When we feel alone and helpless, fear arises. When there is no one we can lean on or who can help us, we fear being scared. Let’s pay attention to this. What does it mean to feel alone and helpless? Why do we feel we need help from others? Why do we need someone else to depend on? Our mind always plays the devil’s advocate, so the mind will convince us that we don’t have the ability to solve the issue that troubles us, or the time to solve it, and we are naturally scared. That is the time fear arises. So can we give up the way we think? Because the nature of our fickle mind will repeatedly create obstacles for us.
Whenever we feel we are not accepted or excluded, we will feel alone and helpless, then fear arises. We cannot see that we already assume that we are not able to deal with the problem at hand. When we fear being scared, we want to get rid of it. For example, if you are scared that you don’t have money in the future, then you will become stingy today. You are scared that you don’t have money when you are old. The reason you have this behavior is simply because you are scared, and to get rid of this fear, you become stingy. This is the result of “assume the worst” thinking. To step out of this pattern is to stop the way of “fearing fear”, and come back to understand and learn about fear because it is our thinking that creates the fear.
Being helpless is our state of thinking; we assume the worst; our mind creates the idea that we are helpless, and then we feel scared. Then who created the state of being “helpless”? It’s our mind! Our mind creates an issue, and then tries to get rid of it! This is how our mind creates the “opposite” in every situation. What we have to learn is this pathology and not simply try getting rid of it!
In case there are 10 burglars breaking into your house, what would you do? You will want to get rid of them, right? Fear will arise, just like if a thief enters our house. We really need to learn about this so that our life will be different. Uncertainty, control, insecurity, loneliness, loss of loved ones, loss of independence, separation, injuries, not being recognized, being hopeless; these states all are like thieves coming, and we always want to get rid of them. We keep doing these things without learning about the nature of our mind, and that’s why we don’t feel freedom! That’s why we feel pain when our kids don’t succeed at school. These things bother us because we haven’t learned the root cause of our suffering.
There are 10 burglars breaking into our house and we want to get rid of them, who do we hire to get rid of them? The head of the burglars! Do you see that? What happened then? So you have to face an even bigger fear. This is what we have been doing. Because of fear, we are willing to give up everything for security. We did everything we could to give our children a good future. Our lover wants to leave and we will do everything to keep her around. These are all fears. We always end up doing the wrong thing. We always go the wrong direction. The head of the thieves can get rid of 10 others but he will create another 100 thieves. Have you ever noticed that?
When we feel uncertain, we want to control. We will be dependent on others, angry, fearful of losing loved ones, fearful of failure, fearful that things do not go not as expected. We will be angry. We have always been like that! If we have no idea how we are, how can we liberate ourselves from this state? This is very important.
By Suzhen Liu
If you find Suzhen Liu’s writings helpful, please check out her book, ‘Letting Go—Release Your Suffering’ on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Letting-Go-Release-Your-Suffering/dp/1982258004
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