Thank you Ralph!

Would you speak about fear?

First see that what you call “fear”‘ is not fear. Fear is a sensation in your body and mind, a sensation you prevent yourself from feeling the moment you label it “fear.” To arrive at the sensation, you must let go of the concept, the idea of fear, and then the perception will have an opportunity to reveal itself.

The pure sensation of fear is only tension. Tension arises the moment you look at a situation from the point of view of an image, of a man or woman, of a mother or father, of somebody’s husband or wife, and the tension stimulates chemical, physical and psychic changes in the body-mind. But this tension can never be eliminated through analysis, through any process of reasoning, for he who undertakes analysis belongs to what is being analyzed. And as we have said before, the mind can never change the mind.

You must live with your fear, even love it. By this I mean you must offer no resistance to its movement. Go with your fear as you would automatically move with a train which has just started leaving, but which you very much want to catch. As it moves all your energy moves with it. There is no opposition. You might even grab the handrails and jump on.

So move with fear not against it. Escaping it, rationalizing it or analyzing it, only adds fuel to the fire. As beautiful as your ideas may be, as philosophical as your explanations are, they can’t remove the actual tension of fear. They simply shift it to another location.

Fear concerns the person, and the person is a mere fraction of yourself. So the fraction regards a situation from a partial perspective. And as a fraction is never harmonious, all action emerging from the the partial view is inevitably disharmonious.

There must be no opposition. In accepting the sensation there is no longer a place for an image of somebody who reacts. In going with the fear you are outside it, detached, impersonal. We might say that in the moment of acceptance fuel is no longer added and the fire naturally dies out. The perception dissolves into the self, into your opening, and you awaken in this opening where there is no fear.

Jean Klein – Ease Of Being

---