“Fear is the raw feeling generated by the ego’s struggle to stave off oblivion. To awaken, your awareness must penetrate to the deepest levels of your fear, to your core, and disidentify from all selfing.
As you meditate into your core emotions, they become more empty, vulnerable, and obscure. Emptier states reflect energy liberated by profound unknowing, the most raw or “naked” of which is the pure, undiluted fear of death, or terror. People want to be liberated from this core terror and the garden variety anxiety on its surface but proceed in the wrong way by avoiding it. Paradoxically, wanting to end anxiety is its ever-renewing cause. Seeing anxiety for what it is without trying to get rid of it ends it. Try to be with it fully without grasping or avoidance. Stay with it. Feel it so clearly and profoundly that it dissolves into Formlessness.
Terror defines selfing: a feeling of existence we assume is real, similar to a constant stomach cramp whose cause we never question because it has always been there. We try to get rid of it by resisting it, but this strengthens it and keeps it going because it is caused by resistance. We think that we have to resist fear to get rid of it, but instead we must accept it. Resistance strengthens it, and radical acceptance destroys it. To find Freedom, you must investigate the terror in your experience fully, accepting what you find there all the way down to the root.”
-James Wood, Ten Paths to Freedom
Svaha 