Life Is a Series of Unknown Moments

FEAR DOES NOT ALWAYS MEAN DANGER.

Fear is a universal part of the human experience. I do not think anybody gets through a lifetime without moments of fear. One of the things that has struck me over the years is how we relate to fear. There are many kinds of fear generated by physical danger, biological defenses, our pasts, and our traumas, but here I am interested in exploring the fear of the unknown, because it is one of those fears that lurks, especially for spiritual seekers.

We have all experienced fear of the unknown when we have asked somebody on a first date, or applied for a job, or ventured into any new situation. Spiritual seekers spend a lot of time dwelling in the unknown: when we sit down to meditate and be still, when we are praying and our prayer turns quiet, or when we arrive at a place of mystery. These are times when we do not know what is coming—we are in unknown psychological territory. Fear often arises when people reach this territory, which is why as a spiritual teacher I am often asked, “How do I get rid of fear? How do I deal with it? What do I do with it?” Underneath these questions is a fundamental orientation—a belief that when we feel fear, we need to get rid of it as soon as possible.

However, most of our fears are not about survival, as most of our lives are not in peril. So when we are about to experience something new, we intuit a different state of consciousness and a different state of being, and as much as we may yearn for it, we simultaneously become afraid because we do not know. The mind may hold a philosophy or theology or belief about what spiritual awakening is or what it can reveal, but until we have had that awakening, until we have had that revelation, until we have gone through it, we do not know what it is, and we do not know what is in store for us. This link between fear and the unknown is both common and profound.

It is funny, because when we are happy, we do not think, How do I get rid of this happiness as fast as possible? nor, when we are feeling peace, do we ask, How do I get rid of this peace as fast as possible? But when we feel fear, we wonder, How can I end this fear as fast as possible? or How can I avoid this fear? These are conditioned ways of reacting. I like to tell people, “If you are going to endeavor into a deep form of spirituality, into a deeper practice, you should count on visiting a lot of unknown psychological and spiritual terrain, because that is what most of the spiritual disciplines are meant to introduce you to.”

Right before people have meaningful spiritual shifts, the most common thing for them to experience is some variety of fear. It is as if there is a protector at the gateless gate (as we say in Zen) to Nirvana, to enlightenment, and to awakening. Even though there is no barrier—there is nothing holding us back, there is nothing threatening us—we become afraid because the whole landscape of awakening is such a different way of seeing and experiencing life that the intuition of it arising is concurrently thrilling and terrifying. The mind asks, Well, what is going to happen? and we reflect and realize we have no idea. This is when things get frightening.

Part of engaging in a spiritual life is becoming profoundly conscious, and when we do, we start to recognize the overwhelming amount of unknown in our lives. We need to learn that fear does not always mean actual danger. As human beings, we are conditioned to think that what we know will keep us safe and what we do not know is a potential threat and therefore makes us afraid. It is healthy to reexamine this belief and look at our relationship with fear, because what we imagine we know is worthier of fear than what we do not know. Take death, for example: when people think about death they get afraid, but the thing is, you cannot be afraid of death—you can only be afraid of what you imagine death to be. You can imagine death to be annihilation, or you can imagine death to be anything, as there are so many different stories about what is going to happen after we die. Death is the ultimate unknown. So, once again, it is the psychological landscapes where we do not know what will be or what will happen that make us afraid.

We do much more damage to ourselves and others with the things we think we know—with our certainty—than we ever do with our uncertainty or with the unknown. A lot of destruction happens when we pretend to know things that we do not know. It is a refusal to embrace the unknown aspects of life, which is just one unknown after another. We do not know what is going to happen one second from now. From the moment we were born, we have never known what was going to happen from one minute to the next. We can be afraid of that, as if it is somehow problematic. What do we do that causes the most danger?

It is not the things we do not know that create danger; it is what we imagine we know. Most wars are the result of what a group of people imagined to be true. Even if you have an argument with a friend or a spouse, the argument is usually based on two people imagining they know what is right or wrong. Most of the damage we cause to ourselves and others happens when we become attached to an idea, to a belief, or to an opinion, which is not true knowledge at all.

In some way, we have the whole equation backward and upside-down. To begin to embrace the unknown is not dangerous, but to always be running from the unknown is a way of constantly making yourself afraid. Therefore, the best way to deal with fear is to face it. There is nothing new in this idea—if you are running from fear, you become more afraid of whatever you are running from, because whatever you are running from takes on more significance the longer you run from it. If you can stop right in the middle of your fear of whatever unknown terrain you are encountering in your life or in yourself, then the fear has nothing to sustain it. To continue to build and exist even as an emotion or feeling, fear needs you to resist it, to run from it, and to constantly try to negotiate with it. If you face fear—if you experience it—then fear does not have anything to move you with.

If you stop to be with it and feel it, you learn that not all fears are the same. You see that fear of the unknown can only exist if you are running from the unknown. For instance, statements like “You do not know what is going to happen from one second to the next” or “From the moment you are born, you do not know how your life’s going to unfold” make people afraid. Why is this? There is nothing frightening in these statements. They are factual. So why struggle against them? Mostly because we do not stop, we do not meet the situation as it is, and instead we go into imagination. Imagination is where fear thrives; you are imagining what might happen, what could happen, or what is around the corner. It not only generates but also perpetuates the fear response.

What I am describing is the adult version of the scary monsters of childhood. If a child has watched a scary movie, they may wonder if there is a monster in their room. The best thing to do is to comfort them and then take them by the hand and peek underneath the bed together. No monster. Then sometimes the child will say, “Well, maybe it is in the closet.” So you go hand in hand and look inside the closet, and you see there is no monster. What we are doing—without saying this to the child—is showing them that the monster exists only in their mind. The way we deal with the monsters in our minds is to meet them, which means we must let ourselves encounter that moment of meeting.

The key is not to think through all the imagined scenarios; the key is to meet the fear itself. As we gain experience with meeting fear, it stops feeling so intimidating, and gradually our mind and body realize that fear is not dangerous. It is not scary that you do not know what is going to happen tomorrow, and it is not scary that you do not know how something is going to work out, because that is the way life is. That stuff is not frightening until you imagine what might happen. The projection is the monster.

Again, we have a similar projection about death, which becomes a problem only when we imagine what might happen when we die. So even the fear of death ends up being an imagined fear, because it requires our mind to project into the future. However, if you stick with the fact that “I do not know what will happen when I die,” and if you experience that not knowing, you will also experience a tremendous release because you are not telling yourself a lie. You are no longer projecting onto death a scenario that scares you, but you are instead staying with the unknown.

As a teacher, this is what I try to do when people ask me questions about fear. First, I recognize how they are scaring themselves with what they are projecting onto the unknown. Then I show them that to clear that fear, they must stop entering imaginary scenarios that may or may not happen. Instead they should face the fear without any projections, without any story, and without any responses like “This is what might happen.”

Circling back to spiritual practice, envision that in a real sense you, your true nature, is the unknown. When we realize this, then the unknown becomes less frightening. The fear dwells in the separation, when we see ourselves as different, as fundamentally other than life itself, and as other than the unknown. One of the greatest blessings of facing our fears is we realize that in running from them we have been running from our true nature, from what we are in our deepest sense.

When we stand firmly in the unknown parts of life and stand firmly in the face of fear, we realize that fear does nothing to oppose us and is not a threat. It foreshadows newness—something unknown that is about to be perceived or is about to happen. There is nothing unusual in that, because the unknown is a constant. It is an integral part of life and of existence, and therefore it is an integral part of you and of what you are. Until we can stop and see fear for what it is, we are going to continue to be pushed around by it. When we stop and face fear, when we are completely still and quiet with the raw experience of it, we will see that it cannot hurt us. When we can embrace fear, life and our inner landscape are no longer intimidating because we are no longer opposing or running.

The great lesson that fear can teach us—the wisdom of stopping right in the middle of it—is that fear does not always mean danger. As I mentioned, fear can be a sign of something new or something unknown. Sometimes it points to the dawning of a whole new state of consciousness. Fear in these situations does not necessarily mean there is anything wrong; it is a sign that things are going right and that we are having a direct experience of the unknown. If we are spiritual seekers, that is precisely what we want, because it is in the unknown that we find our potential for awakening and seeing our true nature—we are the unknown.