Fear
(Original Post from Dr. Brenner’s personal Blog, October 6, 2013)
One of the statements of the sixties and seventies that I use practically everyday is, the name of Gerald Jampolski’s book, “Love is Letting Go of Fear”. The other day on seeing a patient I used that phrase for the umpteenth time and thought to myself, “What is fear. It’s an emotional experience not unlike love and as difficult to wrap my mind around as love. I realized that I needed a word to help me understand fear in a practical way. That night “fear” became my meditation.
In the silence of meditating on “fear”, the word “loss” came to mind. Could fear simply be the result of loss….of life, a loved one, finances, control, the known, peace, certainty, freedom ……all those things that can never be guaranteed. The ego also revolves around ownership. To a significant degree, the ego represents ”what” we have obtained….knowledge, position, wealth, power, status, our false identity. As was proven during the Holocaust, all this can be taken away from an individual, but not “who” he or she is.
When we were born we were given the gift of life, having nothing and without fear. What if ownership, as ego, is an illusion. Then it is logical what Buddha stated, “the three marks of existence are: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and non-selfhood”. If love is indeed letting go of fear of loss, would we then live in love, with far less suffering and ego? If we could accept that all life is simply the gift of love and that our existence is in service to life, would we be happier? Would this stop our warring, our insanity to have or be anything more then “who” we are, Love made visible? Could we be even more accepting that death is part of this gift of life?
Einstein translated Buddha’s ” three marks of existence” into a simple formula, E= MC2. Energy can not be created or destroyed. Therefore, there is no such thing as death and permanence, only the transfer that exists between energy and mass, birth, impermanence and rebirth. Could aging be no more than moving through life faster and faster, and thus picking up too much mass to move? Is dying no more then love, the essential self, escaping from the body at the speed of light? Why should life forms be exempt from the laws of the universe.
We are all part of Love evolving, transmuting fear into love, illusion into reality.
LIVE, LOVE, SERVE, PLAY!
Paul Brenner, M.D., PhD