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vajra
Ex Member
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Well done KC, the important step is the first one you take down the path of starting to work with yourself. Monroe and some books on meditation and working with fears are a good place to start all right. It might help as well to sign for a while with one of the many groups teaching meditation - both for the instruction, and for the moral support of a like minded group.
Don't expect it all to be handed to you on a plate - you'll have to get going, do some digging and take responsibility for your own path. Expect some apparent reverses and dead ends, all will teach you something.
Pardon the length, but I'm going to try to paint a bigger picture.
It's really important that you trust your own intuition on what feels right - don't substitute one set of fears with another that some lot lay on you.
There's as Hawkeye says a lot of people around with a vested interest in getting people hung up on rigid beliefs and fear - so that they can manipulate them - pretty much all the traditional institutional and fundamentalist religions, not to mention the major societal institutions, political and money interests as well.
It happens accidentally too - when we're very young (or not so young) and know no better a casual comment or thought gets easily fastened on to and builds to become a big deal.
So it's very easy to get stuck with beliefs that scare the heck out of us. What is pushed at us by the system and by popular culture fortunately proves not to stand up to real scrutiny however. (when you start digging you'll find there are good books out there on this topic too - but probably best to focus on finding a way to get started on meditation somewhere that feels comfortable for the moment)
With time and work (the meditation and study mentioned above) we tend to gain insight, a better understanding and experience of what we are, and of the nature of reality - with time it becomes clear for most that the fear based systems are basically the result of a sort of tunnel vision. Of people out of their own fear mistakenly conceiving existence as ruled by fear and aggression rather than love.
This is in a sense a pasting of mind made but rigid conceptual beliefs with no actual existence over the reality. As Robert Anton Wilson said 'what the thinker knows, the prover proves'. What we believe (real or not) is what we experience.
It's maybe a lot healthier that we avoid adopting rigid beliefs at all - that we instead relate to life as a process, that we move through it in a cocoon of evolving understanding and knowledge based on experience and interpretation of what seems to make sense to us. What we think is never more than a working position subject to change tomorrow.
All this talk of meditation and the like is only to get our minds slowed down enough so we can start to perceive what's actually around us - both within and outside without our beliefs distorting our perceptions.
With time we start to overcome our conditioning, and start to see and know - the spiritual path is basically about dropping beliefs that don't stand up, and replacing them with a fluid and ever changing process of learning as above.
It's a lot about opening, awakening, and letting things be - informed by an underlying sense that while we are at times required to act that what life brings is ultimately for our good.
Everything we perceive is in the mind, the game is to stop closing, tightening and imposing our mind made beliefs and hang ups over reality, over the natural flow of life. The former inevitably ends up being fear based, the latter leads to the experience and ultimately to an ability to trust that this flow is led by love.
The fear driven person sees one reality, and responds in a manner that creates more suffering for themselves and others, those seeing more tend increasingly to respond from love.
Anyway. The good news is that mind (and consequently our total reality) is pretty malleable. My own experience of working with fears suggests that more than likely you will with some perseverance be able to work your way clear.
In my own case it took a fairly major life and health crisis to start me down this path. It took a few years, but I got a more or less immediate improvement and by now it's transformed my health, life and outlook....
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