Overcome Fear

Instead of needing to control fear, you need to feel it as an energy movement in yourself, Eckhart Tolle tells Meena Kapur  

How can we control fear and deal with it constructively? 

It’s not so much a question of needing to control it, but a question of seeing how fear arises in oneself. When you look into fear, there are two important factors that are always connected with it. Fear is always connected with some identification with form, and that form that you have identified with as ‘me.’ Even if it is only an opinion and you suddenly fear that someone might prove to you that your opinion is not right — then you get scared. 

It could be a deeper fear if you identify it with a physical body and you see the end in coming near to this physical form. But, at whatever level it is, if you look into fear, you will see there is always some identification with form, which means your sense of self is derived from form and fears its end because every form is short-lived. So, whenever you identify with form, fear will be present. Ultimately, it is the illusion of form that creates fear. 

Identifying With Form 

Another aspect of fear is that it is always connected with the future. There is always some mental projection into the future. The form wants to make sure that it survives, so it projects itself mentally into the future and, perhaps, seeks to complete itself or make itself even bigger, through the future. So, it is drawn to the future. This form identity is drawn to the future in the hope that the future will add more to it, and complete it. That is the desire movement that is connected with the future. 

But desire also has another side to it. The other side of desire is fear. On the one hand, the form identity or the egoic self believes and hopes the future will make it complete. But it also knows, and sometimes it is not seen consciously, there is a deep underlying fear that the future actually may take away the little that you have — the form as it is now — unsatisfying as it maybe. So, maybe, the future will not complete it but may even destroy this form — which, of course, it will! 

Every form is destined to dissolve again, so fear comes in when there is a mental projection into the future. The form always wants to perpetuate and enhance itself in the future but it also knows that it is not going to work. And there is the fear of death, because all fear is, ultimately, the fear of death. Fear of loss is another form of death; loss of something with which ‘I’ had identified. So, all fear is fear of death. All fear is due to identification with form, and all fear is connected with mental projections into the future. A future in which the form wants to complete itself but knows deep down that it is going to be destroyed and dissolved. So, how to go beyond — that is the question. 

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that you can’t control fear. But, you can observe fear. Observe it at two levels: observe how fear comes about in yourself, and you can observe the energy field of fear directly. Part of the emotional pain, the collective emotional pain that humans carry inside themselves, is what I call the pain-body.

A very important part of every pain-body is fear. And that can be observed directly in oneself as an energy movement; that is the fear that you can’t control.

You can only bring awareness to it; you can only bring acceptance to it as it arises; you can only bring presence to it and watch it, so that the fear does not become a vicious circle — fear creating thought, fearful thought; fearful thought creating more fear.

And so the vicious circle of the emotion of fear continues determining what you think. Thinking feeds the emotion of fear and many humans are trapped in that vicious circle. The only way to step out of that is to observe fear directly as it arises.

 You observe how it is created by mental projection away from now, and you can observe fear that may be triggered by some event that seems to threaten your form identification. And, sometimes the reaction of fear is out of proportion to the actual threat to your form. 

The fear may be there when someone criticises you, or when somebody says you are not right, you are wrong. There can be an enormous amount of fear that then turns into defensiveness, and at that moment you are able to see how fear arises and you can also see that your reaction is out of proportion to the threat. That is because the reaction is the accumulated fear that humans carry, which is quite enormous because it is a part of the human pain-body, and you can watch that directly so that it does not turn into thinking. 

Instead of needing to control fear, you need to bring awareness to fear and feel it as an energy movement in yourself so that it does not become thought. Because thought will add to it, feed it and then the vicious circle, the karmic circle, is there again. So, you bring acceptance to it and you begin to depersonalise fear. Before, fear was an essential part of the false sense of self — the problematic, heavy, false sense of self that is karma, which is identification with form.

Higher Destiny 

Fear in that state is a personal matter. It is part of your personal problematic life situation, your personal, problematic sense of self, of identity; and so, when you look at fear directly, you realise the impersonal nature of fear. That means your sense of self is no longer in the fear, your sense of self has shifted from being trapped in the form. Because even fear is form, an energy form — your sense of self was trapped in that form, but now your sense of self is the awareness that witnesses the fear. 

So the fear has become depersonalised and that is the beginning of the end of fear, when there is no longer an illusory self-identification with fear. As long as there is a self-identification with fear, it is karma and it perpetuates itself continuously. 

So, the answer to the question is: depersonalise fear by recognising that it is not you; that it is a form of human pain. Thus you allow it to be, which implies there is an awareness or spaciousness, which is the higher destiny, higher consciousness, the unconditioned, coming in. And so, that is the ending of fear, which is the higher destiny. Part of that is the ending of having to live with that constant companion, the heaviness that every human lives with otherwise. Courtesy: Yogi Impressions.