Awareness Can Not Know Fear – Rupert Spira

In this video, Rupert Spira discusses a great deal about how fear can dissolve when we become more aware or conscious. He discusses this with another person who is not on camera. The both of them converse through the video asking and answering questions.

Spira begins by stating that if we want to live without fear, we have to first live with it. There’s no way around that. Really consider this. If we are doing anything to get rid of our fear because it is unpleasant, we are perpetuating it. This means that we will keep inviting fear to be present and have the ability to control our thoughts and actions.

It takes some courage just to understand that. After all, we’ve been dancing around our fear all of our lives. We’ve been suppressing it, fulfilling it, and running from it.

Spira asks the other person, “What are you afraid that the fear will do to you? Why are you so afraid of the fear?”

The person answers, “That it will destroy and annihilate me.”

Spira postulates a question: What does awareness have to say about the matter?

The answer is that awareness just is. It doesn’t say anything about it the fear. You, as awareness, are already there with it. If you must try to be with your fear, it’s an act of the mind…the trying to be with it is a subtle way of perpetuating it. We really want to get rid of it so we try to be with it.

It’s not about trying to do anything. It’s not about cessation of activity in the mind either. Go back to the feeling of fear. Be aware. Recognize that you are aware. Awareness allows the fear to be, but that’s not really true. Awareness doesn’t even know fear. In order to know fear, we have to know resistance.

How can the emptiness of this room say to someone who walks in “I don’t like you. I’m afraid of you. I’m afraid you will annihilate me”? The emptiness of the room has no thoughts. It just is. You walk in and it doesn’t think or do a thing. Awareness is much the same. It just is. It doesn’t cater to the feeling of fear or any other emotion.

We may at an intermediate step say awareness allows the fear, but it’s not fully true. Ultimately, awareness cannot know fear because it cannot know resistance.

The way to discover this for yourself is to turn toward this feeling of fear so fully to allow it into you without resistance and then turn around and see what remains of the fear. Can you allow the fear so completely? Even the possibility that it might annihilate you? As you do, as you fully embrace the fear, as a byproduct that fear will lose its power over you. It will dissipate.

What we are essentially already allows that fully.

Do you have agitation in you body? So what. For who is that a problem? It’s a problem for ego or thought. It’s not a problem for your essence. When that thought disappears, where is the problem? It’s empty.

In the absence of that thought, where is the resistance? Who is saying “I can’t bear this?” Has any feeling veiled the light of awareness? Can any feeling obscure awareness? No.

What is going to be annihilated by the fear? In the mind it’s the thoughts. The thought of fear with all the stories and then there’s the deeper root of fear which is the sensation in the body. Explore the sensation. When you explore, the sensation can change and lift the resistance.

This contemplation of the body that we do effortlessly releases this constriction. The purpose of the contemplation is to see what is true. The body and breath is wound up in a state of tension on behalf of our belief that what I am is a separate, temporary, limited awareness.

When we discover that we are ever present awareness the body gradually unwinds and expands into this open, empty awareness. The sensation of fear loses its labels as it is seen to be untrue. It’s is most liberating!

The other person states she can feel a sadness. Spira tells her that the sadness is another layer that has been kept at bay and hidden in the body for years dictating from behind the scenes. Now that it is coming up into the light of awareness, she can let it come fully up and explore it. Then it will lose its power over you.

Awareness is pure openness, pure sensitivity and pure allowing. Fully open up and allow yourself to feel such an awareness.

This is you. It cannot be destroyed or harmed or hurt by any feeling, including fear.