Sitting through the smoke of fear.
Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2012 2:00 am
I wanted to post this, this is something I wrote, and posted elsewhere and thought it may be useful to some people here perhaps.
-In Gassho
-In Gassho
"Out of fear, even the good harm one another" -Rev. Dazui MacPhillamy
I wanted to talk for a minute about sitting though fear.
You know "I vow to undergo the rule of training, so that I may teach myself to refrain from: fear."
Really should be the 11'th precept.
Fear does almost as much harm when indulged as anger does from my experience.
As a person who gets regular fear and terror coming up in my sitting, including what I would call "liquid fear" (to the point of not being able to move, barely),
I don't have a lot of pity for people who indulge it. (fear)
Compassion, yes, (and love for that person) but pity implies I view someone as a victim for getting the consequences of their actions, which I don't.
Well do I know the consequences of indulging fear.
It creates a lot of Karma.
I know, because I've done it myself.
And I've hurt a lot of people and myself indulging fear.
I don't recommend it.
Fear will pass, if you sit with it, just like the smoke of an incense stick burning away.
Eventually the stick burns out and the smoke is no longer there.
Only the slightest hint of the scent remains to remind you that it once was there.
It has no tangibility of it's own.
No matter how insistent, or intense, or urgent fear seems to be, or how it wishes to rationalize itself,
fear, is always going to mislead us.
Its a force that blows us off-center if we indulge it, and we do have a choice to indulge it or not just like anger.
And it creates real harm.
No matter how intense the fear comes up, that does not make what the fear is "saying" true.
We can, actually sit with it, and sit through it. It will pass.
Like I said:
Fear will pass, if you sit with it, just like the smoke of an incense stick burning away.
Eventually the stick burns out and the smoke is no longer there.
Only the slightest hint of the scent remains to remind you that it once was there.
In Gassho,
Sara H
), what you have written reminded me of the Litany Against Fear in Dune:
