Fear of Awakening
If you caught my post a few months ago, I'd been suffering from panic attacks and anxiety and had managed to overcome the worst of it, but just recently I've pretty much stomped out the remaining anxiety residue that remained. I thought I would share some of my thoughts/insights from this recent encounter with fear/anxiety.
My fear was peeled down to two deeper fears: the fear of death and the fear of awakening/enlightenment. These two fears could be seen as the same fear: the death of this body - what I've become used to / attached to.
It seems like the perception of death as my eventual reality had always been a perception just below consciousness - something I was a little aware of at times, but never really met head on or faced. Though during this "anxiety process" or whatever it was, the reality of my death became fully conscious and that awareness persisted and still persists.
So I have been forced to try and come to terms with the fact that I will die, which is a very difficult thing. When faced with the reality of my own death, no superficial comforter will suffice, no blind belief in anything will cut it. It is a very raw, potent and alarming wake-up call. It strips back all the bullshit, and I've realized there's no intellectual way I can come to terms with death. There's no belief or intellectual understanding that will make death okay.
So I had to go back to the practice. I'd not really practiced regularly for a long time, as through my skepticism and questioning of spiritual assumptions, I had pretty much tossed everything aside and just got on with my life. So I went back to the practice, to see if I could find peace with this stark awareness of death.
This brings me to the second fear: the fear of enlightenment, which also included the fear of meditation and spiritual practice. This fear had been there for a long time too, but hidden below the surface of my consciousness. I hadn't noticed, but it had always been there, stopping me from going too deeply into practice. Perhaps born of an attachment to how things presently are, and a resistance to change.
During my anxiety process, this fear had been surfaced as well and I was suddenly afraid to meditate. But by coming to the surface, I could look at this fear and deal with it, and see if there was really any ground to its reasoning for making me afraid. As I delved deeper into it, I realized I always had this false assumption of what the fruits of practice were like, what enlightenment/awakening was like, what a taste of the Dhamma was like.
I had imagined spiritual realization as like the mind being blasted open and spreading out into space, or the mind being overloaded with unbearable intense pleasure. I had imagined something giant, dazzling, dizzying, something far beyond the ordinary, something extremely foreign and terrifying.
And it began to dawn on me, in the days that followed, that Buddhism was quite the opposite of all of that. The point of Buddhism was that true happiness wasn't to be found in the extremes, in some kind of extreme, intense bliss, rather happiness is found in peace. And peace is very grounded, calm not intense, at ease not excited, very ordinary not extraordinary. It's being at peace with things as they presently are, being at peace with things as they are, not launching off into spiritual space and somehow going beyond ordinary life. Quite the opposite: it's being more grounded in this reality, getting closer to it, seeing it more clearly and being at peace with it.
And that certainly isn't anything to be afraid of. And now, when I'm with that peace, death is okay. I don't know why it's okay, but on an intuitive level it just is.
My fear was peeled down to two deeper fears: the fear of death and the fear of awakening/enlightenment. These two fears could be seen as the same fear: the death of this body - what I've become used to / attached to.
It seems like the perception of death as my eventual reality had always been a perception just below consciousness - something I was a little aware of at times, but never really met head on or faced. Though during this "anxiety process" or whatever it was, the reality of my death became fully conscious and that awareness persisted and still persists.
So I have been forced to try and come to terms with the fact that I will die, which is a very difficult thing. When faced with the reality of my own death, no superficial comforter will suffice, no blind belief in anything will cut it. It is a very raw, potent and alarming wake-up call. It strips back all the bullshit, and I've realized there's no intellectual way I can come to terms with death. There's no belief or intellectual understanding that will make death okay.
So I had to go back to the practice. I'd not really practiced regularly for a long time, as through my skepticism and questioning of spiritual assumptions, I had pretty much tossed everything aside and just got on with my life. So I went back to the practice, to see if I could find peace with this stark awareness of death.
This brings me to the second fear: the fear of enlightenment, which also included the fear of meditation and spiritual practice. This fear had been there for a long time too, but hidden below the surface of my consciousness. I hadn't noticed, but it had always been there, stopping me from going too deeply into practice. Perhaps born of an attachment to how things presently are, and a resistance to change.
During my anxiety process, this fear had been surfaced as well and I was suddenly afraid to meditate. But by coming to the surface, I could look at this fear and deal with it, and see if there was really any ground to its reasoning for making me afraid. As I delved deeper into it, I realized I always had this false assumption of what the fruits of practice were like, what enlightenment/awakening was like, what a taste of the Dhamma was like.
I had imagined spiritual realization as like the mind being blasted open and spreading out into space, or the mind being overloaded with unbearable intense pleasure. I had imagined something giant, dazzling, dizzying, something far beyond the ordinary, something extremely foreign and terrifying.
And it began to dawn on me, in the days that followed, that Buddhism was quite the opposite of all of that. The point of Buddhism was that true happiness wasn't to be found in the extremes, in some kind of extreme, intense bliss, rather happiness is found in peace. And peace is very grounded, calm not intense, at ease not excited, very ordinary not extraordinary. It's being at peace with things as they presently are, being at peace with things as they are, not launching off into spiritual space and somehow going beyond ordinary life. Quite the opposite: it's being more grounded in this reality, getting closer to it, seeing it more clearly and being at peace with it.
And that certainly isn't anything to be afraid of. And now, when I'm with that peace, death is okay. I don't know why it's okay, but on an intuitive level it just is.