Fear and love

 Fear and love

The difference is like that of chalk and cheese multiplied infinitely.

Many people say they do not live in fear, but there have been very few humans in history who have been completely without fear.

I am not talking about bravado, or even any kind of self-demonstration, but most people do not know what true love is.

True love is a total lack of fear, a state that is very difficult to achive.
From that fearless perspective, we are able to see the clouds of fear that hang around other people's auras, and it is often very difficult to not become sucked in.

Additionally, most people don't know what they are afraid of. They just have an uneasy feeling sometimes.

These fears are the foundation stones of our ego - before we can quieten the ego in order to find our true selves, we must get rid of the fears upon which it is founded.

Let me try to give an example of what I discovered in China.

Whilst teaching there, I tried to study whatever I could of the period during Mao's rule, and I was horrified.

So were the entire Chinese population. The atrocities committed by Mao's army at least equalled those committed by the Japanese, and some poor peasants lived under threat from the Japanese, Mao's army and Chiang Kai-shek's army. This was a time to quieten and cease all egotistical activity, and develop a new persona. So everyone created a false face, which they lived behind and cultivated daily. As time passed by, the falseness took over, and the real self was lost.

One of the most satisfying things in my life was to help a few students to realise this, and hence to realise there own selves. I apologise sincerely to those thousands of students that I could not help towards experiencing this wondrous joy.

Most of us are very poor at demonstrating our love. We become embarrassed by it, and so refrain. We rarely buy flowers and chocolates  out of pure love, but as a result of astute marketing. In a similar way, we are very poor at accepting love, and we treat it as some kind of scam or new marketing activity, or someone with a point to prove. So we argue, and defend our postion within the cloud, and thus avoid accepting love.

Very few people have yet experienced this kind of love except in minor degrees occasionally, and then they have usually considered themself to be too weak or too sentimental, so again dismiss it.

Fear is far more exciting than love, and is therefore attractive to excitable people.

(Chiang Kai-shek was socially conservative, promoting traditional Chinese culture in the New Life Movement and rejecting western democracy and the nationalist democratic socialism)