Fear Is an Illusion

Talk with OM C. Parkin

Source: Excerpt from the book "Angst - die Flucht aus der Wirklichkeit" (Fear – the Escape from Reality)

In my life there is fear, insecurity, a hesitation, a not-being-communicative or maybe not being true, as you called it yesterday, in many little things. My previous teachers say that one has to be able to carry this fear that exists within me somehow inside. To this day, that seems to me somehow unimaginable, when I move there inside of me, it's like, like ... I call it 'sheer horror', and it's not fear of any specific things. It can refer to everything, but it hinders me in everyday life. It makes me hesitate, not communicate, not do things that I should or could perhaps do. Can you please say something about this topic of fear?

Well, first of all I would like to say that a person who is not afraid is either unconscious, highly disturbed, or enlightened. There are different levels of teachings about fear. There is life assistance that can teach you to come to terms with what you call fear. Through positive thoughts which, loosely speaking, all carry the same message: "It's not so bad after all.“ Or go into behavioral therapy and learn how to deal with fearful situations and in this way alleviate them and possibly even push them out of the surface of the concrete situation. The deepest healing teaching about fear is the teaching of transformation, the possibility of transforming fear. This teaching is no longer interested in the concrete, superficial content of fears, but in getting to the bottom of this haunting phenomenon completely. Fear can indeed dissolve completely if we take this path into the depths, because the phenomenon we call fear is not simply a feeling, it is a web of illusions, it is a web of self-deceptions. And this web of illusions has a great power over people. We must begin to get to the bottom of structures of illusion, of self-deception. This cannot be only done with life assistance, with psychotherapy. The radical means I propose are the spiritual virtues of devotion and self-enquiry. Bhakti and Jnana.

A very basic aspect of the self-deception in which people live is the distance between the seeing and the seen; the question of the inner distance between the seeing and the images, the feelings, the whole universe that opens up. How great is the distance between you and what you call fear? You will find that there is a distance, and this is exactly the basic structure in the construction of self-deception. We cannot really see what is because we are too far away from what is. We have withdrawn, we run away, we run somewhere else. But we do not yet understand how to stay completely there and seek the unconditional closeness. The closeness to That-what-is.

Now maybe you'll tell me: "I'm too much of a coward." Then I will answer you: "This is one of the elements of the self-deception of fear. Fear is a phenomenon that leads the beholder to distance himself. If I have a small child in front of me and put a monster mask on me, the child will run away. It will flee. Why won't it just stand still and look at it remaining unmoved inwardly? Because it does not have the consciousness. Because it does not consider the possibility, because it does not yet have the intelligence to recognize this possibility. Because it is captured by the structures of illusion and deception. And fear is one of the great illusions of humanity. Perhaps one of the greatest illusions of all.

As people of the inner path know, it is useless to fight heroically against fear, just as it is useless to make yourself strong by means of further illusions and self-deception. None of this will destroy the deception of fear. So you are called upon to get on the track of the structures of self-deception and illusion. Fugitives are always too far away. They are always one step too far away from recognition. And when you get closer to the fugitive, he tries to increase his speed of flight. In order to recognize the imprisonment in deception and illusion, we must learn to understand how to really get close! No matter what we want to see, we have to summon up the courage, the trust, the love, to get so close that we can see, that we can feel, that we can look through. We must assume that everything we see is just a facade, everything. And do we have the courage to penetrate through? Do we have the courage to get so close that the seeing and the seen become one? And that this does no longer means "I have fear," but " I am fear". As long as I have fear, I am much too far away. Only when I am fear, I am one with fear and can see it from the inside.

Book: Angst – die Flucht aus der Wirklichkeit (Fear - The Escape from Reality)

by OM C. Parkin in German

advaitaMedia, 2015
hardcover, 171 pages

Buy here:  www.advaitamedia.com/shop