Unexpected Freedom

Who Says it’s Wrong to Feel Afraid?stuck in the false.’ When we see ourselves consuming falseenergy, which is what we are doing when we are beingjudgemental of our fear, we see that tendency for what it is.Finding identity in judging and condemning is a very limitedidentity, and it’s also an exhausting identity. It means alwayshaving to try to succeed and win. We will always have anenemy to try to get rid of. By contrast, the one who walks theway beyond right and wrong and good and evil abides as theawareness which sees, which listens, which knows, andwhich receives all experience willingly.Fear is Just SoSo our practice is a way of moving out of the tendency toindulge in habits of condemning, of being for or against ourfear or whatever else it is we’re experiencing. Our practice isthat of assuming the disposition of one who receives intoawareness that which is, silently listening, and feeling freely.Fear is just so – no judgement. Fear, in the beginning means,‘I feel afraid.’ But if we keep listening to it and feeling it, the‘I’ falls away and there’s just feeling fear. Fear. And there isawareness, a presence in the middle of our experience, notpushing nor pulling, not accepting, not rejecting, neither fornor against, neither not for nor not against. But it’s not that Ithen have a new-found fixed identity as awareness, because Ican’t own this presence. Any feeling of wanting to own andbe secure we can also simply receive.Then we start to recognise that our desire and fear gotogether, that they are inextricably joined. When we see thisconnection between desire and fear we don’t want to get lostin desire any more because we see that whenever we get lostin wanting we’re building up fear for the future. Fear is theother side of desire. If ‘I’ am caught in desire, what ‘I’ don’t85