Discomfort supplement for Enlightenment

[Danda]

Hey there

I was reading Leo's advice for attaining Enlightenment here in forum recently.

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Realistically, if you cannot muster the strength and consciousness to leave a toxic relationship, you will never muster the strength and consciousness necessary for enlightenment.

It's sort of like you're complaining about being too winded from hiking up a local mountain trail, so you're hoping that by scaling Mt Everest you will then be able to hike your local mountain. Yes, that's technically true, but you see the problem with that logic, right?

It let me wonder a lot. I put so much energy and time into meditation, self-inquiry, concentration, etc every single day, but I am completely dismissing the little (or bigger) fears I face on daily basis.

Like fear of opinions of others, fear of mistakes, fear of not being good enough, fear of the unknown, fear of discomfort, fear of regret..

The fear of some of those things is really strong and feels so real, but when I'm doing self-inquiry I don't really feel so much fear. (6 months since I started self-inquiring)

I'm afraid of things that just poke to my ego, but when it comes to killing this motherf***er the fear is really not so strong.

It got me thing "Am I doing something wrong?". Does my mind play a trick on me when I'm doing self-inquiry?

So the question is: Is better to focus fully on self-inquiry and let other things be dissolved by it, or focus on discomforts step by step and eventually face the biggest one, the fear of death?

Thanks everybody 

[AleksM]

@Danda

Avoiding fear is not the answer. You have to face fear. Don't use spirituality as an escape. Focus on both spiritualy and personal development.

 

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Spiritual bypassing, a term first coined by psychologist John Welwood in 1984, is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs. It is much more common than we might think and, in fact, is so pervasive as to go largely unnoticed, except in its more obvious extremes.

Part of the reason for this is that we tend not to have very much tolerance, both personally and collectively, for facing, entering, and working through our pain, strongly preferring pain-numbing “solutions,” regardless of how much suffering such “remedies” may catalyze. Because this preference has so deeply and thoroughly infiltrated our culture that it has become all but normalized, spiritual bypassing fits almost seamlessly into our collective habit of turning away from what is painful, as a kind of higher analgesic with seemingly minimal side effects. It is a spiritualized strategy not only for avoiding pain but also for legitimizing such avoidance, in ways ranging from the blatantly obvious to the extremely subtle.

Spiritual bypassing is a very persistent shadow of spirituality, manifesting in many ways, often without being acknowledged as such. Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive, anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous boundaries, lopsided development (cognitive intelligence often being far ahead of emotional and moral intelligence), debilitating judgment about one’s negativity or shadow elements, devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being.

Read more: http://robertmasters.com/writings/spiritual-bypassing/

YouTube search: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spiritual+bypassing

[Telepresent]

@Danda I don't see a difference between self-inquiry and dealing with these fears.  Certainly you can spend a huge amount of time and energy playing the 'definition' game (ie. what we see people doing here constantly when they say "reality is this" or "is consciousness that?" or basically any of the threads I've ever started here). Maybe you can play that game indefinitely. But if you're really honest, you're going to reach a point where you realise that all of these things are based in your mind/perspective/beliefs, and that you need to start investigating your mind/perspective/beliefs totally, to learn if there's any truth to them.  At this point it's impossible not to face all these little fears, as they are the same as your mind/perspective/beliefs. 

I suspect the reason that "when it comes to killing this motherf***er the fear is really not so strong" is because you haven't truly, truly made the connection that the thing making that statement is the thing you're setting out to 'kill'. So long as it is 'other', you won't fear it as you can distance it from 'you'.

Really, really ask yourself: what is ego, what is 'you', why are you scared of small things but not the big one, and what are you willing to lose?