Hello Rupert,
I had recently started reading your book The Transparency of Thingswhen an experience of quite unsettling fear arose in the early hours of sleep, along with a strong energy around the head area which made sleep impossible. At first it was very difficult to contain it and to allow the sensation of fear to be there. Eventually I just stopped trying to keep it at bay and it dispersed.
I stopped reading your book and meditating at that point to allow things to settle. Now I’m feeling good and spacious and wanted to ask you if it could have been the reading of your book that triggered this deep fear. Meditation can keep me awake, but usually I don’t associate it with this degree of fear. I had a similar experience two years ago when I had been reading a Tony Parsons book. Is the non-duality teaching a bit much for me perhaps? I am not so keen on picking up the book again, although I probably will!
Many thanks,
Neil
Dear Neil,
Reading my book would not have triggered the fear you refer to. Reading such a book, which comes from presence, stimulates the presence in us. There is a sort of recognition, sometimes called transmission. Presence in us wakes up, as it were, to its own being.
It may be that as a result of this, the feeling of being a separate entity is threatened. In other words, the apparent entity in us feels that its hideout has been discovered and that, as a result, its days are numbered. This is the fear you describe.
As you quite rightly found, this sense of fear does not need to be contained. In fact, it thrives on containment and resistance. If it is allowed to be as it is, without resistance or attitude, welcomed for what it is, that is, a mildly uncomfortable bodily sensation with a story attached to it, it will, as in your case, disperse.
You were quite right to stop reading and allow things to settle. Next time the fear arises, it will not be so overwhelming. You are prepared for it.
Treat it as an old friend. Welcome it. You know that it cannot destroy you, that you are not going to disappear. With this knowledge the fear is disarmed, for it thrives on the belief that the entity around which it revolves is real.
Simply take your stand knowingly as the presence of awareness that you intimately know yourself to be, and allow this fear to roll through you like a thunder storm. Open your being to it, which means simply to see that as this awareness you are already wide open. Allow this fear to take its full shape within you and then let it flow through you, leaving you untouched, in its own time.
It is not that non-duality is too much for you. On the contrary, your description shows that you are ready for it. It is rather that non-duality is too much for your fear. Fear and the knowledge of non-duality are incompatible. It is up to you which one you will choose, but I suspect that the choice has already been made in your heart!
With love,
Rupert
