Excerpt From:

A Guide To Awareness And Tranquillity  (page 94)

  By William Samuel

ABOUT FEAR

Personal fear and consternation are invariably wrapped around "things." Fear has to do with what we believe the objects of perception can do to us, or what their absence can withhold from us.

Man's constant quest for "things" (and his accumulation of them) is proof of the value he has assigned them and of the power he credits them with having. When one awakens to the truth that there is neither power nor value in any image of perception (thought, feeling or thing), he has made a major step in the elimination of fear.

 

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QUESTI0N: How does one learn to view things as having no value or power?

ANSWER: Commencing with the alone and only Awareness (this one, right here), we find "things" included within Awareness as Awareness. We give "value" to the Isness being Awareness, not to the multitude of images included therein.

To use the television set illustration, the "value" is the television set that includes the shadows and images "within" its functioning screen. No power is given to the images. The television set doesn't hold itself in horror of the images the screen includes. Neither does this Identity I am (you are) quake before the picture that appears as a personal experience. Why? Because no image "out there" can do aught to this Identity I am.

Sooner or later we must stop paying lip service to this fact and, like Macbeth facing Macduff, test it! To "test it" is simply to stop assigning value, either good or bad, to that which has no value, either good or bad.

Things, images, objects of perception, reflections, etc., are perfect things, images, objects of perceptions, reflections. They are being just what they are being, but the power is not them; the power and importance is That which is being them-and the "That" is God.

 

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HAPPINESS AND "THINGS"

To the old nature, happiness hinges on an external world of things, and especially on the possession and manipulation of them.

"How are things going? How is everything? Is everything all right?" surely implies the belief that happiness has to do with the proper alignment of the images within Awareness. Would we make happiness, joy and completeness dependent on a state of "things"? This appears to place the television set at the mercy of the images on the screen.

Externals are not the creators of Peace, Tranquility or Serenity; neither are they empowered to alter or remove them. Indeed, externals are subservient, so to speak, to Tranquility (Identity). For example, a tranquil view of the panorama yields infinitely more detail and beauty than a fearful view of it, or an angry view, or one that is "blind with rage."

How things seem, therefore, hinges on the view of things. In and of themselves, "things" are not capable of influencing the beholder, who is the "viewing."

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WE LEAVE "THINGS"

Images are best seen in a "state of tranquility." If they are to be seen correctly in one's experience, therefore, it should be obvious that the natural place to turn is within oneself, where tranquility is felt and experienced. Through the eyes of Absolute Tranquility, "health" and "wealth" are seen as they are.

To feel peace within when everything outside is awry demands that we leave "things." It requires that we let go all desire to correct, manipulate or change the troubling images of perception. It requires that we divest ourselves of the incorrect notion that happiness can be experienced only if "things" get straightened out or the mess is cleaned up-or "healed."

Tranquility is ever present as our very Identity. It is always "here," but we cannot be very well aware of it while battling the external picture, and we cannot be aware of it at all while believing that Identity is dependent upon, and dictated to, by a world of "things."

Letting the world of things go, with the knowledge that Peace is right here, right now, closer than breathing, we feel the baptism of Peace descend like a river of water. Then, AS Peace, we "look out" and see images as they are and for what they are. Inevitably, this view of the world reveals that no matter how ominous the appearance of a particular situation, no matter how dire and foreboding, there is no Power there. No condition or circumstance is capable of altering the Peace, the Identity, that one is!

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TO MAKE A POINT CLEARER

Take a vicarious walk into the early morning. Smell the air's freshness. Look at the wet leaves along the pathway, the damp stones covered with new moss and Spring. Listen to the crisp sounds of rock and sand under foot, the brush of twigs against the clothing. How clear and sharp come the bird's songs, how soft the rustle of the green leaves. The sun is warm; the sky is blue. A clean, beautiful, unhurried day is at hand. There are new blossoms everywhere, unselfishly giving beauty to anyone-or no one.

Now, consider another scene. A dusty room, a disordered desk covered with the accumulation of months: a rubber stamp and pad, a wrinkled and torn paper bag, a sharpened away pencil with worn eraser. A book is open to a reading of some past time; in a disarranged pile is a carbon paper, a tissue, a jumble of arrowheads gathered from a not-so-distant walk into one of yesterday's mornings.

Who is to say that either of these scenes is to be preferred over the other? Who is to say that one is better than the other? They are both within the Awareness of the Identity being I. To say that one scene is good and the other not so good is to give them a power they didn't have before the judgment-the power to alter feeling.

 

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II

MORE SELECTIONS ON JUDGMENT AND WHAT IT APPEARS TO DO TO THE OBJECTS OF PERCEPTION CRITICISM

Criticism is judgment, Webster tells us, usually an unfavorable censure following a critical observation.

Those who criticize most make the most judgments. Those who make the most judgments find the most to be unhappy about. "Yes," someone writes, "but those who are intellectually able to make the most judgments also find more to be happy about."

Not so! The happiness this refers to is only the other end of unhappiness, the joy that is opposite misery, gladness that is the dualistic partner of sadness. The one who makes no judgments, either good or bad, is never moved from the Tranquility and Peace which resides in the Heart at the very center of Being. This is the Tranquility that is self-evident only to those who take no sides, to those who prefer to judge not, even as they have been admonished.

 

Backbiting and criticism are merely the negative aspects of judgment. Is a positive judgment any better? It has been written, "When beauty came into being, ugliness arose." A judgment is merely a comparison of one human evaluation to another.

Critics are great peak-of-elation and valley-of-depression sufferers, plunging from the ecstatic height of happiness into the abyss of the soul's dark night.

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