When Fear Falls Away by Jan Frazier

Author:Jan Frazier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609250003
Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser

CHAPTER 4

ASSIMILATION

Becoming Fully Human

When you face a challenge truly, there is no thought. There is just

the looking, and it may be an actual looking or metaphoric. You

see what needs to be solved at that moment, and that looking is

fierce and gentle at the same time. And there is an activation

of a greater intelligence than whatever you have learned.

—Eckhart Tolle

July–August 2004 Now What?: July 14

I am trying to figure out how to live now, now that my life has begun—now that my life in earnest has begun.

I always supposed that the arrival at the longed-for destination would be a condition of resting, an ending of sorts. Stasis. What more could there be? Not that I thought all that much about what it would be like: I little supposed I would ever get to find out. But if I indulged myself in imagining the state, it was stillness I pictured. Nothing left to be done. Protracted bliss.

But now I see the truth of what the sages (Merrell-Wolff among them) have said: that realization is actually a beginning, the start of authentic life. There has been a death of a kind, a necessary end preceding a new beginning. A door has opened.

I am a mother with a mother's work to do. I am not a monk. I live not in a cave but in a house with broken doorknobs and dust bunnies and cat vomit on the rug. Well, if it were only cat vomit and dust bunnies and doorknobs that called me to action, I'd have nothing to decide, no struggle at all: for those ordinary things of ordinary life are purely joyful now, in the way that everything is. Being, in whatever form, is a pleasure.

But it isn't only household messes that call me to them. It is my teenaged children; it is the aching world, our poor country that is falling apart by the day. I cannot retreat. I mean to know how I am best to make use of this blessing that has come to me.

It is nearly a year since this began. Most of the time has been filled with plain amazement. It's been a time of getting acclimated, feeling what it's like in my new skin. I've gotten used to knowing how to drive and how to access the source when it is called for in a particular situation. I've come through long moments when I hardly knew myself, when I might have been afraid, when I had to trust long and hard that this massive change is good.

And now I feel a settling down, a Now what? coming into me.

There is so much suffering in the world. I would like to be helpful to others, in some way help alleviate their suffering.

Franklin Merrell-Wolff says that coming to full consciousness is the beginning of a new life, a vast world opening to the traveler. I say to Peter, What am I to do now? It is so hard, figuring this out, and he smiles and says wryly, You're going to have trouble getting sympathy for this problem, and we laugh.

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