No fear

Mark Rothko 1969

"No Beginning, No Ending, No Fear" by Norman Fischer (in When You Greet Me I Bow collection)

The Buddha is called the Fearless One because he has seen through all the causes of fear.  His awakening moment, coming suddenly after six years of intense meditation, shows him that there is actually nothing to fear. Fear -- convincing as it may seem - is actually a conceptual mistake.

Fear is always future based.... If past traumas cause fear in us, it is only because we fear that the traumatic event will reoccur. That's what trauma is -- wounding caused by a past event that makes us chronically fearful about the futre and so queasy in the present....  In the full intensity of the present moment there is never anything to fear -- there is only something to deal with. It is a subtle point but it is absolutely true: the fear I experience now is not really present moment based: I am afraid of what is going to happen. This is what the Buddha realized. If you could be in the radical present moment, not lost in the past, not anxious about the future, you could be fearless.

What if your life weren't actually being threatened. What if the only thing actually happening to you was insult, disrespect, frustration, or betrayal, but you reacted with the alarm and urgency of someone who life was at stake.  And continued, long after the event, to harbor feelings of anger and revenge.  In that case, your reaction would be out of scale with the event, your animal instinct for survival quite misplaced.  You would have taken a relatively small matter and made it into something much more unpleasant, and even more harmful, than it needed to be.

Impermanence is the basic Buddhist concept. Nothing lasts. Our life begins, it ends, and every moment that occurs between this beginning and ending is another beginning and ending.  In other words, every moment we are disappearing a little. Life doesn't end suddenly at death. It is ending all the time.  Impermanence is constant.

Buddhism teaches that behind all our fears is our inability to actually appreciate, on a visceral level, this truth of impermanence.  Unable to accept that we are fading away all the time, we are fearful about the future, as if somehow if everything went exactly right we could be preserved for all time.  To put this in another way, all our fears are actually displacements of the one great fear, the fear of death.

Fear is desolation, desperation, anguish, despair, and sometimes anger.  Grief, sorrow, disappointment are quiet feelings we can live with.  They can be peaceful and poignant, they can be motivating.  When we feel these feelings, we can be more compassionate, kinder to one another, we can be patiently active in promoting solutions...  

All difficult moments occur in the present, and the present moment, no matter what it brings, is always completely different from our projections about the future.  Even if what we fear about the future actually comes to pass, the present moment in which it occurs won't be anything like the moment we projected in the past.  Fear is always fantastic, always fake.  What we fear never happens in the way we fear it.

Buddhist tradition of five reflections. ... meditation practice that guide practitioner in seeing that old age, sickness, and death are built-in features of the human body and mind, that no one can avoid them.  

Everything we prize in living comes from the fact of impermanence.  Beauty. Love.