I was with a group of spiritual people tonight in which a common theme among them was fear. I learned as they talked that there was both fear of living and of dying. There was fear that in life (living) bad things might happen. And of course then the ultimate bad thing, death.
Don't hear my observation of this as criticism, I recognized it, because I once lived it. As a matter of fact, I feel experiencing fear has been part of my life purpose here. And boy have I experienced fear. Enough so that I literally became frozen in it as a child and it manifested in me waking up one day literally unable to walk. I share this not for sympathy, but so we are clear, I have lived in fear.
As my evening began to wind down I had the opportunity to reflect on how my perspective had come to change so much, how I had come to fear so little and simply live so much. I began to realize, first, that fear was instilled in me, it was not my nature. Then, I began to recall how meditation affected my perspective on death. I learned I was more than just my body and my mind. And that even when I left those things behind in meditation, I still existed and more than that, felt freer and more alive than ever. When I came to Know that, the fear just began to melt away. Suddenly I looked forward to life beyond this. Suddenly I came to embody the idea that I truly was a Soul simply inhabiting a human body. Fear still popped up on occasion but it was much more in perspective. As I embraced death as just another event like any other and began to experience the connection to the other side, death and life just seemed to be opposite sides of the same coin.
As I continued to reflect further I also recalled how I spent time challenging my fears, confronting them. Were my perceptions really true? Of course not, that's why they are called fear. I also came to understand that I was uncomfortable with the unknown. but eventually that changed too as I began to see the unknown as that place of potentiality. The place where all things were possible rather than impossible.
I guess mostly what I have come to learn about my fear is that it was all in my head. And for a while, while I still believed my own stories, I began to choose to tell myself good stories about my life rather than stories that escalated my fear. Eventually, I came to know I was safest when my mind was quiet, I lived in the moment, and told no more stories and just accepted whatever came to me. Just as Rumi talks about in "The Guesthouse." Through my meditations I began to connect with another aspect of myself that I had not been in touch with previously. The part of me that was capable of traveling in the present moment to far off places only to come back knowing I had traveled to the distant past and to the future right here in the now. I came to know the part of me that conversed with the ancient sages/yogis and yes, even Jesus himself. Mostly though, through my meditations I came to know the part of me that feels timeless and expansive beyond any words. The part of me that is silence itself but beyond that too. The part of me that is the ever present witness to everything and beyond even that. These meditation experiences helped me to Know that I am not my body, I am not my mind and through the limitations of the human form I guess I would say I have come to know well only what I am not. I have come to Know that I am so much more or so much less, depending on how you look at it, than what is obvious to my eye and my human perception.
