Climate Change...

LIBERATION AND PEACE BY OVERCOMING 3 FEARS OF THE UNKNOWN - FEAR OF THE UNCONSCIOUS, FEAR OF LOVE, AND FEAR OF DEATH.

"One of the fundamental human predicaments is the struggle to overcome the duality between life and death. From this basic predicament derive all other problems, difficulties, fears, and tensions you have to contend with. Whether this manifests directly as fear of death, of aging or of the unknown, it is always fear of the passing of time. All are manifestations of the same basic fear.

In order to assuage these fears, humanity has created philosophical, spiritual, religious concepts. But concepts, even if they result from attempts of one individual to pass on a true experience, will not relieve the real tension. The only way to truly overcome fear and reconcile the great duality is to delve into the first unknown you fear so much: your own psyche.

This sounds simpler than it really is. To explore the unknown corners of one’s own mind is by no means just a question of resolving dualities. There are many who ardently pursue a path of self-exploration yet shy away from certain facets of their innermost selves. The tension and disturbance is then glibly explained away. These people may even have made considerable progress and resolved certain inner conflicts, but vast areas of their psyche remain unknown.

To the degree you are unaware of what goes on within you, you will fear the passing of time and the “great unknown.” When one is young, these fears may be assuaged. But sooner or later every human being will be confronted more directly with the fear of death. I want to emphasize it again: to the degree that you know yourself, you fulfill your life, yourself, your dormant potential. And to that degree death will not be feared but experienced as an organic development. The unknown will no longer pose a threat.

One of the main obstacles to overcoming the fear of death is the fear of letting go of the barriers which separate you from the opposite sex. As long as these barriers exist, the fear of death must also be there just as strongly. There is a very direct connection between these three: fear of one’s own unconscious, the fear of love with the opposite sex, and fear of death. The connection between the first two is beginning to dawn on you, but the third part of the triad may still be a novel idea. It will cease to be an arresting theory, however, once you experience the connection yourself, in the effort of self-understanding. You will then know the truth of these words.

Self-fulfillment depends on fulfilling yourself as a man or as a woman, respectively. Ultimately, you cannot fulfill yourself without overcoming the barrier between you and the opposite sex, thus truly becoming a man or a woman. Of course, there are also other aspects of self-fulfillment. You may be unaware of certain potentials you possess: your talents, your strength, your inherent good qualities, such as your courage and resourcefulness, your broadmindedness, your creativity. 

However, none of these can truly unfold in their inherent splendor unless a man truly becomes a man, and a woman truly becomes a woman. The self-realization that takes place while the barrier to union with a mate remains can be only partial and conditional. For this barrier indicates a barrier to areas within the self that you shy away from exploring and understanding. It indicates a resistance to fully grown selfhood and an insistence on artificial infancy. This carefully nurtured parasitical state prevents liberation through overcoming the fear which is a product of duality.

When all resistance to unknown areas in oneself has vanished so that one no longer fears oneself, one cannot possibly fear other human beings, including the opposite sex. A great inner freedom and trust, born out of an objective, realistic attitude releases the tight grip of control that stands in the way of letting oneself go into the state of being. When you fulfill yourself, there is no longer a barrier, no more holding on in fear of the unknown, in distrust of the self or the other. The same holding on prevents you from entering into the cosmic stream of timelessness that you experience in the highest bliss of union with a mate, and that you experience in the highest bliss in what you call death.

Death has many faces. Those who are afraid, tightly holding onto the little self, may experience death as fearful seclusion and separateness, but for those who are not afraid of living fully, of reaching out and no longer preserving the little self, death is the glory that union on this earth can be and more! Therefore, the struggle of self-realization, in the last analysis, must mean: first, removal of the barriers between your consciousness and the hidden areas of your psyche. 

These hidden areas are not always covered up and unconscious — they are often right in front of your eyes if you but choose to look at them. Second, removal of the barriers between you and your counterpart, whoever he or she may be at a given phase. And the third barrier is between you and the cosmic stream. Whenever this stream carries you, you will experience its rightness. It is functional at this stage of your being, it is organic. But people fearing themselves, the other, and therefore the stream of being, do not trust the passing of time. They hold on with the little self and create a wall of clouds between their higher consciousness and their momentary awareness.

The three basic hindrances are pride, self-will, and fear. All faults, problems, confusions, distortions, conflicts, and misconceptions derive from pride, self-will, and fear in one form or another. The same triad constitutes the barriers to the three avenues of self-expansion. Let us consider this more closely.

Take first the barrier between consciousness and the unconscious: pride. It bars the way because you may not like what you will find if you venture into the unknown within yourself. It may not be flattering or compatible with your idealized self-image. Even if your finding proves not to be derogatory, you will fear it might be. The importance of being admired makes you adopt the standards and values of others whose approval you seek. This creates a block of pride, a wall, a cloud that hinders insight.

Self-will causes apprehension that what you find may force you to do something your little ego is not inclined to do, or to give up something which it is unwilling to surrender. Self-will wants the little ego to be in control, so you can cling to the known.

Fear bars the way when both pride and self-will indicate a lack of trust; then fear makes you believe that the final reality is not to be trusted. Cosmic reality is embedded in your deep unconscious as the stream of cosmic events. If you enter into this stream, it cannot help but be benign, bringing happiness, fulfillment, and meaningfulness. Distrusting this stream and therefore holding on to what you know, in the belief that you might fare better than by taking the chance of entering the unknown, creates walls of fear. It is this fear that blocks full self-recognition.

The triad of pride, self-will, and fear also applies to the barrier between the self and a mate. Pride enters because, whether you are man or woman, you fear the apparent helplessness — and therefore shame — of giving over to a force greater than your little ego. Love between the sexes is a humbling experience and therefore the enemy of pride. Your pride wants to direct and control; it does not want to give over to any force, even if this force is most desirable. Even though you and everyone else go through life desiring to love, you still block it and find ways to compromise with the contradictory directions of your soul. The force driving you into love is great indeed, for it derives from your innermost nature. The drive deriving from pride, self-will, and fear pushes you away from love.

Self-will is opposed to love because it wants all control; it cannot give itself up. It seems to you — erroneously, of course — that only when you obey and are governed by the little self are you safe. You are under the misapprehension that giving yourself over to the love force is the same as heedless and headless greed, unreasonableness, and lack of realism. This is not so. Realism, objectivity, the ability to relinquish, and fearless willingness to enter love are not only compatible but interdependent. You block the experience out of fear of losing your dignity — meaning pride — and your selfhood — meaning self-will — when, in reality, true dignity and selfhood can be gained only by giving up pride and self-will.

The fear of losing safety and one’s very life is not so different from the fear that blocks the blissful experience of self-forgetfulness in union with a mate. Some of you may sense the similarity, at least occasionally.

The triad of pride, self-will, and fear also influence one’s attitude to death. Dying ultimately means giving up self-direction — and this surrender, strange as this may seem, appears humiliating. In order to avoid the humbling truth that the little self is not all-powerful, you hold onto it in pride and self-will, thereby creating ever stronger waves of fear.

In order to resolve this erroneous duality, particularly the conflict between giving up the self and full possession of the self, I would like to present what may indeed sound like a paradox: are you finding yourself on such a laborious path of self-realization only to become capable of giving yourself up to union with the other sex and to death? The truth is that you cannot give up successfully what you have not found, for you cannot freely let go of something you have never really possessed. Only when you can freely give up your selfhood will you gain more selfhood.

Now, if death, or dying, can be such a blissful experience, why then is it perceived so darkly? Why doesn’t a death instinct, a yearning for death exist, as, for example, the strong instinct to lose oneself in love? Why must death be encountered without the help of instinctual drives, and why must human beings work so hard to overcome the barrier of fear? You may ask, why is it that we, on this earth, have to battle against this great unknown? At first glance, such questions seem justified and logical, but when you take a closer look, you will understand that things must be as they are. 

You see, my friends, it would be so easy to wish for death because you cannot cope with life when life is painful and unfulfilled. In this unfinished, ignorant, and blind state of terror, you would all too easily escape into death, even though, in this case, death would not prove any different than life — for both are intrinsically the same. In order to avoid such a destructive escape, the life instinct must be very strong. And it can operate only as long as death remains an unknown. No words can remove your fear of the unknown, so your life instinct can prevent you from choosing death out of negative, destructive motivations. 

This strengthens the stamina to try and try again, until life is finally mastered though understanding the self, and hence the universe. Only in this endeavor will the inner understanding finally dawn that death is not to be feared — or, that it is feared only in exact proportion to the still existing fear of living and loving. Hence the sharp cleavage between life and death, their illusory opposition, begins to dwindle. The true understanding of these words can come only when life is no longer a threat and no longer needs to be fled so your life instinct will no longer have to oppose the death instinct; they will be one and the same. You will then not need to rush ahead, nor will you need to hold back.

If you look at your conscious and unconscious attitudes toward the passage of time, toward life and death, you will find that they are identical with one another and with your innermost, hidden attitudes toward love, regardless of your conscious, healthy desires. You will find that the fear of the unknown plays a role in all these attitudes. You will find that you constantly fluctuate between trying to hold back time in a fear-cramped motion, and rushing ahead because you cannot stand the moment. Very rarely indeed are you in harmony with the cosmic stream of your life, your individuality.

This is what being in peace with oneself, being in harmony with God, really means: not holding back, not pushing toward, but dissolving in the life stream, in full possession of yourself, yet without fear of giving up self-possession. This is the great experience that you are blessed and privileged to have when you find your mate. And this will ultimately be the experience of going into a new form of consciousness.

The key to all this lies in self-discovery on the many levels from which you still shy away. When you avoid parts of yourself, you cannot help but project outwardly onto others and into the outside life what seems like a terrifying self-confrontation. Hence the projection cannot yield peace and liberation, regardless of how much precarious temporary satisfaction it appears to give. You always find reasons and excuses outside yourself to hedge what most needs to be tackled. This applies to practically all, my friends, at least occasionally."

- Eva Pierrakos, Creating Union