The more you look at the mind and you see the delusions you recognize that fear is their character.
We’re all having panic attacks all the time because we have attachment and aversion – we’re always living in fear. That’s the suffering of samsara: they talk about the “fears of samsara,” that’s how they refer to them. We call them all these names: panic attacks and dramas and anxiety and all this. They’re because we’ve got delusions, that’s all.
And they’re rooted in the main delusion, literally the root delusion: ignorance, marigpa, ego-grasping.
And why fear? What is it that causes the fear? Because the things that the delusions believe in don’t exist, that’s why. Of course, this is very hard to see: we never think for a minute that we’re not in touch with reality, but this is Buddha’s key point.
When you’ve realized emptiness, the absence of the fantasies, there’s no fear: no anxiety, no worry, no attachment, no anger. Amazing!
I always like to tell the story of Lama Zopa Rinpoche and how he nearly drowned when he was a little boy. He was a tantric yogi, the Lawudo Lama, in his past life up in the Sherpa country. He died in meditation and then next life he was born as little Zopa – he was not called Zopa at the time. From the time he could crawl, he’d go missing his sister said, and they’d find him up the path to where they knew the cave of the Lawudo Lama was. He’d do this repeatedly.
And then as soon as he could start talking, when they’d find him and say, “Come home!” he’d say, “No, that is my home,” pointing up to the cave.
Anyway, when he was about 8 years old and he’d already been formally recognized as the reincarnation of the Lawudo Lama, his mother sent him up the mountains to some uncle or something in a monastery. This was about 1952, I think – he was about 8, he was born in 1945 or something, or whatever, ’44, ’45.
Anyway, he’s a little boy and he sees across the river – these tumultuous rivers, you know – he sees across the river these people. The Sherpas called white people “yellow-eyed” or “straw-colored.” Straw-colored hair and yellow eyes, I think – pale eyes – they had this weird term for us. He’d never seen people like this before. There were a couple on the other side of the river, and he wanted to meet them.
Of course, you don’t go empty-handed, so there he was, with his bowl of boiled potatoes, walking on this log that was serving as a bridge – it wasn’t a very deep river, but very rough, you know – and he fell into the river with his potatoes. And of course they don’t teach them to swim up there!
When Rinpoche told the story, he said, “The head kept coming to the surface for air.” That’s an odd thing to say, isn’t it? We’d say, “I came to the surface for air,” wouldn’t we?
But you see, in all this work of looking into how things exist, it’s very clear: you get into the habit of talking about emotions differently – like with anger. We say, “I am angry, I’m depressed.” But instead of that, you say, “there’s anger,” “there’s depression,” because technically the I isn’t that. You get into this habit, so you see things more objectively.
When you say, “Hello, who are you?” I’ll say, “I am Robina.” Well, technically you’re not Robina – you are the person named Robina. My philosophy teacher Geshe Tegchok would say you don’t be all smarty pants and answer like that, you just answer normally: “I’m Robina,” but you don’t believe it.
Anyway, there’s Rinpoche’s head coming to the surface, and he said he saw his manager, his uncle, panicking, running along the bank.
Anyway, he goes down in the water again, comes up for air again, and then he said to himself, “Oh,” he said, “the thought occurred to me that the person known as the Lawudo Lama is about to die.” He didn’t say, “I’m about to die.” He said, “The person known as the Lawudo Lama is about to die.”
Then in telling the story Rinpoche said, “I didn’t know anything about emptiness” – meaning in that life, 8 years old, he hadn’t heard about emptiness yet. Obviously if he was a yogi, he’s known it from the past, and you can’t lose it, so the realization is there. “I didn’t know anything about emptiness, but,” he said, “there was no fear.” There was no fear.
This we have to think about, because what we would say in our psychology is that the most natural response is fear because of this instinct for survival – in fact, it’s necessary to have it. Mr. Darwin or somebody came up with that, right?
And it’s reasonable: if you look at animals who are all panicking, all running away from danger, if you look at humans when we’re nearly attacked, the same response every time.
We’ve all got panic and fear when the I is attacked – of course we do, because we’ve got ego-grasping. But because we can’t imagine not having it, we assume it’s necessary. It’s said that without fear you wouldn’t know what to do when you’re attacked, that you need to have this instinct for survival. I mean Buddha would say that’s hilarious. No! Fear just makes you make a mess. You need intelligence, not fear!
We think if Rinpoche didn’t have instinct for survival, he would have just sunk to the bottom of the river like a stone and gone, “Oh well, I’m drowning, who cares?” No! He still went to the surface for air, but his mind – this is the point – his mind would have been stable.
This we can’t comprehend in our world. We don’t believe such a thing is possible because we all posit the existence of and the necessity for ego-grasping. We don’t call it that, but that’s what fear is – that’s what fear is the symptom of.
Rinpoche didn’t cling to an I, but he wasn’t being nihilistic: he’s not just sinking to the bottom of the river like a stone. He stayed clear and managed to get out of the water. And if he had drowned his mind would have been fine then too, he wouldn’t have panicked.
What a great thing to look forward to!