I am looking forward to June. In June, my parents and brother come to London. We'll be heading to Amsterdam again, and then Greece after Carlo returns from Singapore. Hopefully i'll get to see Leonard too.
Yesterday was Dan's birthday, so i gave him a ring on his new mobile number and had a really great chat with him. I miss Dan, he's the best. For his birthday, him, Chris Martins and Josh went to Dim Sum. Leonard is in Whistler after safely trekking cross canada from Toronto back home. It sounds like the great canadian friends and activities that i'm familiar with. It made me a little sad that i couldn't be there to celebrate it with him. But then again, i have my own adventures that i must press on with.
I guess "fear" has been in my spirit a while. Why is it that we battle so much with fear. I prayed yesterday that God would help me be more aware of my fear and to understand it and transform it. Then this morning i was reading my new book "The Power of NOW" by Eckhart Tolle. In it he explained fear in a practical sense, it gave me a greater understanding and left me with a profound beginning to the day which on the surface would seem like the average daily work commute. Yes, on the surface, but what was happening inside was a bunch of oooooo's and whoooooooa's. I like mornings like that.
Eckhart lit up the day today with his explaination on how to identify fear. He talks about physical fear and psychological fear. He noted that you do not need fear to avoid unnecessary danger- just a minimum of intelligence and common sense. For such practical matters, it is useful for us to apply the lessons learned in the past. Okay, i get that...don't touch a boiling kettle or you'll get burned. We learn that when we are toddlers. Simple.
Then he goes on to the psychological conditions of fear such as unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, etc. These are fears of something that MIGHT happen, not of something that is happening now. Then he explains that we need to get back to the PRESENT moment. We are in the here and now, while our minds seem to be in the future. When this happens, we create an anxiety gap, and if you are identified with your mind and have lost touch witht he power and simplicity of the NOW, that anxiety gap becomes our constant companion. How many people live their lives like this? How many years have i lived my life like this. I shake my head, it seems to be the state of our society, the way we are conditioned to think. And even when we are aware, it is so easy to slip back into it.
The solution is that we can always cope with the present moment, but we cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection- we cannot cope with the future when there are such endless possibilities. We could worry on and on for ever, missing out on the present moment, where our attention should really be.
Why are we so connected to psychological fears? What is it that makes it so hard for us where we keep slipping back into our old habits?
EGO.
As long as we are identified with our mind, our ego runs our life. Because of it's phantom nature and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. The Ego is outwardly very confident. But psychological fear is fundamentally an emotion which is generated by the body's reaction to your mind. When the ego feels under threat, our emotion becomes fear; fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, fear of being wrong and so on. Everyday, our bodies continually receive these false, mind-made, ficticious messages from our ego. We are on the defense, we have a forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, we live in fear. And we think this is completely normal?!
This is the drama within our own selves that we grin and bear everyday, and yet it doesn't have to be this way. Are we the master of our thoughts, or are our thoughts the master of us? I think of the sleepless nights where i would toss and turn and couldn't turn my mind off about worries and fears and problems in my life. And my mind was controlling me, i was definitely not the master of my thoughts. It is only in the last year that i am on the quest to overcome this. And it takes diligent practice of being AWARE, and applying detachment. That is the hard part, but i'm getting better at it. I want to be the master of my thoughts!!!
