Meditation #22 – Anxiety and Enlightenment
Anxiety cloaks fear. Even after waking up in awareness we can’t escape fear but we can be mindful of it. In fact, Anxiety can be useful in awareness to untie many of the knots that we have in the human condition. Kierkegaard said that,”Anxiety was his greatest teacher.” Anxiety will teach the basic truths of impermanence and patience. There is no pushing pain away when we are experiencing anxiety if it is mindfully approached.
However, I am assuming that you are no longer a zombie and have some semblance that anxiety cannot rule your life and you are living in the state of impermanence to some degree already.
Anxiety kills. It will take ahold of a spirit and wrack it with so many physical and emotional symptoms that one can experience an “emotional stuck-ness” that seems impossible to move again. Much like a 800 pound gorilla that is in the room with you and even sometimes sits on your chest. That kind of anxiety is lack of awareness and faith in yourself.
Oh but friends, all of you out there who are not awakened forget to realize that the “person” that you are attached to in human form is a program. We are enlightened beings in a body that has been programmed to believe that we are limited in all that we can do. We argue our limitations and then we own them which manifests in anxiety in a very unpleasant way that involves all sorts of thinking manifestations of the brain. We believe and do what we think we can’t do. We believe and do what we think we can do. There is either liberation or not. We choose not to be liberated when we are anxious.
We pick our human programming to decide for us who we really are as a human. But we are not human, we are programmed zombies trying to fit our human ways into an enlightened body. That will never, ever work in a million years.
But if we use anxiety as a great teacher to move us forward into the next level of awareness and enlightenment, we will push out of our human “stuck-ness” into liberation.
No wonder why we have anxiety in our culture! We are trying to do the impossible. But the “impossible” we experience with anxiety is human not unconditional. It’s not enlightened and not awake.
What is there to be afraid of? We have to remember during our awakening process that enlightenment and being awake involves the realization that we are not human at all. We are dying flesh attached to a soul that knows and sees all things.
Even our brains are limited in their existence of this world. We hardly use what we have that is human. Sad, isn’t it? If we are liberated and un-programmed to this world, our “I” dies, our “ego” dies and that is human.
We must not identify with our own “I” or “me”. We must not identify with the human programming that was thrown upon us in the human world.
But Anxiety? People want to know how to deal, manage, get rid of, understand and even embrace anxiety. Why? Because we hate it, that’s why. We don’t have to hate it at all, it makes us uncomfortable and uncomfortable is excellent when we are seeking our own awareness.
The juxtaposition of Anxiety is courage: Bravery in the face of opposition and mindfulness enough to pursue all the opposition and oppression to teach ourselves the mentally healthy way to manage our souls trapped into this human body to reach the human uncondition, the enlightenment of everything oppressive.
Changing our framework in how we look at anxiety will help us get up and out of it. Experiencing anxiety is a pathway to love.
Anxiety meds will not change your soul. It may change your “human” to some degree but it will not solve your problems. Now don’t get me wrong, there are some folks who are humanly and truly imbalanced who need psychotropic meds to function. But what I am talking about here is situational long term chronic anxiety.
I have been overwhelmed with anxiety at times in my life that I lived in a brain fog of sorts. I would lose words, not perform well in social situations and my distraction level was higher than the highest mountain in the world. I was not here, nor was I present. My very soul would try to peek out from behind the cloud and shake me awake again and that was difficult.
But when I learned that the Anxiety is a pathway to love, my whole perspective changed. You see, if we reason that we can pay attention to the intense feeling of causing your anxiety that stems from fear, you can figure out why and what these feelings are. It will take some time perhaps or no time at all.
Remember that Anxiety is a path, not a point on the horizon. You are not going to go to that point on the horizon, you are going to walk past it.
Anxiety will also tug on you so hard that it can be almost impossible to ignore. This is a blessing, not a curse.
What do you need for yourself to pay attention to yourself? What do you need to help you gain strength to power through these feelings of fear?
Plain and simple: YOU NEED UNCONDITIONAL LOVE.
Anxiety is another layer to peel away. Anxiety is a part of the program of being human and in the human condition. Getting rid of anxiety seems like it would be way too painful and always will come up about the ways you are living daily life.
But what is daily life? Doesn’t daily life exist in the human condition? Isn’t that a program of sorts? It is, isn’t it? Do you want to be programmed forever or do you want to deliver yourself into an awakened state of being, a state of not being a zombie anymore?
Let everything go. Why does your fear matter? There is, as I have said before, only fear or love. There is nothing in-between.
Also the tricky part about Anxiety is if you withdraw from it, it will get worse. You may bury it deeply but it will manifest somewhere in your life and in places that seem the least likely. It will interfere with everything you love and block the pathway to love… because it is another pathway to love. The irony is amazing here, isn’t it?
The lack of substance in our experience is our greed, cravings, addictions, aversion and pushing pain away; hold no ignorance or belief that sustaining Anxiety will bring security or happiness! Exploring anxiety relieves all that there is involved with it and brings recovery and ultimately unconditional love.
The circular pathway is discovery, recovery then love. They harmonize with each other in a circle of awareness that spirals up and inward.
Our souls exist out of the time space continuum, the pendulum in the middle or left or right. It exists in abstraction in the uncondition of spirit. Anxiety fights this existence to reason that our soul must live in certain place in our world. It doesn’t. It exists in an abstraction place called mind. Mind is different than brain. Using our mind is different than using our brains to solve a math equation. Using our mind is the center link between our human-ness and our soul. It is the link between the interconnected lack of time space continuum in the human uncondition and the place we know of ourselves in the world.
What does this have to do with anxiety? Quite a bit, actually. If we believe that our mind and our brain exist on the same place, we will exist in a stuck reality that is conditional. We have to be able to disconnect our mind from our “self” and our “ego” or out “I/me”.
In a previous chapter I talked about how to do that to some extent or at least bring about an awareness in understanding the difference. We cannot be two human people in the same body. We cannot adopt the thinking that the ego and mind are the same.
Same goes for feelings. Any feeling or emotion, in fact. Feelings are simply defined, too. They are the impermanent shifting body sensation which we label as pain or pleasure. They pass through us if we recognize and embrace why they exist in our programmed world. Our mind can handle our feelings better than our brain can which is the reason why being aware and awake when we experienced emotion is so important.
Back to Anxiety. Be. Here. Now. There is no other time to exist in the mind. Remember that being human is a programmed set of values that is attached to a world that is set in motion by conditional stimuli.
No one should ever worry about being in the ‘now’. Be not anxious for nothing, it will resolve itself. We can nudge change to approach anxiety but staying anxious brings our past and future into our present. Why would we want to do a preposterous thing like that for?
Everything is now. In fact, everything is always just this. Whatever you are doing is now and now the past. Like now… there it goes again. Did we have anxiety for this moment we are having now that just past?
Don’t waste your time on trying to control a racing mind or an anxious mind. Controlling anything to the extent in which you think you humanly can is always going to be a soul faux pas. You can’t control most everything in our human world.
You can’t outrun pain. You can’t rationalize pain either. Your thoughts are going to race if you seek to control it. Not doing so results in anxiety.
Face it, Anxiety will catch you if you try and run away. Anxiety is unresolved pain that you repressed that is surfacing again. You didn’t fully experience the first time around.
So get back in touch with reality! The unexperienced pain needs to be experienced to its core so you can experience love in the liberation of anxiety. Breaking through pain is ginormous, terrifying and can feel like you are dying at times. That’s ok, you won’t die from experiencing emotional pain that seems endless, eventually by working through it, it will clear itself out.
This may take a few weeks or even a few years. Don’t push it down inside but don’t rush processing your fear either. Let it flow in and about you like a floating orb that you want to study and learn about.
Eventually and over time, your anxiety will disappear and give way to a quiet mind. There will be nothing left for you to rationalize your pain away. You will be able to not outrun your mind and succumb to your brain. The result is peace and liberation. And in the absence of fear, there is love. Your mind will think very little, it will stop racing and it won’t have thoughts intruding on your daily life that will rattle you. Even in times of deep lifetime conditional human struggle, you will be able to manage it with a peace and quiet and embrace that will lead you into more awareness.
That is precisely why anxiety is a pathway to love.
