..续本文上一页hat”s being challenged

　　” “Where do you feel weak

　　” “What is the danger

　　” Learn to take the reasons for the fear apart, because a lot of the fear lies in the confusion. You don”t know exactly what you”re afraid of, or you don”t know exactly what to do. It seems like all the avenues are closed. And you can”t analyze what”s going on. So you have to sit down, if you have the chance to sit down, or at least mentally make a note: “Exactly what are you afraid of here

　　” Learn to look at the fear not as something that you”re feeling but something that”s simply there. And try to look at why it keeps shouting at you over and over and over in the brain. Now the fears that are neurotic are the ones that are relatively easy to deal with. Those are the ones that psychotherapists can handle. The fear is unrealistic and the treatment is to simply look at the situation for what it really is. You confront it, you try not to avoid it, but actually go into the situation and learn that it”s not as bad as you thought it would be. It”s simply based on childish avoidance. You had a really bad experience as a child and you”ve instinctively been avoiding that particular issue, that particular feeling, ever since. And it”s gotten to the point where it”s totally unrealistic. So you learn to watch it, to put yourself into a situation that will bring up that fear again and watch this disjunction between the fear and the actual situation. When you begin to see what the situation is, the fear gets calmer, weaker, more and more manageable. That”s neurotic fear.

　　What requires a deeper practice is dealing with realistic fears. One of the members of our community lived through the Korean War, came to the States, became a psychotherapist. And as part of her training she had to undergo psychotherapy. After a couple of years of psychotherapy, the therapist said, “It looks like your fears are very realistic. There”s nothing I can do for you.” This is where dhamma practice comes in: facing our realistic fears, our fears of aging, illness, and death. These things are real and they do cause suffering—if you don”t work your way down into exactly where the attachment is. This is precisely the Buddhist take on fear: it comes from clinging and attachment. And the clinging is threatened by impermanence, by stress and suffering, by the fact that these things are beyond your control. The purpose of our training here is to learn how not to let our happiness be based on things beyond our control, because as long as our happiness depends on these things, you”re setting yourself up for suffering. Setting yourself up for fear. This is how the meditation in and of itself is a way of dealing with the fears—the deeper fears, the realistic fears. Ask yourself, “What exactly does my happiness depend on

　　” Normally, people will have a whole lot of conditions that their happiness depends on. And the more you think about them, the more you realize they are totally out of your control: the economy, the climate, the political situation, the stability of the ground underneath your feet, all of which are very uncertain. So what do you do

　　 You learn to look inside. Try to create a sense of wellbeing that can come simply with being with the breath. Even though this isn”t the total cure, it”s the path toward the cure. You learn to develop a happiness less and less dependent on things outside and more and more inward, something more under your control, something you can manage better. And as you work on this happiness you find that it”s not a second best. It actually is better than the kind of happiness that was dependent on things outside. It”s much more stable. It permeates much more deeply into the mind.

　　In fact, it allows the mind to open up, because for most of us the mind jumps around like a ca…

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