How can I overcome the fear that I will not exist anymore?

How can I overcome the fear that I will not exist anymore?

Ciana: There is something very deep inside of me that still wants to hold on, to interact in the illusion, because this part of me does not know anything else. And the primary feeling that I get when I go to that deep place is fear: absolute fear, fear that I will not exist anymore, that I will be alone, that I will not be able to interact with life. How can I overcome this fear? How can I believe what I know?

Rupert: If we believe something, we do not know it, and if we know it there is no need to believe it. In other words, as soon as we know what we believed, we cease to believe it, and as soon as we believe what we think we know, we cease to know it for sure.

So which is true in your case? Do you know that you are a separate entity or do you believe it? Do you know you are awareness or do you believe it? They are mutually exclusive possibilities. 

The way to find out is to look at yourself and ask yourself what you can be absolutely certain of from your own experience. Only that merits the name of ‘knowing’. Take your stand in what you know. Everything else is belief. 

Look at whatever it is that is seeing these words and ask yourself what you can know about it for absolute certain.

Did it appear? Was it born? Does it move and change? Does it grow old? Does it every disappear? Have you ever experienced its absence? Is it located? Is it limited? Is it in need of a companion? Does it lack anything? Can it know anything other than itself?

The answer to these questions may come first as an intellectual openness or possibility, but as we take the exploration deeper, the answer begins to live in us. It lives as us.

 

*     *     * 

 

Only an apparent entity seems to have the possibility of interacting or not interacting with life. We first have to separate ourself from the totality and imagine ourself to be a little fragment before we are able to consider the possibility of being the slightest bit removed from the very heart of all experience.

This imagined entity suffers only its own imagined isolation. Presence itself is so utterly, intimately one with all experience that separation, alienation, non-interaction, loneliness and fear are simply inconceivable. They would only be made out of itself and would therefore be known as love, intimacy and friendliness. 

What would be separate from what? Space separate from space? Love separate from love? The ocean separate from water, the sun from light?

We fear that we will not exist any more. How can we overcome this fear? By knowing that we do not exist as an entity in the first place, but that we are. Does a pink elephant fear non-existence? Does it long for love?

Nor does awareness exist. It isexistence. It is. It can never cease to be. You can never cease to be. Fear cannot stand your presence.

 

*     *     * 

 

The awareness that we intimately know ourself to be is indeed alone. It is so completely allthat there is no room for the slightest suggestion of another. How could that which cannot even imagine another possibly feel lonely? What could it lack? How could it even imagine something other than itself? What would such an other be made of? Where would it find anything in experience with which to make an other that was not itself? Everywhere it looks it finds only itself.

By contrast, how could a separate entity not feel lonely? In fact, the separate entity doesn’t feelloneliness. It isloneliness. The imaginary entity is made out of an imaginary wall with which it separates itself off from love, from the totality, from friendship. It populates the world with imaginary others and then simultaneously longs for and avoids them in equal measure. No wonder it is torn between conflicting desires and fears, always fearing that its own precious, make-believe self, which is only real in its own imagination, may disappear.

Indeed, it is always disappearing. It disappears every time the thought that thinks it disappears. It is only a subsequent thought, which imagines that the entity continues to exist even when it is not being experienced, that manages to maintain the illusion of its permanent existence and therefore feeds the fear of its own disappearance.

The separate entity has to work hard for its imagined survival. It is hungry and afraid. But you, awareness, are there all the time, indifferent in the background, loving in the foreground. See that clearly and take your stand there firmly.

With love,
Rupert

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