Practice 17

Everything is Here to Help You

"The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe." ~ Albert Einstein

One could realize that this decision Albert Einstein wishes us to make comes down to our self-identity worldview, rather than a judgment about the actual nature of an objective reality. We can experience a shift between what seems like a hostile universe and a friendly one on different days or even as drastic as at different times in a given day, depending on how we are interpreting the circumstances of our life. 

What we identify with/as has everything to do with how we interpret the hostility or friendliness of the Universe. 

It is important to consider what your lived experience of identity is. We take on various roles and identities in order to conduct important aspects of our life such as spouse or partner, parent, teacher, employee, role model, etc., but we must be mindful that these are just masks. We often mistake them for our actual identity, however, getting lost in them and fusing into their perspectives and problems as we take them on as our own.

But there’s a more fundamental identity that goes beyond our role-playing masks, and that is what we believe our essence to be as we experience our perspectival selves as an actor in this world. Do you hold the perspective of a soul, along with the worldview of a soul? Or are you largely experiencing life as a separate, egoic human animal? If you are identified with your separate humanness, you see the world through the perspective of a human animal experiencing a seemingly random, arbitrary evolutionary play of chaos and order who will one day die and cease to exist. If you are being your soul-self you will experience a perspective closer to being an eternal consciousness having a human experience which was freely chosen under a state of higher awareness in order to create growth through overcoming adversarial circumstances. Or perhaps you’re somewhere in-between.

Because most of us won’t access states of consciousness high enough to know directly what our soul-existence is like, we have to rely on trusting our intuition, beliefs, and experience to answer important existential questions relating to the nature of reality (although just as I have experienced directly through higher states of consciousness all that is contained in this teaching, you also could experience directly yourself through psychedelics or years of meditation). For now, if you’re willing, offer me a leap of your faith with this one if needed. Back to it…

Beliefs can be limiting or expansive, so we would be wise to choose them consciously and in alignment with our spiritual growth. We have to make the choice to do this because we all carry beliefs that we’ve picked up from others as the assumed “the way things are” collected throughout a lifetime of conditioning and domestication.

Are adversarial experiences such as not getting what you want, becoming ill, experiencing pain and suffering, and the host of life’s negative experiences happening to you, or for you?

The first is the attitude of victimhood, the second is of enlightenment. The position that things are happening to you is a possible byproduct of identifying strictly as a human animal having a random material experience, while the position that things are happening for you is a possibility that opens up when you become identified as a soul having a very non-random, intentional experience.

To realize the truth that everything is here to help you, you must be willing to let go of the limiting beliefs created by your ego and the collective ego of cultural society—no small task but it is the first step in the process of completely upending suffering for good. The ego is driven to worry, anticipate, separate, and regret. When it is running our lives - when it is running the show - we experience a daily diet of negativity. The soul is driven to truth, unity, presence, love, and acceptance and has the power to unravel the negativity of the ego when we stop playing the dualistic story of victims and villains. 

The ego feeds on judgment and negativity, which shrinks back the energy of our soul. In contrast, the soul expands through positivity experienced in presence. In order to expand positivity, we must release victimhood altogether and begin to open up to the love all around that supports us.

When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation, change the situation, or accept it. All else is madness. ~ Eckhart Tolle

In order to reduce victimhood, one helpful way you can choose to perceive reality is to come to know that you are loved more than you could ever realize, just as you are now. The actualization of that love is this human journey with all the negative and positive experiences that come with it. You planned and designed it, all down to the last molecule, in order to create an experience that would lead to your soul’s desired growth path and elimination of karma. Your life-reality can be seen as a love-learning simulation experience that offers a customized path for your soul’s evolution. In other words, it is a very friendly universe.

All adversity is an evolutionary gift for the soul, wrapped in a package that our selfish, attached ego-mind views as undesirable. All joy and love is a gift of our living in the moment, allowing ourselves to play in the light of our divinity. The main antagonist to our actualizing a completely loving, joyful, soulful experience of this human life is fear.

Relinquishing Fear is Key to Expanding Love and consciousness

Learning to accept and love all things is your soul’s ultimate desire manifest. Fear is the inverse of love so, in order to grow love, you must relinquish fear. The love-learning simulator of life will confront you with your fears over and over in order to give you opportunities to overcome them. When you do, you transcend fear and their associated attachments. By doing so, you grow your capacity to love and to receive love.

Our non-mindful strategy to approach fear is typically through avoidance or manipulation (by not being truthful or by other forms of deflection). Avoidance of fear brings stagnation and victim mentality, and over time will create phobias, low self-worth, and learned helplessness. Alternatively, you can take on a radical attitude of responsibility regarding discovering and relinquishing your fears consciously.

“The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it then you make it worse because you project onto it all kinds of bogies and threats which don’t exist in it at all.

Whenever you meet a ghost, don’t run away. Because [if you run away] the ghost will capture the substance of your fear and materialize itself out of your own substance. It will kill you eventually because it will take over all your own vitality. 

So, then, whenever confronted with a ghost, walk straight into it. And it will disappear.”

~ Alan Watts

Just as much as order in nature connotes a ‘fish in water’, the truth about fear is most people live as a ‘human in fear’. Because of the constant, insidious nature of fear, you may not even realize that this is the water in which you swim. You can, however, become directly aware of this if you become present enough to notice how many micro and macro fears your mind creates in its attempt to keep you alive. Fear is core to your survival programming and is beyond your direct control in that you can’t will away fear directly. We aren’t trying to villainize fear here because the positive aspect of fear is that you wouldn’t be alive right now without it. But it is important to see that while fear plays an essential part of our survival as a separate biological being, there is another, less vital, aspect of survival our fear is managing for us. And that’s the survival of our self-concept (the ego).

Your emotions pull on your local consciousness like a puppet on strings, and are often preconscious experiences expressed through your body. However, you can learn to become more conscious of their existence. By tuning into the felt experience of the body — perhaps a contracting in the gut, a swirl or flutter around the heart, a sudden icy feeling through the lower back or pelvis, etc. — and becoming curious about the internal experience of sensations and thoughts you are having, you create space to bring the reactionary unconscious into visible awareness.

Fear exists to help you maintain what you believe you are - what you identify with.

Survival isn’t about just surviving physically; it is also about surviving in social, personal, cultural, and conceptual contexts. Fear helps your ego-mind maintain its self-concept by keeping you from doing things that it wouldn’t approve of, such as embarrassing yourself or looking stupid, unattractive, or being rejected, for example. Living in survival fear means living risk averse, which means living within the limits of your ego’s ‘small-life box of possibility.’

Your fear manages your self-concept through what you’ve become identified with and affects the choices you make in everyday life. It helps you avoid what threatens to kill you on the physical level, of course, but fear also gets you to avoid things that seem threatening to your identity. For example, if you are a ‘facts-over-feelings’ materialist skeptic, encountering evidence of God and an afterlife threatens the things your identity is attached to and dependent on and thus is something you will avoid becoming open to. Anything that you have extended your identity into and have become attached to becomes the dogma prism projecting your rules of ‘what is and is not acceptable.’

What you are is defined by your fears, and what you fear defines what you identify as—a vicious circle. If you are identified as a mother or a father, that is part of your identity and thus you will have a certain set of fears associated with that personal conceptual identity that exist outside of the actual material circumstances of being a parent. For example, being identified as a ‘good’ parent as part of your conceptual identity might include making sure you ‘look the part’ so your child has the latest stroller with shock absorbers and only designer-label clothes to help yourself and others know just what a ‘good’ parent you are. There is nothing inherently wrong with designer baby clothing and expensive strollers, but when they are used by the ego to bolster its identity as a ‘good’ parent, then that is fear seeking to protect what it is identified with. This is quite different than the actual material circumstance of a ‘good’ parent not allowing their young child to play with a knife that could seriously hurt the child.

All fear is relative to what you identify with, which means there isn’t anything objectively fearful. All fear is imaginary and doesn’t exist outside of being a limited and instinctual being, such as an animal. If you identify as a small, limited self that can die, you will fear more things than someone who has come to believe in an afterlife and no longer fears their body’s death, for example. Realizing all fears are just creations of our imaginations opens up the possibility of large, personal change. To see this, what is something you no longer believe that used to be true for you once upon a time? Imaginary fears can be changed like beliefs can—by challenging them.

Most all fear can be boiled down to a desire to avoid pain; anticipation of future threats and the unknown; the enormity of your True Self potential manifest; or a loss of ‘self.’

There are few things that constitute an objective, ‘factual self.’ Your self is largely a set of concepts and stories that only exist in your mind and therefore your self is malleable. In other words, you can overcome most any fear you have through working on what you’ve conditioned yourself to be attached to. All fears, including the fear of death, are completely imaginary. All fear is also falsehood and delusion, because in truth there is nothing objectively you can be afraid of. Danger is relative to what you identify with and as; there is no objective danger as even death is an illusion. Your degree of fearing directly relates to your quality of consciousness (awareness) and thus the more you fear, the less awakened, happy, fulfilled, etc. you will be.

Fear is also resistance to a future experience. If you are ultimately present — unless some emergency is happening — no fear will exist. Fear often comes because of your thoughts, which are happening in psychological time (living in your virtual future or past). Your mind recalls a past or imagines a future scenario that threatens what you identify with and the creature comforts you’ve become attached to.

If you are a fearful person, you likely have based your happiness conditioned on the enjoyment of the luxuries of your preferences manifest, rather than on accepting what is and has been — the positives and the negatives —and all in service to you. Authentic power doesn’t come from your ability to manifest your preferences so you can surround yourself with comfort and convenience; it comes from being able to accept all of who you are, and to tolerate or accept all experiences of polarity, without resistance. This may sound ridiculous, but it is possible.

In addition to the mental and spiritual benefits, there are practical health reasons to identify and face your fears. Fear translates to stress and causes a whole host of health issues, including depression, heart disease, cancer, anxiety, and much more. Fear becomes stored tension in your body and the body can record and store fear over a lifetime, creating chronic disease.

You will want to watch your fears mindfully after becoming aware of fear in this new way. To help with this, you can categorize your fears into two categories, macro and micro. Macro fears are one you will likely be able to list more easily, including examples such as “fear of spiders” or “having an unhealthy child” or “looking stupid” or “making mistakes” or “being alone” or “disappointing others.” Micro fears and the smaller, insidious fears that nudge you often arise throughout a day and include examples such as “fear of someone realizing you lied to them” or “fear of not eating healthy enough” or “fear of taking this phone call,” etc. These micro fears typically run under the radar of your awareness and require you to practice into more subtle granularities of mindfulness in order to become aware of them and how they influence your thinking and behavior. When you can begin to see the aggregate of these micro fears, you start to see the invisible water of fear in which you swim as your ego identity seeks to protect itself throughout the day.

Fortunately, by doing the work to become aware of your fears and identify what aspects of egoic identity feel threatened, you can move yourself into presence and out of survival consciousness and habit. The way out is through, and the solution is to surrender yourself to the thing you are afraid of, rather than continuing to resist it. Rather than running away, you run towards acceptance and learn to be okay with living with what you fear. You practice radical surrender, relinquishing the illusion of control of, and defense against, what you fear.

Thusly, if handled with proper perspective, fear can be a stimulator in the development of our consciousness. If embraced as an exciting, stimulating opportunity for movement, it will fulfill its divine role in our lives to propel us outside of our comfort zones and create real inner change.

10 tools to relinquish fears in your life

1. Do the thing you fear. Face the fear head-on. This is ‘walking into the ghost’ as Alan Watts describes.

2. Put yourself proactively into challenging situations. Leave your comfort zone and make bold (not reckless) choices. 

3. Get more exposure and experience handling things you fear and are insecure about. Through repetition, exposure + mindfulness (feel and observe the fear as the inner observer) will wear down anything you fear (such as public speaking).

4. Concentration practice. A form of mindfulness where you put your awareness on your fear sensations as you experience them and then attempt to love those feelings through affectionate acceptance (the practice is below).

5. Access total presence when fear or anxiety shows up. When your mind attempts to jump into the future, invoke your presence mindfulness practice to realize there is nothing to fear if in the present moment.

6. Therapeutic assisted psychedelic use such as mushrooms, ayahuasca, and DMT. Particularly good at releasing existential fears such as your fear of death.

7. Self-hypnosis. When fear is looming, crowd out negative obsessions with positive visualizations, intentions, and gratitude to reprogram your subconscious mind.

8. Contemplation practice. List out your fears and what you are unwilling to experience and bring them into contemplation as the sacred adversaries they are—pointers in the direction of showing you where you are not yet love.

9. The Sedona Method. Learn how to experience fear and let it go fully, in the moment.

10. Breathwork practice. Integrate breathing practice into any of the above to ground yourself and grow a sense of relaxation, calm, and safety.

Fear is a contracting emotion that creates a sensation in your body that triggers an old ‘fear program’ within you and creating an energy that seeks to take over your whole body. It sends a signal to the universe to attract the thing you fear in order to get you to face and walk through that fear.

At the highest level of consciousness, you are all things (All-One). Fear is thus nothing more than an illusion because anything you have ever been afraid of, in truth, has been the One Self (you). The nature of Supreme Consciousness, the totality, is to fully accept and love itself, and you are on Earth learning your way back to the complete unconditional loving embrace of your highest self. Self love — loving your entire Universal Self — is the ultimate teaching and life purpose, thus the relinquishing of attachments and the fears they create is required on the path to ultimate Self Love. Relinquishing fear also means having trust and faith that the Universe will always bring you what you need, even when it doesn’t look like what you want.

Everything is here to help you, including fear, as it all helps expand your consciousness and trains you to become more love/loving and accepting of all that is.

If you can see the truth of this, you can more easily stop viewing fear as something antagonistic and start seeing it as a servant to your achieving more love and higher states of consciousness. This level of emotional mastery is living the good life. 

Are you willing to take this leap of belief?

Start by befriending your fear.