The Fear of Being Nobody

The greatest fear spiritual “seekers” experience is this: who will I be without my story? The fear of being nobody came up for me a lot before I woke up and definitely most intensely during a “bad” psychedelic trip. I describe it in my new eBook, Before And After Awakening:

“In 1982 I ate a big, fat magic mushroom on a hilltop with friends, and it turned out the mushroom ate me. It took me on the most frightening inner trip of my life. It felt as if I was being sucked down Dante’s inferno. It lasted for several hours. As I clung desperately to the rim of the volcano with my finger nails, the fire down below threatening to engulf me, I heard my mother’s voice crying to me faintly: “Jimmy, what have you done to yourself?” I finally began to come down when Barb, my girlfriend, who had been at work, joined me, saw what was happening, and lay down and made eye-contact with me, and guided me back to safe ground. I will always be grateful to her for that.”

With hindsight, it is easy to say that if I had just surrendered to what was so, which would mean accepting the reality of the inner fire raging up my spine, my trip might have smoothed out, but the fact is that, at the time, I was terrified! I was terrified of losing this “me” that I thought I was, this “me” that I had built my whole identity around—as a Kiwi, as a former army officer who had served in Vietnam, as a rugby-player, as a chiropractor, and as a seeker of truth.

But when we really look at it in the clear light of day (not under the influence of a powerful drug like psilocybin!), the fear of being nobody is actually a paper tiger. When we peer inwardly—into our own psyche, our own consciousness—we can’t find this “I,” this “me” anywhere. Yet we, as the awareness which looks, are very much here!

This is when the real awakening begins, when you realize that no thought, concept, or story between your ears is real because they come and go. You cannot even find the “I” thought in your consciousness. It, too, is illusory. And yet, again, you—the seer, the watcher, the experiencer—are always here!

As you awaken to the freedom that is your natural state, your realize more and more clearly that what you were afraid of—“Oh my God, I can’t handle the thought of being nobody”—was an illusion, a story that you “believed.” However, the fear itself, when it was happening, was very real—which further reinforces the story of “Oh my God…”

This is why, in the nondual approach, we focus again and again on seeing that the thought or story is not real—rather than dealing with the emotional reaction which is real for as long as it lasts, but ultimately is fueled by the story.

When you undo the story by exposing it for the illusion it is any emotional reaction created in your body by the story, including the fear of being “nobody,” dissolves, and you relax. You relax into your true nature, and your overall experience becomes one of ease, harmony, and flow.

Let me conclude with a final quote from my new eBook:

“At the same time, it is vitally important to realize that thoughts are very powerful. Thought has created everything in the human-made world, beginning with the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the transport we move around in. When you understand this from the perspective of freedom, of being fully conscious—i.e. realizing you are not your thoughts—you have the key to transforming your own life for the better and to changing your world.

“Freed from its psychological and emotional aspects—the worrying, fretting “I” or “me”—thought becomes a powerful tool for communication, problem solving, creating, and expressing your true purpose in the world. It is the most powerful tool available to us, in fact.”

©Jim Dreaver, 2011

Before and After Awakening

I have just completed my new book, titled Before and After Awakening: An Old Meditation Journal and My Experience Now.

In 1983 I was living in a four-bedroom house I owned in Santa Rosa. It had an in-ground swimming pool in a lovely backyard setting. I drove a brand-new BMW. I had a successful chiropractic practice. But, I wasn’t happy. Why?

I’d had a profound taste of enlightenment in 1977, which I write about in End Your Story, Begin Your Life, and the experience had been so pure, so mind-blowing that after that, it was the only thing I wanted. I wanted to live in the ‘enlightened’ state all the time. I had always been a good chiropractor, but chiropractic was never ‘it’ for me. I wanted to become enlightened so that I could share it, teach it, and write about it. (I know, it may sound arrogant to some, but my intention was always pure!)

So, some time earlier, I’d resolved to sell my practice, sell my BMW, rent the house out, and travel to India and Southeast Asia to find enlightenment. (Ah, such naiveté, such an illusion to even think it was somewhere outside myself! But I am reminded of the lines from T. S. Eliot: ‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.’)

So, in the spring of 1983 I sold my practice and was preparing to embark, with my girlfriend, on what would be a nine-month journey to China, Bali, Nepal, India, Australia, and New Zealand. In that spring, while I was getting the house ready for the new tenants, and preparing for our travels, I kept a journal during my regular morning meditations. I would scribble notes on a yellow legal pad, describing my various states of consciousness, which alternated between time of great peace, clarity, and equanimity, and periods of extreme uncertainty, anxiety, and insecurity. After all, my identity was still very much tied to what I did and what I had and I was giving all that up!

I would type the notes at night (personal computers were only just coming on the market then), and I still have the 110 page manuscript. It is funny too, because I always knew that meditation journal of mine would find its way into a book, and now, almost thirty years later, it has!

Yesterday I finished in-putting the entire manuscript into my laptop, and at various intervals along the way, in I write up my experience now: what I see or know now that I didn’t see or know then. I think it is a book that will help a lot of people. It is certainly the kind of book I would have wished I had back then.

And what do I see now that I didn’t see then? Back then, I still believed that my stories, and my sense of “self” was real, and that “I” had to find enlightenment, presumably, I thought at the time, through the practice of meditation.

Now I see that nothing between my ears is real—no thought, no story, not even this “I” and “me” I take myself to be. Why? Because thoughts and stories come and go, but we—as these aware, conscious beings we are—are always here.

Stories may be true, or they may be false, but none of them is real. What is real always here, always exists. We exist. We are real, independent of our ever-changing thoughts, stories, feelings, emotions, events, and circumstances.

To know that, to embody the knowing, is to be free. It is to be one with the natural ease, harmony, and flow of life.