A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
Don't be afraid to see what you see.
Every day the media reports incidents of terrorism, crime, and aggression. I have never been to a country where tragic stories of death and bloodshed did not fill the newspapers and airwaves... but the overwhelming majority of the human race does not behave destructively; very few of the five billion people on this planet actually commit acts of violence. Most of us prefer to be as peaceful as possible.
Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.
Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.
If we get involved in fears about the future, we shall miss the chances that the present offers us.
The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.
Want, or desire, arises when you are not happy. Have you seen this? When you are very happy then there is contentment. Contentment means no want.
We all have a relationship with everything. Obviously the relationship we have with the people and objects in our immediate vicinity is more intimate than the rest of the world. For most of us the most common relationship is possession. In our minds we think we own and possess things like cars and houses and carpets and golf clubs etc. This thinking easily spreads into jobs and tasks and positions and perhaps even other people. "I want you", and "You are mine alone", is the essence of many romantic film scripts and song lyrics. What we forget is that this relationship is wrong. It is not possible to possess anything. Care for..yes. Use...yes. But possess...no. You can't take it with you when you go, so we say! And yet it's the idea of possession which lies at the heart of all fear, war and conflict. Can you see it? Fear of loss, fear of not acquiring what we have already decided is ours in our minds. So what is a better relationship we can choose which takes all the fear away. Be a trustee. Everything comes to us in trust, for us to use and then to set it free. The consciousness of trustee sets us free of the tension of grasping and guarding. To see ourselves as trustees of everything that we receive, including our bodies, encourages our innate capacity to 'care for with dignity'. It is a much more relaxing way of relating to the things which we are privileged to receive in life.
What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.
