The Mood of the Self-Contraction

ADI DA SAMRAJ: Fear is inherent in the body, in its separateness. The fear isn’t yours at all. The fear is in the self contraction. It is, its characteristic mood. It’s inherent emotion. You could be feeling fear now, and yet there’s nothing dramatic happening at the moment that would seem to justify being afraid. But if you somehow rather bring to mind the potential of life difficulties in this moment, or remind yourself of traumatic experiences you’ve had by remembering them and so on, you can be experiencing fear right now without any apparent cause. It would be entirely obviously subjective, but nonetheless, it’s still the same thing.

It is the mood of self contraction, the mood that is inherent in self contraction, in the presumption of separateness, in the presumption of identification with the body as the position of existence. And if you presume it is the position of existence, then you start puzzling over what do you do about this? Is there some way to escape this? There doesn’t appear to be any way to escape it. And so fear becomes a fixed sensation, becomes a chronic sensation, in fact, potentially very disabling sometimes.

And so everyone has experiences of one kind or another, just the mere fact of being alive and what had to occur in order of you to be alive, birthing, and so on. Plus all the experiences of a lifetime effect, as you suggested, embed fear in the body or the psychophysical mechanism. And this is fundamental to the condition of everyone here, of every human being, of every living being. Although everyone’s in a different disposition or sense of circumstance or state of mind in the present moment, nonetheless, all are sitting in a situation and everyone is in the midst of an activity. In fact, right now, that is generating fear. Except that generally speaking, people use various psychological devices to keep it subliminal or to generate diversions, that kind of intoxication or even literal intoxication by using intoxicating means. But diversions of life, experiential means to divert attention through generating intentionally or otherwise by circumstance. Experiencing different states of mind, of emotion, of body that desensitize you, at least temporarily, to the fundamental fear that is at the root of this bodily sense of separate existence.

And this is not therefore merely your characteristic. It is the actual state of everyone, and it is therefore something that is right there. Everyone is always sitting in it. And how much of your life you want to waste diverting yourself from it or consoling yourself and so forth, intoxicate yourself is up to you, but you can’t really get rid of it because it’s inherent in the presumption of identification with the state of separateness and brevity, change and inevitable death.

You can’t escape that. So you cannot escape fear unless something fundamental changes about your understanding and experiencing of existence itself. You cannot get rid of fear. There is no intoxication, no diversion, nothing that will desensitize you, that is anything but temporary and in the long run, very destructive of any kind of balance or well-being or clarity.

So you rightly, if you consider the matter clearly, you have to address this fundamental matter. There’s nothing you can do about it except whatever it is that utterly transcends the root presumption that is the cause of it.

Next:

Transcending the Self-Knot of Fear