationship between fear and love. So if I give into that, that's going to go. Now, I mean, that's quite an extreme story, and certainly not every human being is actually capable of doing that. But just pointed this relationship out so clearly. And see him now: he's ninety-two, quite an extraordinary being, hasn't been able to sit because he's damaged his back. He hasn't been able to sit down for forty years. So everything he does is either lying down or walking -- quite extraordinary. Just keeps faithful to this principle.
[11:22] So there's definitely a relationship between fear and love. We also see the opposite relationship between fear and hatred, or fear and violence. How much in our world -- and we see this with political groups, with countries, with ideological groups -- how much is there a relationship between the presence of fear and the impulse to violence? You can see it in animals. You can see it in yourself individually, when that comes up. And we certainly see it in larger groups.
One of the other kind of basic but maybe, perhaps, obvious things to say about fear is how many kinds of fear there seem to be. So certainly, we know fear in relation to this body, and fear that this body will be harmed, will grow ill. Fear of dying, this body dying. Certainly that's sort of basic to a human being, fear around the body. Fear around our emotions and our emotional life. How common is it for us to be afraid of what might come up emotionally, afraid that I might feel this or that? How much fear, how much anxiety is there in our lives around what others think of us? That's actually quite prominent, I think, maybe in this culture, maybe in the world: "What will they think of me?" Fear around what we might think of ourselves -- that we're afraid that we might think of ourselves badly, or really see how we really are. There can be fear around forms, certain forms. So you know, the groom and the bride at the marriage ceremony, and beforehand, the groom's got, you know, knees shaking together. That's a fear of a form, of entering into a form, and then feeling trapped by it. And all kinds of other forms. I remember my first actual meditation day. Years and years ago, twenty-something years ago, the idea of being silent all day and just sitting in meditation, I was ... trembling is an exaggeration, but ... [laughter] I was quite trepidatious at the thought.
[13:53] There's a story from one of the Hindu traditions, and in this particular Hindu tradition, there was the belief that the guru, the teacher, is able, if he so wishes, to bestow complete enlightenment on a disciple by touching them or looking at them in a special way. And so this guru was sitting with his group of disciples one day, and he said, "Whoever wants complete liberation from the ego, complete enlightenment, step forward, and I will bestow it. I will give it." [laughter] Nothing. No one moved. Silence. So a second time: "Whoever wants complete liberation, come forward, and I will give it. I will give it." Nothing. Third time. Silence. It was just silent. And then he said, "The offer is withdrawn."
Now, I don't know, but I think he was actually calling their bluff. He's actually pointing to something: we're even afraid of freedom! It's amazing. It seems like we can be afraid of anything, absolutely anything. It's possible for fear to latch onto it somehow and build a relationship of fear with it. So, for all of us, as human beings, for all of us, there's a really important question here, a really important question. And that is, for all of us, am I challenging fear deeply enough in my life? Am I challenging it enough?
Now, if I put out a question like that, is it possible that we can hear it without a sense of should? There's no should in this. It's just a question. It's actually a question coming out of kindness. It's a question coming out of kindness, because fear is suffering. Am I challenging it enough in my life? So it's a difficult question. Am I too tolerant of fear in my life? Sometimes we just tolerate it. We just, we're so used to it, it seems so much the norm in our society, and we just tolerate it.
[16:22] So we do, as I said right at the beginning, it's very common, fear is very common; we need to accept it. But that doesn't mean leaving it unchallenged. So I accept that it's there. But also, can I work with it? How much is my life constricted by fear and constricted in fear? How much is my life constricted in fear? These are not easy questions. They're big and kind of probing questions. So when we go into this, if we're willing to ask these kind of questions, what we can see with fear is, sometimes it's very clear when fear is around. It's very obvious -- you know, the heart is thumping away, and you've got butterflies in the tummy, and all that. But sometimes, quite a lot of the time, fear is around and operating powerfully, with a lot of clout, a lot of authority, but we don't even realize that it's operating. It has tremendous authority and power. So there's nothing present that we actually feel. We don't recognize its presence. But it's still kind of, in a way, running the show at some level. And this is very difficult to notice, when this is around.
Sometimes we realize it because certain options are just closed doors. I have a friend who, when she was quite young, she inherited a lot of money in the States, living in the States. She inherited a lot of money. And we were talking years later about happiness and unhappiness, and we were talking about that. She was actually not feeling very happy in her life. And at some point in the conversation, I just said something about the relationship between generosity and happiness, and that generosity is a beautiful quality of heart that actually brings happiness with it. And I just sort of lightly suggested that she may consider donating some of what she'd inherited. Not to me, but ... [laughter] But just dropping in, and it was so funny what a closed door it was. It was just, "Cannot go there. I need this money. What if I want a house? Da-da-da-da-da." Understandable, but what a closed door. It's like, didn't realize that actually, that's a fear operating. But it's not a felt fear.
And we can notice this in all kinds of ways. Sometimes fear is masked as desire or passion. We see this around food. Sometimes there's great interest in food or, like, a passion for food, and it's actually fear that there won't be enough. So I see that where I live -- it's a retreat centre. And in a way, you just kind of, to a certain extent, get what you're given, in terms of food. Sometimes it comes up for people. I don't have control over how much I might eat or when I might eat. And the last meal is about 5:30, and then you've got fourteen hours until the next meal. And for some people, it brings that up. But it might look like desire, like greed. It's actually fear.
[19:51] I have another friend who's -- long time working in the theatre as an actor and director and different things. And she was, a while ago, beginning to reflect how a lot of the passion, or what looked like passion for that work, was actually, part of it was actually fear masquerading as passion, passion for the artistic process. She was afraid that, if she let some of that go, that her identity as an actor, as an artist, etc. would be lost. And then who would she be? And afraid of that sense of emptiness, and not being able to identify. There actually was, it turned out, a core of real, genuine passion there. I think passion is something very important in our lives. We need that. We really need passion. But it's like, what's authentic, and what's not? Fear was in there, covering up and making it look like a genuine passion.
So, when we come to working with fear, there are actually a lot of approaches in the Dharma. The teachings of the Buddha, the Buddhadharma, offer a lot of approaches for working with it. And this is what I really want to go into this afternoon. I just want to give a very brief overview right now. And these approaches are complementary. They support each other. They're not separate or contradictory.
(1) The first one -- I'll go into these much more this afternoon, but the first one is mindfulness. So, probably almost everyone has heard this term. Just bringing our awareness and our capacity to attend, to pay attention, in a very simple, very kind of bare-bones, direct way. What does fear feel like? Just bringing our mindfulness to the sensations of fear, without kind of going into the why and exploring that. So that's, in a way, the most basic approach.
(2) The second is looking into our reactions and response to fear itself. So what is my relationship to fear? And actually, that turns out to be an extremely significant point of entry into working with fear.
(3) And the third is not so much to do with mindfulness. Mindfulness is one part of the Buddha's teaching, one small part of the Buddha's teaching. It's not the whole path, and the Buddha never intended for mindfulness to be the whole path. And anyone who's been practising for a while will soon realize that mindfulness or awareness can actually not fix everything. So, looking at other approaches, and particularly, trying to deflate what the mind has inflated. The mind believes in this object of fear being genuinely fearful, genuinely something to be afraid of. Actually looking, in the Dharma language, seeing the emptiness of it. And as I said, I'll go into it. I'll go into these this afternoon. Basically, broadly speaking, three approaches, and actually there are more, but it's all I'm going to go into today. And in a way, challenging the fear in a more active way.
[23:25] Okay. So that's plenty of talking for now, and we'll pick this up this afternoon. So, we're going to do a meditation now.
MN 4. ↩︎
