Transcription
So it's wonderful to be here again. Every time I come, it's so lovely to see such a thriving Saṅgha here, thriving community of people interested in practice and interested in the teachings. Okay, so as I'm sure many of you know, the theme for the day is fear and the possibility of us as human beings, the possibility for us as human beings, of actually living free from fear, free from the grip of fear. The Dharma promises this as a very real possibility. This is what I want to go into. First place to start, perhaps, is to state something extremely obvious, which is just that everyone in this room, every human being knows the taste of fear. Everyone knows the taste of fear. Just by virtue of our being human, we know what that is. We feel it and we feel the suffering of it.
So it's common. This is important to say, because often we get into views about ourselves. It's common. The Buddha even describes, relates a story from before his enlightenment of practising in forests, and he would be sitting, doing sitting meditation or walking meditation, and a bird would rustle some leaves, or a deer would move in the undergrowth or something, and he was overcome with fear, he said. Overcome with fear. But he said, I decided to stay practising, to stay with it, to work with it. So it's kind of a nothing story in one respect, but it shows two things: one is that it's common, that it's human, and the second is that it's workable, because he stayed with it and he worked with it. So we can work with it. Sometimes I think in the grip of fear, when the anxiety/fear has really got its engine spinning, it can be very consuming. It colours everything. It seems so convincing, what it says to us. But even in the midst of that, at the same time, it's possible -- and I know, I'm sure some of you have tasted this -- there's almost like another whispering coming through. So yes, it seems convincing, but it's almost like the being knows at some level there's a possibility of freedom here. We don't have to be in the grip of fear so much. Freedom from fear is possible. We can sense that somehow even in the middle of the fear. It doesn't have to be as overpowering as it seems.
And everything that fear tells us -- do this, don't do that, it will be like this, it will be like that, this might not happen -- all the voices of fear, it's almost like in the middle of it we can have a sense: maybe they're not the truth. Maybe they're not the truth of things. Just some quiet bubbling up from the being in the middle of the fear. And we can also get the sense that there's a real unfortunate way that fear, when it's present, anxiety when it's present, actually constricts, it tightens the heart. It blocks the heart's opening in love and the expression of love and also the receiving of love. We can actually sense that. I don't know where it's from, but it's quite common in modern circles to say, "It's love or fear." There's a real truth to that.
Years ago, five or so years ago, I was in India and met a remarkable man, Baba Amte, his name is. He's not a spiritual man at all. But he was born into an aristocratic Indian family, very wealthy, and had a profession as a lawyer as a young man. And he was doing very well, and then met Gandhi at one point. Actually, just before he met Gandhi, he had been given a case to represent the sewer workers in Calcutta, so the people who actually go down into the sewer -- you can imagine -- in Calcutta to clean the sewers. He had been given a case to represent their rights. He met Gandhi at some point, and Gandhi said to him -- or said in general -- "If you want to really know a person, you have to walk in their shoes for a while." So Baba Amte heard this and decided to work himself for almost a year going down into the sewers of Calcutta and cleaning the sewage with the workers he was representing. During that time, one evening he was coming home from work and walking home in the streets. He stumbled over something in the darkness, in the gloom of the dusk. He stumbled over something in the streets, and he looked down, and was horrified to see a man lying there on the pavement, dying actually, in the last stages dying of leprosy, of the ravages of leprosy.
In that instance, in seeing this and the horror of his wounds and the horror of his illness, was so overcome with fear that he ran immediately, just spontaneously ran all the way home. And he got home, sort of out of breath, panting, and he collected himself a little bit and thought, "What have I done?" And he gathered his resources and went back, found the man lying on the street, the leprosy patient, and picked him up and took him back to his house, to his own house, and actually nursed him and stayed with him until he died. Baba Amte died about six months ago at the age of 92 or 94. He said that was a turning point in his life, one of the many turning points. He said there was a choice in that moment, very clear, between fear and love. And he had initially acted on the fear, and then got home and turned that around. He said that was a turning point in his life. And from then on, he kept choosing love. He kept choosing love.
Something shifted inside. It was quite a dramatic moment. Something shifted inside of him. And he decided to devote himself, the rest of his life, to working for the rights of people with leprosy. So he bent the ear of the Maharashtran government, and they gave him a piece of scrap desert land, really in the middle of nowhere in Maharashtra. He went there in the fifties with his wife, two baby boys, I think three leprosy patients, and a lame cow. This sort of rag-taggle bunch went to this place and set up a community devoted to serving leprosy patients, and built everything from scratch themselves. Visiting that place fifty years later, this massive -- thousands of people, thriving community with a school for deaf and dumb children. Everything had come out -- beautiful place, lots of joy, and it all came out of this turning around, this constant willingness to turn around, not go with the flow of fear, turn it around and choose love instead. He said that became a kind of guiding principle throughout his life.
That's kind of a dramatic example, but sometimes dramatic examples set things up very clearly, very black and white. Not all of us can aspire to that, but. Conversely, we can see in our world the relationship between fear and the opposite, love. Violence, aggression -- we can see this in animals when they're afraid, very short movement to aggression. We see it in individuals. See it in ourselves. See it in countries. See it in ideological groups. When there's fear and the pressure of fear, very easy for it to ricochet off into violence. So there's a real relationship between love and fear and its opposites. When we look at fear and the presence of fear in our lives, it's kind of interesting as human beings -- there can be so many kinds of fear. It seems like so many kinds of fear.
[9:45] We can be afraid of almost anything. You see how much fear there is in relationship to our body, in relationship to pain -- very understandable -- in relationship to illness or the ageing process. How much fear we have in relationship to our body. Or fear about what others think of our body. How much fear is around what others think of either our body or ourselves? We can fear our emotions, what might be lurking inside, what might I discover, depths of pain or anger or what monster might lurk inside me. Quite rare for someone to have a real complete lack of fear in relationship to their emotional life. How much -- I already mentioned it -- fear is there in relationship to what others think of me, what will they think of me, am I all right, do I appear okay, do they think I'm this or that? How much fear, social anxiety, runs through this culture. Massive, absolutely massive. Such suffering.
Sometimes even how we view ourselves -- rather than what others think of us, how we view ourselves. We actually fear that we would view ourselves with scorn and with criticism, with judgment, with harshness. Again, quite endemic in the culture. We can fear different kinds of forms. We move, as human beings, in and out of all kinds of forms. We fear this form or that form. We can fear the form of meditation, or the form of a retreat, or the form of a certain job, or the form of not having a job, or the form of being married or in a committed relationship and feeling [choking sound], or being single and fearing that. These are all forms. We fear forms and the absence of forms. Sometimes we can even fear freedom. There's a lovely story from one of the Hindu traditions. In this story, the guru, the teacher, is sitting with a circle of his disciples. They're sitting around and he says, "Whoever wants complete and utter freedom from the ego, complete enlightenment, come forward and I will bestow it. I will give it." In this particular tradition, they believe that the guru can, with a touch or a look, bestow enlightenment and freedom on his disciples if he so chooses.
So he said that, "Whoever wants that, come forward." [laughter] No one moved. Second time he offered. "Whoever wants complete release, the complete ending of the tyranny of the ego, come forward." [inaudible] Third time, same thing. There was just silence. And he said, "The offer is withdrawn." [laughter] I think he was calling their bluff. In other words, showing something -- even to be free of fear, to be free of everything, there's fear in relationship to it. So fear runs through our life in incredibly powerful ways. It has so much clout in our lives. Sometimes it's very obvious when we're feeling fear -- the heart is pumping, the tummy is churning, you can't think straight; it's very clear this is fear. A lot of fear that runs through our life is actually not so obvious. So I want to go into all this whole range today. But a real question for all of us, and I'm including myself: am I challenging fear deeply enough in my life? Am I challenging it enough and deeply enough? It has an enormous amount of power, and a lot of the time fear goes -- we let it go -- unchallenged in our life. Now, that question is not coming from 'should,' like "We should, you should, I should." Can we hear it more as an invitation, more just out of interest? Am I challenging it deeply enough in my life? Am I too tolerant of fear? Sometimes we tolerate fear too much. Am I too tolerant in this life of fear? It's a really, really important question.
So we need to accept the commonness and the humanity of fear, as I said right at the beginning. But within that acceptance, it's not kind towards ourselves to let fear go unchallenged. It's not a movement of kindness. How much is my life constricted by fear and in fear? How much of my life is constricted in fear? Really, really important question, because sometimes fear is operating and we don't even realize that it's operating. As I said, sometimes it's obvious. It's obvious -- the heart is almost jumping out of the chest. Other times it's operating -- there are actually no symptoms of fear present, but it's operating, and it's operating very powerfully with a lot of clout and an enormous amount of influence, and it's actually driving our choices, but we're not recognizing its presence and we're not even feeling it as fear.
I remember a while ago -- this is many years ago -- I was living in America for many years, and I have a friend there, a good friend, and we were talking. She was unhappy for quite a while. And we were talking about happiness and unhappiness. At some point in the conversation, she had -- backtracking, she had inherited quite a lot of money through a death in the family when she was younger. At some point in the conversation, we were talking about happiness and unhappiness, and we started to talk about, well, what brings happiness and why are we unhappy, etc.? I mentioned the connection between generosity and happiness, that the heart moving and opening, releasing in generosity is actually a happy heart. Generosity feeds happiness. I was sort of mentioning this connection, and -- I thought delicately suggested, lightly suggested, that maybe she make an offering with some of her money. Maybe she'd engage in some acts of generosity. I didn't imply towards myself, but. [laughter] But it was interesting. This was many years ago. It was interesting that it was just like a kind of -- what's it called? -- drawbridge coming up. It was just like, "No entry." It's not a conversation you could have. She had not been walking around -- she had plenty of money; all her needs were met -- not been walking around with any sense of fear around money. It wasn't a present fear. But when it was put on her plate as a choice, it was suddenly there. It was operating, influencing a lot of choices and a lot of ways she was manoeuvring in life and directing herself in life, and had implications for happiness.
Sometimes this more sort of clandestine fear is actually masked as desire. It looks like desire, or it can look like passion, even. I have another friend, also in America, and she -- many years working as an actor and a director and stuff in the theatre. Very talented as well. And beginning to -- this also was years ago -- see that some of that passion and some of that desire to create and to be out there doing her thing, some of that was coming from a fear that if she didn't do that, she would be a nobody, and what's more, that she might be forced to confront what she felt was a sort of lurking barrenness at the core of her being. Somehow what looked to all the world like passionate engagement, healthy, juicy desire for working as an artist, was actually something sitting on thin ice -- there was a lot of fear of this sense of inner barrenness. Now, this isn't definitely to say that all passion is coming from that place; it's absolutely not. Passion, desire are something that's very crucial to us as human beings. We need desire. We actually need desire and passion on this path, this path of supposedly going beyond desire. We need a lot of desire. It's something that has to be authentic. It can't be on thin ice. There has to be something authentic there and deep.
[19:25] Sometimes fear is actually masked as desire, as the movement of desire. It doesn't look like fear, doesn't even feel like fear. We can see this with ourselves. We can see it with food, for instance. It looks -- "Oh, I just love food." Food is a very complex issue. Sometimes it's masking a kind of fear of being without, or fear of contacting something emotionally. Very interesting. Sometimes you see it more clearly on retreat, when people are on retreat for a week or so and they don't have so much control over what they eat. At Gaia House, the last meal in the evening is at 5:30, so you're kind of staring at an evening ... [laughter] without access to a refrigerator. There can be a fear when we don't feel in control in relationship to things like food. It looks like desire, it looks like greed or passion or something, but it's actually fear dressed up.
So really what I want to stress today is this spectrum of fear. Sometimes it's very obvious, it's really obvious. Sometimes it's just a little more low-key. And sometimes it's operating, but it's not operating so obviously. This last category is very important. When we make choices out of fear, whether it's conscious or unconscious fear, when we make choices out of fear it can feel like it's not a big deal. It feels like it's not a big deal. Around money, say, or generosity, or just kind of -- we're not aware that we're making choices out of fear. Money is a very interesting one. But something happens when we do that or as we do that. We make these choices and they're coming out of fear and they are reinforcing fear as a habit. So we can't actually get away with what it looks like we're getting away with. Every time we act out of fear, we're feeding the habit of feeling fear in our life. We're feeding fear as a habit. And what's more, we're feeding the whole way of looking and perceiving and relating to life and relating to the sense of self in life -- me in the universe, this sense of self and other, this sense of me in this unpredictable, foreign universe. That whole way of looking, the separateness, the division, the fear, that also gets reinforced every time we act with fear. And particularly when it's in a way we're not even conscious of.
Making these decisions out of fear -- a lot of it's understandable; remember, this is all human -- but we're reinforcing something there. So most of you have probably seen that film, An Inconvenient Truth by now. Remember that part in it where the frog is in the glass and they -- have you seen this film? No? Goodness, okay. It's a very, very good film about climate change, and it's really worth seeing. It's probably on DVD. But anyway, there's a moment in it where Al Gore is trying to explain why is it that human beings are not -- this is starting to change now; this is a while ago -- why is it human beings don't react to climate change? Other stuff -- jet planes slam into the World Trade Center, etc., big dramatic moment, everyone freaks out. Why is it with something a little more surreptitiously creeping up, we fail to react? Apparently if you put a frog -- I don't know who came up with this -- but if you put a frog in a bowl of water, if it's a bowl of boiling water the frog will immediately jump out. If you put the frog in a bowl of water and you slowly begin heating the water, it will actually stay there until it dies or until you remove it.
So the analogy was about our relationship with climate change. It's a similar thing with a lot of the choices we make as human beings. We don't even perceive them as suffering or as feeding suffering. Does this make sense? Yeah? Enormous clout, enormous power that fear has. As I said, we have to really look into it and begin challenging it.
So today I want to talk about some of the ways we can work with fear. And in fact the Dharma offers many, many, many possibilities, many approaches -- so many I couldn't possibly put them all in today, though I'll try and offer some. They're all complementary. All the approaches in the Dharma kind of stand together and they support each other. I want to go into some of these this afternoon. So one of them is just the approach of mindfulness, bringing a real bare attention, our bare awareness to meet the physical sensations of fear -- I'll go into all this in more detail this afternoon -- without trying to analyse too much; just very, very simply meeting the experience of fear and learning how to do that. So that's one. The second is actually understanding our relationship with fear. This ends up being really, really crucial. There's something in our relationship with fear that ends up feeding fear and reinforcing it. We need to understand that to be able to kind of dismantle the process. So what is our relationship with fear, and can we unpick that?
Another approach that I'll go into this afternoon -- just to paint a little bit of a picture -- is not to do with mindfulness so much but more to do with questioning and challenging and using the reflective mind, actually challenging fear through doing. Sometimes in the Dharma we kind of expect mindfulness and this power of attention to fix everything, as if mindfulness could fix everything. It's not the Buddha's teaching that if you just learn to pay attention and be with, everything will take care of itself. It's absolutely not the Buddha's teaching. It's one significant part of the teaching. But there are other approaches that use the reflective mind, use more active challenging, etc. I'll explain all this this afternoon, but to see the emptiness of the object of fear, to see that there's nothing actually there to be afraid of. Okay, so that's probably a good place to stop for this morning.
