As a part of the Listening Heart series, in this recording from the summer of 1989, Ram Dass discusses the dynamics of personality and emotions including issues relating to the nature of fear, anger, and love.
Audience Member: We're going to start with fear. And we're quite a frightened group, so we'd like the support of everybody to be courageous enough to ask our questions. Emmanuel says that fear is the only issue, and it became apparent for all of us in our group that we spent our whole life in a reactive dance of fear.
And when we examine that, we realize that very often the thing we were frightened of wasn't nearly as frightening as the fear, and that it became the fear of the fear of the fear. And we wanted to try to understand what the fear is, what the thing is that we're so frightened of, and whether that energy is something that we can transform.
Is it our friend? Is it our foe? And how practically can we deal with it as well as understanding it?
Ram Dass: Okay, [that was] well presented for a frightened person. Fear is the result of getting caught in the middle. Buddha says it's the result of ignorance, and the ignorance is that when you start out as an infant with an undifferentiated awareness and then you are taught who you are, that component, that structure, which we call "ego" is a very fragile structure.
It seems tough, but it's actually a very fragile structure. And it's a structure that is created of mind, of learned neural patterns, if you will. And it has on one side of it what Freud referred to as the id or the impulse life, of which the structure is designed to interface between the impulse life and the society, to protect the society from the impulse life.
And on the other hand, it is this fragile structure in the face of tremendous forces externally, which are parents and social institutions and chaos and storms and nature, all of it. So, when you didn't have a framework, when you didn't have a somebodyness, you are just part of the universe and there's no fear. I mean, a tree isn't frightened. Even in one of the discussions that Emmanuel had about what a mouse feels like when it's being eaten by a cat, the question is, is the mouse saying, "Oh my God I'm being eaten by a cat?" Or is it feeling warmth and moisture and shifts in energy? Do we project? We anthropomorphize and we say that it's squealing because it's afraid. But to be afraid, one has to have a self-concept. And when an organism is functioning instinctually in a scene, each change in the homeostasis, each change in the balance of the situation is just a new moment. It's just a new moment to which it responds.
So it's very delicate to interpret things because we tend to interpret in terms of where we're sitting, and we've developed these structures. And if you can sense the way that works, just see on one side of you these extremely powerful impulses in you that you're afraid of. And on the other side, the tremendous forces outside that you're afraid of, and feeling yourself as a very fragile entity within that structure.
And so the root of the fear is the separateness. The root of the fear is the model one has of oneself. That's where the fear starts. Once that exists, then you process everything from inside or outside in terms of that model.
And it keeps reinforcing the feeling of vulnerability because in fact there are externally incredibly powerful forces outside and inside. The transformative process of spiritual work is reawakening to the innocence of going behind that model that one had that cut oneself off, that made oneself a tiny little fragile somebody. And a lot of the power preoccupations that we end up having, and especially the power of trying to leave something behind in the face of death, is the feeling of our own fragility.
And if you look at social structures, you see how much social institution is based upon the feeling of fragility of the human condition. So how you deal with fear, because you say, "I'm afraid of that person." I mean, you say, "I'm afraid of being socially shamed," but when you are socially shamed, it hurts. And then here we still are.
You're afraid of violence, and then if violence happens, sure, it's scary and painful and then behind it here we are.
And I think you presented it right, that often the fear feeds upon itself and we're almost afraid of the fear, or the fear is the thing rather than what we're afraid of. We're just afraid. We just feel very vulnerable.
The ways of dealing with it in a therapeutic tradition, what you usually do is try to figure out what you're afraid of. Another technique is this Witness, which merely sits with the fear and tries to get it before it becomes so consuming that there's no space left. There's usually a little space left.
The image I usually use is, if you have a picture frame... you got a painting of a gray cloud against a blue sky, but you only had one picture frame and it was a little too small. So what you did was you bent the canvas around to frame it. But in doing so, you lost all the blue sky, so you ended up with just a framed gray. It fills the entire frame.
So when you look around, you say, "I'm afraid" or, "I'm depressed" or something. If you enlarge the frame so there was even just a little bit of that kind of round thing of a cloud and a little blue space, you'd say, "Ah, a cloud," right? That's what the Witness is. The Witness is that tiny little blue over in the corner that leads you to say, "Ah, fear."
I've talked about the woman calling me in the middle of the night many years ago, and she said, "I've taken LSD and I'm going to commit suicide and I'm going crazy. I've gone crazy. I'm going to commit suicide." She called me from California to New York State at two in the morning. So I got up and I said, "Yes, okay, you're going to commit suicide, you crazy?"
And it's dawned on me. I said to her, "Look, you're obviously too mad to talk to. Could I speak to whoever it was that picked up the phone and dialed seven numbers plus an area code to get me? Because whoever that is has obviously got all their marbles and I'd like to talk to that person." And in a way, that's the Witness of the rest of it.
Like, "I'll dial him and tell him I'm mad." And in a way, that's the little blue sky and that's what we have in us all the time. Often, we get so frightened we can't stop for a moment to notice, "Ah, there's fear," because it's consumed us. So the art is to keep cultivating that Witness, continuously in all the opportunities you have, so that it is present more and more of the time.
At first it's there about 1% of the time, and all the rest it's there 99% of the time. But after a while it gets so that it's there almost 50% of the time. And then as you start to go into these things, "Ah here comes fear, here comes depression again."
And when you focus on the Witness rather than on the fear, you see that there's a part of you that is not afraid, that's just noticing it.
The noticer isn't judging. It's not trying to change it. It's not even afraid. It's just noticing.
Like somebody comes and says, "I'm depressed."
I said, "Are you completely depressed?"
"Yes, I'm completely depressed."
"You're absolutely sure you're completely depressed?"
"Yes."
"At this moment, as you're telling me you're depressed, are you depressed?"
"Well, no, I'm just telling you I'm depressed."
"That's the one right there. That's the one."
So in a way, recognizing that there is a part of you that always exists that is not afraid, and in the deeper mystical sense or transformative or spiritual sense, there is indeed a part of you that is always not afraid - because there is a part of you that was never separate.
