Face Your Fear

Video Transcription

Everyone’s asking the big question now, “Ahhh, what if the world ends?” Oh my goodness what ever shall we do? Well in reality it is going to end. Everything that appears will also disappear at some point or another. Everything that begins also ends. Even this world will end sooner or later. Civilizations come and go. Rome rose and fell, Atlantis rose and fell, Lumeria, Sumeria appeared and disappeared, galaxies appear and disappear, universes disappear…

The truth is this whole physical universe is destined for a terrible end. Now try not to get depressed, but every star will die eventually. Every star will burn out and stop putting out light, and therefore every planet and all the life on it will die. Entire solar systems will go dark and eventually the last star will burn out someday. Could be a long time from now, but the way physical reality works, everything dies. All physical forms end.

And so you’re probably concerned about the end of the world and I’m inviting you visit that fear, fully. Meet it here, all the way, and ask yourself what comes up with that. What kind of feelings of mortality and finiteness come up? My next question would be what infinite feelings come up? Truly you are not the body, and this is what the fear really is when you fear the end of the world, or if you fear end of life as you know it, fear the death of the planet. Really what it comes down to is survival of self, survival of identity, survival of me, you, survival of the body… But survival of the body isn’t something that can happen. So let’s face it now. You will die. Everyone will die. Everything ends sooner or later, including this beautiful planet. So feel the fear fully. Feel it right here. Right in here, right where the terror grips you. Don’t be afraid anymore of meeting your own terror, meeting your own end, meeting death. Let it be all around you. Let yourself feel the experience of terror fully, terror of the death of your identity.

One thing I’ve learned about fear is that when you run away from it and try and get away from it as fast as you possibly can, and you keep outrunning it, it just keeps running faster and catches up with you. It never can be escaped, and all the suffering happens because you’re trying to outrun the fear. Oh my God! How can you get away from fear? Well the answer is: you can’t. But if you turn around and meet it fully, fully, it actually turns into your power… into self empowerment, peace, wisdom. So don’t run away from fear anymore. Meet it every time it comes up. Meet it fully because when you feel fear, usually it has to do with something about survival, survival of the self, survival of your position in the herd, survival in the social context, survival at your job, survival in your family, survival of the fittest, the most beautiful, the most talented… When you feel fear it is fear of the ending of something, not wanting something to change.

I had a dream once; I always had a fear of machinery; saws and things like that. Power saws because “shwww” one wrong move and you could loose a finger or something! So in a dream I was being chased by all these objects of my fear. I was running, running, running, running, running ever so hard not getting anywhere, of course; the usual “can’t get away from what you’re trying to run from” in the dream. Finally, in the dream I decided, “That’s it. I’m not going to run anymore,” and I sat down right in the path of all these fearful objects chasing me. I braced myself, I sat in the lotus position and I just said “I surrender.”

As these items reached me they disappeared and suddenly there was a very large vibration, a huge vibration… and as I sat in the path of these things they all came into me. I absorbed them, and transformed them into power, transformed them into wisdom, transformed them into energy, back into raw creating energy that could be used for other things now. Once I learned that lesson in that dream, I’ve faced fear the same way ever since, and it’s made such a difference. There was an immediate cut down on the amount of suffering, which we’re all looking for less suffering, whatever form that suffering takes for any one person… We’re all looking for less of it, right? So one way to alleviate suffering, a large chunk of it all at once, is to face your fears when they come up.

So face this fear of the end. This fear of the end of the world, the terrible plight of humanity destined to possibly destroy itself, or be destroyed by some celestial event like a solar plasma cloud that could fry the earth in a few minutes, or meteors, or what have you… There’s all sorts of ways that this world could be destroyed in an instant, but there’s something that doesn’t die, doesn’t end, and that’s YOU, the consciousness that you are. Your body can come and go. Worlds can come and go. Universes can come and go, yet consciousness remains and hasn’t been harmed by the comings and goings in its imaginings.