Within days I discovered that was easier said then done. While I was now armed with the truth, love is everywhere all the time; I was not constantly present to it. Furthermore, fear has reared its powerful tormenting head again and is obviously here to stay. How do I reconcile these two apparently opposing forces, love and fear? Which one is real? When I am feeling love, that is all there is; when I am feeling fear, pain, anger etc., that is all there is. I am back to square one, or am I? No. I now know the drill. At the bottom of the fear, at the center of the fire, at the pit of the abyss, lives the formless, the ever-present love. It is the only true reality- everything else is an illusion. But this illusion is so compelling, so powerful, so real. It comes over me in an instant, and suddenly it rules the moment. What is that force? What is its source? What drives it?

It was time to explore these two realms of reality. I am experiencing them both, that is undeniable. There is pure love, and there is pure terror. I must resolve this apparent duality.

Wait, stop, here it is again, my desire to understand, to fix, to avoid- my need to resolve the duality. There is no duality. I already know that. Then what is the source of my fear in this physical plane? I understand that at the core of my being, I am afraid of separateness, of death. But how does it play out in the physical world? I delved into this question with abandon. This is what I found:

The source of my fear and all its related emotions was the expectations of my mind. It’s strong desire to survive. In order to feel “safe,” I was living in this world, in this body, in this mind with a sense that things had to show up in a certain way. I noticed that I am living life as I think it should be, not as it is. I was approaching situations and people with a preconceived notion of SHOULD. This “should” not have happened; s/he “should” not have said that, done that; I “should” not feel that, want that; you “should” be this way or that way…”should,” “should,” “should.” What is this “should”? Where does it come from? Why are we constantly in a state of judgment and expectations? How did we come to view the world from this perspective? I realized that when we are in “should,” it provides us with the illusion of safety and predictability. The reality is that it actually perpetuates and feeds our fears.

It became clear to me that I am a victim of the world of “shoulds.” Well, victim is not the right word since even in that there is the word should- I should not come from “should.” OK, so here it is, in all its glory- the “should world.” Nothing wrong here, just the way it is. We humans come from “should.” This “should” runs our lives and is the major source of our suffering. We are not being with what is, we are being with what we want it to be. Recognizing this fact is not easy. We are so wrapped up in our experiences and our minds, that we are not able to see the bigger picture. Like fish in water, we are unaware that we are in the ocean. We have no sense of how our limited perceptions, driven by the mind’s preoccupation with survival, feed our fears and desires, and restrict our capacity to experience and utilize the source of the whole.