Thursday, 21 July 2011 17:41
Written by Nirmala
A friend sent me the following observations:
I'm still questioning viewpoints. A month or so ago, I spoke about it with you in Satsang, and now I keep noticing how important it is for people to express their beliefs. In me, I feel this desire arise and I recognize it as a mechanism to try and change peoples minds - to get them to agree with me, or think of me in a certain light or way. Surely this is me building a strong platform to stand on so as not to see how really fragile and instable this ME is. Constant projection of ME into the world to keep my story alive. I don't feel bad about it. Just curious. Lately, when I see a post on Facebook (social media seems to be hotspots of people asserting their beliefs!), or am approached by a person asserting a belief, strongly usually, I see it as them doing the same thing - but still the overwhelming desire arises in me to help them to see it my way, but that is just another viewpoint of me! And then I notice that I am doing that, and I let it go, usually by not responding to their post even though I really really want to, or by smiling, listening, and allowing them to speak but not taking what they say personally, at least sometimes. Not taking it personally is the hardest thing!
Here is my response:
Thanks for your observations about viewpoints. I would suggest that the problem with any viewpoint is when it is held rigidly. If a viewpoint is held lightly and there is also a recognition that all viewpoints have some truth to them, then we can share and explore our own and other's viewpoints and be enriched by them all. This does not mean all viewpoints are equally true which is the trap the media falls into when they try to present a "balanced" report and so include a viewpoint that has almost no truth to it. But again, by holding our own and other's viewpoints lightly, and then exploring them openly and thoroughly, we can determine how much truth a viewpoint has. However, when you hold them lightly, there is no need to get rid of other viewpoints or change someone else's mind. There is room here for all viewpoints. Another way of expressing this is when as you say, you do not take them personally. That is holding them lightly. And it is just a practical truth that when you first agree at least somewhat with someone's viewpoint, that it is then easier to introduce them to your viewpoint.
This brings up a bigger question which is, Why do so many people hold their viewpoints so rigidly? Even nondual spiritual teachers can fall into this trap of holding their nondual viewpoints rigidly, and therefore discounting dualistic truth as if it has no basis in reality. The reason people hold their viewpoints rigidly is simply because they are afraid. Holding any idea or belief rigidly is a response driven by fear.
There are two movements within life. One is Love and the other is fear. All movement is one of these two. Love is the movement or expression of our essence. It includes everything from a sweet personal love for a lover or child, to a profound golden sense of the divine oneness and goodness of everything. Love is all of the qualities of our Being including awareness, spaciousness, aliveness and connectedness rolled into one. These are all movements of our nature as Love. Love is our essence. It is what we ultimately are made of, and it is the most real and true thing there is.
In contrast, fear is any movement of thought that restricts, constricts, distorts or limits the flow of our essential Love. Like many of the things we hold in mind as dualities, these are not actually two opposite realities. Love exists outside of thought and yet fear does not exist except as a movement of thought. Fear is just a conceptual structure in our mind that limits or distorts our experience of the limitless Love that is always here. This is kind of like the apparent duality of wet and dry. The thing that exists is water. When there is a lot of it, we call that wet. When there is not much, we call that dry. You can remove water from something and it ends up dry, but you can't remove dryness from something and have it end up wet. This is because dryness is just a concept. There is not some molecule like H2O that makes up the experience of dryness.
So fear and its resulting pain and limitation are not actual things or even energies. They are simply the words we use to describe the relative absence of love. Fear is any movement of our ego or mind that restricts or limits our experience of Love and thereby gives us a dry experience that is relatively empty of Love. The love is not actually destroyed or gone, it is just not in our experience anymore, just like when we dry our clothes we do not destroy the water molecules that made them wet, we just move the water out into the air and off of our clothes.
So holding on rigidly to a viewpoint or belief is a movement of fear because it limits or constricts the flow of awareness. By this definition, ideas and beliefs themselves are slight movements of fear as they also limit or direct our awareness and our love. However, it is always a matter of degree as some movements of thought constrict our experience of love more than others. Furthermore, this capacity to limit or direct awareness is not bad or wrong. It is the mechanism that consciousness came up with to create the entire world and all of its experiences and illusions. In order to experience something we have to limit or direct awareness. That is how Being creates contrast and differences. In a world made up completely of water, without a way to dry things out, everything would always be soaking wet. In this world where the only reality is Love, without ideas, beliefs and even fears, we would just be drowning in Love with no contrasting dryness.
To further clarify this, on the Human level, there are also two forms of fear. One is objective fear as it is in response to an actual threat or danger. It is a healthy part of our organism to have the physiological response we call fear to an oncoming bus or other danger as that is part of how our organism protects itself. This is obviously not a mistake or even a problem. Then there is purely conceptual or psychological fear which is when our mind uses its capacity to imagine a threatening or dangerous outcome, and thereby triggers the same physiological effects in our body and also the same restriction and contraction of our awareness. This ultimately is not wrong or a problem either, but it does create all of the drama and misunderstandings of our ego driven experiences.
Specifically, psychological fear is simply an idea or belief about a negative future that can also trigger the sensations that we associate with the emotion of fear. Such an idea is often much less true than a simple observation or viewpoint, and so it contracts our awareness and love much more than a simple observation or opinion. Most of our fears have some truth to them in that it is usually true that they can happen, but most of them have very little truth as most often they do not end up actually happening. When someone disagrees with us, it can trigger deeper fears about what will happen if we are wrong, or about what will happen if they continue to believe something wrong. If we are afraid, then we will try to get them to change their minds or to convince them we are right. But our fears about what will happen if we or they are wrong are not usually very complete or true. What we fear may not happen at all, or it might turn out quite differently than what our fear is telling us will happen.
Fear is the driving force of many beliefs and ideologies. For example, many on the political right are afraid of the concentration of power in the government, and given the path of history, their fear has some truth to it. Many on the left are afraid of the concentration of power in corporations and the wealthy, and once again given our history, their fear also has some truth to it. But neither fear holds the whole truth, and because of that the solutions on both sides tend to be well....one-sided. That is the only power fear has: to reduce our awareness of the truth.
In order to give fear a chance against the much stronger and more powerful reality of Love, our fear has the advantage of only having to create the appearance of the absence of Love. It is like a blow drier that does not actually dry your hair, but just makes it look dry! And that appearance is then enough to trigger more fear and the appearance of even less love. It is kind of like how in this day and age of internet news a report that has little or almost no truth can be repeated and repeated until a lot of people believe it. Fear has the advantage of just needing to create the appearance of there not being a loving presence in every moment that you can trust, so then our mind creates more thought and more fear.
What to do when fear seems to appear so real? The simple antidote is to love your fear. Give the same fullness of attention and curiosity you would give to a new lover to your thoughts and fears. This is like pouring a lot of water on a blow drier....the water is going to win that battle and short out the blow drier! Loving our fear allows us to see it more clearly and fully. And most importantly to see how small the fear is. Fear is a small truth masquerading as a big truth. When we love our fear, we see through this disguise to how small it really is. Just as you do not need to get someone else to change or drop their viewpoint, you do not need to get rid of or go to battle with your fear. Instead just drown your fear in love!
When someone is sharing their viewpoint and it triggers a fear in you, you can just love your fear, love your own viewpoint, and love their viewpoint no matter how small it is. It does not cost you anything to love this way since the supply of Love is endless. In this moister atmosphere of flowing Love, the relative truth of all viewpoints can be discriminated and enjoyed.
I hope this helps.
