The transformation of fear does not mean that we no longer have fearful responses. It means that we no longer believe that those responses are who we are. This is what practice is about: learning to stop believing that our deep-seated reactivity is who we are. Who we really are is much bigger than any of our fear-based conditioned responses. When we can really experience fear, we can see through this false identification, perhaps even glimpsing a vaster sense of Being.
Ezra Bayda, Being Zen
It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought:
which is why we so often prefer to live in an almost world, why we prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities to be safely clouded by fear, why we want the horizon to remain always in the distance, the promise never fully and simply made, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility.
David Whyte “Beginning” in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us:
we suffer more often in imagination than in reality
Seneca the Younger, Letters from a Stoic
Human beings are a frontier between what is known and what is not known. The act of turning any part of the unknown into the known is simply an invitation for an equal measure of the unknown to flow in and re-establish that frontier: to reassert both the exterior and interior horizon of an individual life; to make us what we are – that is – a moving edge between what we know about ourselves and what we are about to become. What we are actually about to become or are afraid of becoming always trumps and rules over what we think we are already.
David Whyte, “Self-knowledge” in Consolations
There are second thoughts happening each time you act.
There is hesitation, and from that hesitation or gap, you can go backward or forward. Changing the flow of karma happens in that gap. So the gap is very useful.
It is in the gap that you give birth to a new life.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Truth of Suffering and the Path of Liberation
He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.
Jean-Luc Godard, 1930 – , French Film Director
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