AWARE LIVING CAFE, MARCH 16/24
This final in the six-part series had 8 attendees; the Book Of Life themes were Relationship and Fear. We started with a deep discussion on how relationships – if they’re genuine – bring with them a certain necessary friction wherein one may meet their own conditioned expectations and needs for comfort and security only in relationships that challenge one to see and listen and transform with self-awareness. Indeed, if there’s no tension, there is no relationship; it becomes a comfortable non-relationship, a convenience and an escape from reality.
We talked too of Fear; of there being two kinds: one instinctive and related to survival re food, clothing and shelter, and another imagined fear being psychological – mind-made, produced and believed by the apparent ‘me’. We explored how the craving to become in relationships – rather than to simply be, here and now – causes personal fears that one’s projected (conditioned) desires will not be met and achieved. Freedom from fear comes with one’s direct recognition and understanding of the source and past cause of it. In sum, the past mind-made nature of fear can only be comprehended and dissolved in the present, in passive awareness. In aware living, there is no past, no tomorrow – no fear.
Kind regards
James Waite