It has the potential to completely overpower my sense of self/ego/freedom. So that is why I am afraid of pain. Because pain has the potential to completely dominate awareness and crush my sense of self.
The present moment is the scariest thing. All fear is about the present moment experience becoming so strong, that it obliterates my self. The present moment experience is God. And the thinker I managed to maintain side by side to the present moment is my separate self. So the fear is of God completely overpowering the separate self and the drop being lost to the ocean.
I realized pain or pleasure is not the fearful part of experience….LOSING CONTROL is what I am afraid of….for example, if I prick myself, I know what pain to expect, so I am not that afraid….but pleasure or pain which comes randomly to me is scary…because I cannot fit it into any of my mental models of causation of why that happened….because then if pleasure comes, I have no control or understanding about how long it would last…and with pain I would have no idea how long it will last again…in both cases….LOSS OF CONTROL is the SCARIEST THING.
Dying into the present moment…is what I am afraid of…the present moment is basically the God reality…my sense of self is maintained because of not being fully present (that extra space I have I use for maintaining the self)…this self can now control and direct my experience…but in a situation like if a large dangerous dog is barking at me…suddenly the present moment completely takes over my being…but interestingly if the danger completely and entirely overwhelms you, then there is no one left to even be scared….the present moment is a mysterious thing….in some sense we long for this self abnegating complete absorption and takeover by the present…our most rapturous and many early childhood experiences that were most memorable were the times when the present filled you up entirely removing the sense of self and time…even time does not exist in the present moment…time, self etc. all exist in the distance between you and the present…so the present moment is God…and somewhere I read, we are not even afraid of death per say (its just a concept)…what we are truly afraid of is God which is the present moment (just using that word, since there is no other word, I’m referring to the NOW)…So we long for this transcendent NOW to completely take us over into its ONENESS and ABSORPTION, but it is also quite terrifying, because when this happens, there is no YOU that can experience this…the experience swallows you too into itself…so there is JUST THAT…its like ego death experiences in psychedelics, where there is just the experience and no YOU to even know, witness, understand the experience…the experience becomes everything
The present moment is the scariest thing. All fear is about the present moment experience becoming so strong, that it obliterates my self. The present moment experience is God. And the thinker I managed to maintain side by side to the present moment is my separate self. So the fear is of God completely overpowering the separate self and the drop being lost to the ocean.
I realized pain or pleasure is not the fearful part of experience….LOSING CONTROL is what I am afraid of….for example, if I prick myself, I know what pain to expect, so I am not that afraid….but pleasure or pain which comes randomly to me is scary…because I cannot fit it into any of my mental models of causation of why that happened….because then if pleasure comes, I have no control or understanding about how long it would last…and with pain I would have no idea how long it will last again…in both cases….LOSS OF CONTROL is the SCARIEST THING.
Dying into the present moment…is what I am afraid of…the present moment is basically the God reality…my sense of self is maintained because of not being fully present (that extra space I have I use for maintaining the self)…this self can now control and direct my experience…but in a situation like if a large dangerous dog is barking at me…suddenly the present moment completely takes over my being…but interestingly if the danger completely and entirely overwhelms you, then there is no one left to even be scared….the present moment is a mysterious thing….in some sense we long for this self abnegating complete absorption and takeover by the present…our most rapturous and many early childhood experiences that were most memorable were the times when the present filled you up entirely removing the sense of self and time…even time does not exist in the present moment…time, self etc. all exist in the distance between you and the present…so the present moment is God…and somewhere I read, we are not even afraid of death per say (its just a concept)…what we are truly afraid of is God which is the present moment (just using that word, since there is no other word, I’m referring to the NOW)…So we long for this transcendent NOW to completely take us over into its ONENESS and ABSORPTION, but it is also quite terrifying, because when this happens, there is no YOU that can experience this…the experience swallows you too into itself…so there is JUST THAT…its like ego death experiences in psychedelics, where there is just the experience and no YOU to even know, witness, understand the experience…the experience becomes everything
Journey to the Abstract 