Chapter Two, Section Four: Consciousness: The Way Out Of Pain - The Origin of Fear

[Music] Hello and welcome back. This is Barbara Weinrich and Linda Galigio with our podcast entitled The Power of Now, A Vag to Spiritual Enlightenment with Linda and Barbara. Today we are looking at chapter two, consciousness the way out of pain and section four, the origin of fear. Welcome Linda. Hi Barbara, so glad to be here with all of you. Yay! Alright, I'll go ahead and get started today. You mentioned fear as being part of our basic underlying emotional pain. How does fear arise and why is there so much of it in people's lives? And is it 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 why you don't put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, is because you know that you'll get burned. You don't need to 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 with physical violence, you might experience something like fear. This is an instinctive shrinking back from danger, but not the psychological condition of fear that we are talking about here. The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms, unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia and so on. Wow. This kind of psychological fear is always something that might happen, not something that is happening now. You are in the here and now. While your mind is in the future, this creates an anxiety gap. And 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. Hmm. Well, that's a powerful message. Moreover, as long as you're identified with your mind, the ego runs your life, as I pointed out earlier. Because of its phantom nature and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is a case, even if the ego is outwardly confident. Now, remember that an emotion is the body's reaction to your mind. What message is the body receiving continuously from the ego? The false mind made self. Danger, I'm under threat. And what is the emotion 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. But 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 a 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, then if 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. Let's talk about this for a minute. What did Eckhart say? "We're all born with a deadly disease and it's called death." So there's not one of us that gets out of dying and most of us, right? Nobody gets out alive. Nobody. I love this thing about being right. That was one of my hardest things and sometimes I still want to do that. But think about when you think you're right and someone else has to be wrong. Your ego gets such a kick out of that. I'm right and they're wrong. But if the person shows you to be wrong, your ego is so sensitive that you can dry yourself in and think about it for days. And then there's the shame and the guilt that's associated with, oh my god, I was wrong. Yeah. Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong, makes no difference to your sense of self at all. So the forcefully, compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place from within yourself, not from the mind. Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you disidentified from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will then 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. Amazing thing about this, Barbara, is that we have this. We could all be so happy. At heart said, if we could teach it to our children in school, it's so basic. Yes. The way to get out of destruction of self. Yeah, acceptance. There's a saying, acceptance is the key to serenity. So accepting that what might be true for another person may not be true for you and be okay with that. Yeah. And sometimes when you see what you're doing, sometimes I do and I just laugh. How are you doing that? And I guess it's unconscious. And now it's conscious. I'm not going to do it anymore. Right. Right. It'll come back though. So anyway. So anyone who is identified with their mind and therefore disconnected from their true power, their deeper self rooted in being will have fear as their constant companion. The number of people who have gone beyond mind is yet extremely small. So you can assume that virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of fear. Only the intensity of it varies. It fluctuates between anxiety and dread at one end of the scale and a vague unease and distance sense of threat at the other. Most people become conscious of it only when it takes on one of its more acute forms. This is a very powerful and helpful chapter for having people become aware and encouraging them to become the witness of the egoic mind and how it is. It's so divisive and defensive and really tries to separate us and make us right. Making us right makes somebody else wrong. And they're not necessarily wrong. That's their truth. That's their experience. That's what they know. And who are we to judge? Jesus said, judge not, let's be judged. Be an acceptance of what is accept people where they are and accept them for what they believe to be their truth. I also, like what he said about, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right is a form of violence. So many people that you see are connected to fear and fears are constant companion. Well, that sounds sad to me. Yeah. Sounds sad. It's a hard way to live. Right? It is, it's a very hard way to live because as long as you think that anything outside of you is going to make you happy, it's not. It's just not. Might for a little while. And everybody's might for a little while could be longer than in other persons for sure. But in my experience, and this is only my experience, it's all within. And when you get to know yourself, when you get to be the being that you are, it's not even happy. It's joyful beyond words. And once you start experiencing this, there's no turning back. There might be, but you can do it. And yes, you can do it because you get that feeling that this is who I really am. And I don't have to be afraid. And guess what, I'm not going to be afraid because I know that the ego is just trying to help us survive, but it's not real. Right. And it's painful for the most part. Really painful. Okay. Well, that's the end of section 4, the origin of fear. And we appreciate having you join us. We'll see you next week. Bye now. Bye everyone. If you've enjoyed this podcast, and you'd like to go deeper into a spiritual conversation and perhaps even earn a credential as a certified spiritual coach. We encourage you to go to our website, LifeCoachTrainingOnline.com and check out our courses or give us a call at 800-711-4346.