If I stop to just examine a particular fear sensation that’s in my body, I can see it as something separate, an experience, an expectation, a response linked to something by association.
I see this so clearly, yet it’s hard to hold, as if I don’t want to know that. If, for any reason, the fear went away, I’d feel like a newborn – uncertain, unformed. (You can be newborn at any age, you know, even when the body is already beginning to sense what death by deterioration might feel like!)
But what happens when the fear is tied to a response set up very early, at a pre-verbal stage? I’ve always assumed (and I’m sure I’ve read these opinions) that pre-verbal/pre-memory experiences are not accessible to consciousness and therefore can’t be processed differently to create new responses.
But I’m beginning to notice assumptions and see them (just like shoulds) as indicators that questions are called for.
• First assumption: that there is just one “consciousness” (also assumed to be that waking, conceptual, rational state we spend so much time with). Is this true? No way! Just plain common sense supports this, as well as many psychologists. I know I’m in a different state when I’m dreaming (occasionally with a foot in each door, as in the few times I realize I’m dreaming while doing it). Then I’ve experienced the meditative state where I get a wordless kind of understanding.
• Another assumption: I cannot intentionally change what was created in a different state from the more usual, waking consciousness. Not so true, either! If the personality is able to navigate those states at all, it should be able to develop skills to do so deliberately, carrying memory and intention from one to another.
If I really stop to think about it, the sky’s the limit (or rather my beliefs are)! And guess what? - the fear of losing the fear is just another fear! ;-)
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