Blinded by Fear

As we’ve probably heard by now, love is the greatest power there is. Every spiritual teaching or philosophy, along with every religious scholar and psychology professor, proclaims this truth: Love is the one and only power. If you’ve got it, you are mighty, strong and safe. Without it, you are separate, scared and poor. Sounds simple enough. Yet this knowledge doesn’t really help us unle...

Life is a trap, of a kind, stuck as we are in this struggle to overcome the duality between life and death. From this fundamental predicament stem all our other problems, fears and tensions. It shows up in our fear of death, of course, as well as in our fear of aging and our fear of the unknown. What’s the common root of all these fears? The passage of time.

In an effort to deal with ...

If we boil it down, there are essentially two philosophies about this thing we call life, and they are apparent contradictions. One imparts the perspective that if we are truly mature, spiritually and emotionally, we need to learn to accept life on life’s terms. And often those terms are hard to take. Our best approach will be to accept what we can’t change. When we won’t accept life, th...

Our greatest joy in life comes from giving, to whatever extent we are able. It comes from reaching our potential, we might say. On the flip side, our greatest pain is derived from not meeting our full potential in giving to others and to life. Every other pain and frustration cascades from this pain of not offering up what we have to give. Turning this around, all pleasure and satisfacti...

Our biggest struggle in life is the push and pull we face between our desire to overcome our loneliness and isolation, and our simultaneous fear of having close, intimate contact with another person. Often these are equally strong, tearing us apart from the inside and creating a tremendous strain.

The pain of feeling isolated always pushes us to try to escape from it by becoming more ...

Underneath our ordinary, neurotic, unconscious wrong thinking lies a difficult conflict embedded in all of humanity: We have a deeply ingrained longing to be happy and, at the same time, we fear happiness. And this fear is directly related to our fear of letting go. By the same token, our longing to be happy must also be a longing to be released from the clutches of our little ego. The t...

To have self-fulfillment, we need to be in harmony with ourselves and with life. There are three topics that form the basis for achieving this harmony:

1) Having a positive concept of life that sees the universe as safe.

2) Being free and fearless to love.

3) Holding a healthy balance between the forces of activity and passivity.

Let’s weave these together to see how they cre...

Every person on Earth has an apparently nonsensical fear of bliss to some extent. Even though it makes no sense, there it is, and this fear exists side-by-side with our longing for bliss. Yet bliss is our birthright. We have every right to live in a state of supreme bliss and sublime joy, which are qualities we struggle to adequately describe in any language.

No matter how unhappy we ...