Fear &
Fearlessness
by
Chogyam Trungpa
 In
order to experience fearlessness, it is necessary to
experience fear. The essence of cowardice is not
acknowledging the reality of fear. Fear can take
many forms. Logically, we know we can't live
forever. We know that we are going to die, so we are
afraid. We are petrified of our death.
On
another level, we are afraid that we can't handle
the demands of the world. This fear expresses itself
as a feeling of inadequacy. We feel that our own
lives are overwhelming, and confronting the rest of
the world is more overwhelming.
Then
there is abrupt fear, or panic, that arises when new
situations occur suddenly in our lives. When we feel
that we can't handle them, we jump or twitch.
Sometimes fear manifests in the form of
restlessness: doodles on a note pad, playing with
our fingers, or fidgeting in our chairs. We feel
that we have to keep ourselves moving all the time,
like an engine running in a motor car. The pistons
go up and down, up and down. As long as the pistons
keep moving, we feel safe. Otherwise, we are afraid
we might die on the spot.
There
are innumerable strategies that we use to take our
minds off of fear. Some people take tranquilizers.
Some people do yoga. Some people watch television,
or read a magazine, or go to a bar to have a beer.
From the coward's point of view, boredom should be
avoided, because when we are bored we begin to feel
anxious. We are getting closer to our fear.
Entertainment should be promoted and any thought of
death should be avoided. So cowardice is trying to
live our lives as though death were unknown.
There
have been periods in history in which many people
searched for a potion of longevity. If there were
such a thing, most people would find it quite
horrific. If they had to live in this world for a
thousand years without dying, long before they got
to their thousandth birthday, they would probably
commit suicide. Even if you could live forever, you
would be unable to avoid the reality of death and
suffering around you.
Acknowledging
Fear
Fear
has to be acknowledged. We have to realize our fear
and reconcile ourselves with fear. We should look at
how we move, how we talk, how we conduct ourselves,
how we chew our nails, how we sometimes put our
hands in our pockets uselessly. Then we will find
something out about how fear is expressed in the
form of restlessness. We must face the fact that
fear is lurking in our lives, always, in everything
we do.
On
the other hand, acknowledging fear is not a cause
for depression or discouragement. Because we possess
such fear, we also are potentially entitled to
experience fearlessness. True fearlessness is not
the reduction of fear, but going beyond fear.
Unfortunately, in the English language, we don't
have one word that means that. Fearlessness is the
closest term, but by fearless we don't mean
"less fear", but "beyond fear".
Going
beyond fear begins when we examine our fear: our
anxiety, nervousness, concern, and restlessness. If
we look into our fear, if we look beneath its
veneer, the first thing we find is sadness, beneath
the nervousness. Nervousness is cranking up,
vibrating, all the time. When we slow down, when we
relax with our fear, we find sadness, which is calm
and gentle. Sadness hits you in your heart, and your
body produces a tear. Before you cry, there is a
feeling in your chest and then, after that, you
produce tears in your eyes. You are about to produce
rain or a waterfall in your eyes and you feel sad
and lonely, and perhaps romantic at the same time.
That is the first tip of fearlessness, and the first
sign of real warriorship.
You
might think that, when you experience fearlessness,
you will hear the opening to Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony or see a great explosion in the sky, but it
doesn't happen that way. In the Shambhala tradition,
discovering fearlessness comes from working with the
softness of the human heart.
The
birth of the warrior is like the first growth of a
reindeer's horns. At first, the horns are very soft
and almost rubbery, and they have little hairs
growing on them. They are not yet horns, as such:
they are just sloppy growths with blood inside.
Then, as the reindeer ages, the horns grow stronger,
developing four points or ten points or even forty
points. Fearlessness, at the beginning, is like
those rubbery horns. They look like horns, but you
can't quite fight with them. When a reindeer first
grows its horns, it doesn't know what to use them
for. It must feel very awkward to have those soft,
lumpy growths on your head. But then the reindeer
begins to realize that it should have horns:
that horns are a natural part of being a
reindeer.
In
the same way, when a human being first gives birth
to the tender heart of warriorship, he or she may
feel extremely awkward or uncertain about how to
relate to this kind of fearlessness. But then, as
you experience this sadness more and more, you
realize that human beings should be tender
and open. So you no longer need to feel shy or
embarrassed about being gentle. In fact, your
softness begins to become passionate. You would like
to extend yourself to others and communicate with
them.
When
tenderness evolves in that direction, then you can
truly appreciate the world around you. Sense
perceptions become very interesting things. You are
so tender and open already that you cannot help
opening yourself to what takes place all around you.
When you see red or green or yellow or black, you
respond to them from the bottom of your heart. When
you see someone else crying or laughing or being
afraid, you respond to them as well. At that point,
your beginning level of fearlessness is developing
further into warriorship.
When
you begin to feel comfortable being a gentle and
decent person, your reindeer horns no longer have
little hairs growing on them
-- they are
becoming real horns. Situations become very real,
quite real, and on the other hand, quite ordinary.
Fear evolves into fearlessness naturally, very
simply, and quite straightforwardly.
The
ideal of warriorship is that the warrior should be
sad and tender, and because of that, the warrior can
be very brave as well. Without that heartfelt
sadness, bravery is brittle, like a china cup. If
you drop it, it will break or chip. But the bravery
of the warrior is like a lacquer cup, which has a
wooden base covered with layers of lacquer. If the
cup drops, it will bounce rather than break. It is
soft and hard at the same time.
 This
article was excerpted from the book:
Shambhala:
The Sacred Path of the Warrior
by Chogyam
Trungpa.
Reprinted
with permission of the publisher, Shambhala
Publications Inc., Boston, MA, USA. ©1999. www.shambhala.com
Info/Order
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More books by this author
About The
Author
CHOGYAM
TRUNGPA, meditation master, scholar, and artist, founded the Naropa
Institute in Boulder, Colorado; Shambhala Training; and Shambhala
International, an association of meditation centers. His other books
include Cutting
Through Spiritual Materialism, The
Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation, and Meditation
in Action. For more information about the author and
Shambhala meditation centers, visit www.shambhala.org.
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