Most of us spend our lives obsessed with avoiding what we fear most – death. We gather into “pods” that draw energy from our shared primordial fear, living in barbaric violence and hate as a means to stay alive. This primitive impulse is focused on mere survival at all costs, which inhibits any evolution to a higher awareness.

Although humankind has perpetrated many tumultuous and horrific events on this planet, we have been offered great compassion through awakened Souls who have come to show us a different way…other than fear. For the most part, we have discounted and mistreated these people through the disdain of our primitive impulses, thus preventing our spiritual evolution generation after generation.

What is fear? Generally accepted definitions include: “an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, and likely to cause pain” and “a feeling of anxiety concerning the outcome of something or the safety and well-being of someone.”

The common denominator here is emotion. Our emotions influence every aspect of our living. They drive every action we take, every decision we make…alienating us from our own lives and our Authentic nature.

We use emotions to create or change our mood. What we fail to realize is that for every emotional “high” we create there is a “low” that we must face. We live our lives trying to have as many “highs” as we can while ignoring the fact that what goes “up”…must come “down.”

Our emotions have no real “monitor” to control the quality of themselves within us. So we play the game of trying to offset one emotion with another all day long, which is very draining to our psyche and the body.

The moment we experience a painful emotion based in fear that we perceive as coming from the outer world, we try to counteract the pain of fear by creating another emotion that is more gratifying or pleasant. We have reduced our lives down to merely trying to manipulate our emotions to be “pleasant” and bring as much gratification as possible as a way of confronting unpleasant emotions.

Established in childhood, this “dark side” of the psyche rules our lives for the remainder of our living in this world. It evokes very bad habits, including worry, hate and convoluted insanity. Simply stated, it means that we are paranoid. And to some degree most of us are.

I offer you an old story that was given to me by a wonderful Zen teacher many years ago. It is a simple tale that depicts how our emotional minds work and what they do to us in the course of a lifetime:

It happened once that a king built a great palace with millions of mirrors. All of the walls were covered with mirrors. A dog entered the palace and saw millions of dogs all around him. Being a very intelligent dog, he started barking to protect himself from the millions of dogs that surrounded him. His life was in danger. He grew tense and began barking to protect himself. But when he started barking, those millions of dogs started barking, too.

In the morning the dog was found dead. He was there alone with only mirrors, no other dogs. Nothing was fighting with him, nothing was there to fight. He had seen only his own reflection in the mirrors and became afraid. And when he started fighting, the mirror reflection also started fighting. In his mind, he was alone with millions and millions of barking dogs surrounding him. Can you imagine the hell he experienced that night?

Most of us are much like this dog. We do not realize the difference between the illusion our emotions create and the reality of what lives within us. We see ourselves only as human beings and, with no respect for the spiritual aspect of ourselves, our emotions reign supreme over our minds. So we relinquish our living to the pursuit of avoiding fear through gratification and hate, which only serves to create a deep and painful karma.

When the dog began barking due to his impulsive emotional reaction to a perceived fear, the strength of his own emotions imploded upon him blinding him from realizing there was no real danger. When we limit our lives to rules that govern fear through fear, we never lift our heads out of our emotional fear to observe the situation as it truly is. Everything that is unknown to us becomes something to be afraid of, which keeps us from taking the adventure of our lifetime into the quest for Love.

Sadly, most of us just bark at mirrors until we die, perceiving the form reflected in front of us our enemy rather than awakening to the realization that it is merely one more emotional illusion in our delusion.

A spiritual practice offers us the Way to mature out of this gruesome and grisly cycle, and break the patterns of irrational intimidation from our emotions that are constantly warning us that we are in danger. Entering into the unknown through a spiritual practice is what our life is all about. We are here, as the Buddha taught, “…to live beyond the beyond.”

This does not mean that we do not have joy in our life. Joy is the result of bliss – misery is the result of constant gratification. The two are not synonymous and are easily confused by most people.

So our mantra must be: anything that threatens our ego is of no real concern to us. We must hold to the “thy will be done” attitude within – even if it means “losing face” socially. When we are no longer interested in seeking to “justify ourselves” we come to a place where forgiveness becomes a lifestyle rather than some momentary, magnanimous event of the ego.

Everyone is in our lives for the purpose of serving the spiritual. Seeking humility is the most noble cause of a human being’s life. The compassion that comes from humility ushers us into a place of immense spiritual forgiveness. From there, we awaken to the authentic significance in our interactions with others and ourselves.

It is impossible to live in forgiveness when we are battling with the “logic and reasoning” of our emotions. Forgiveness is in direct proportion to the level of our humility.

In closing, I leave you with the Buddha…no greater words could be written:

Live in love
And do your work;
Make amends of your sorrows;
For just as the jasmine
Releases and lets fall
Its withered flowers,
Let fall willfulness and hatred.