Only Fear Dies - Extract


		Living means gathering experience. You can't live without learning the hard way; that if there's glass on the footpath you'd better not tread on it with bare feet. In the same way our beautiful inner nature is protected by the good sense of our experience. But we seem to have forgotten this. When it comes to our emotional lives we ignore this hard-won experience. We repeatedly reach out and embrace what hurts and lacerates us. We put up with and stay with manipulative, emotional and angry people, hurtful people. We succumb to the selfish demands of their personalities and our own. We allow other people's personalities to live off us and we live off them. In a mad and perverse trade-off, we agree to exploit each other and we each suffer in turn. Do you really want to live with an angry and emotionally demanding or indifferent partner? Of course not. Your innocence can't relate to such destructive love (if you can call that 'love'). But you no longer live from your innocence and pure experience, the love you were born with and the good sense you developed. Your personality has got in-between. And now in your emotional life, your love-life, you're not sure which is which - which is the good sense and which is the spoiler . . . from 'The Being Behind the Mask' (Only Fear Dies) pp9-10 • Life is good. And life is always good now. Let someone press a pillow over your face now or when you are unhappy and you will get the point. Be told that you have cancer and a month to live and watch every problem, every pathetic bit of unhappiness in your life now, vanish miraculously. Instantly you will discover that life is good. And that it is good now, this moment and every moment. You will realise that life is not in yesterday or tomorrow, not in that past or future dream-land of unhappiness where you breed and hatch your moodiness and resentments. Whatever day you die - and it is always closer than you think - your one wish will' be that you had realised the truth of life. Must you be forced to face death to know that life is good? from 'The Truth of Life On Earth' (Only Fear Dies) p28 • What is true is not the truth. What is true changes in time, according to circum-stances. The truth - love, life, beauty, peace - never changes. It is true that man has legs. But that is not the truth. Because not all men have legs. Some lose their legs in time. And the contradiction or qualification is then true; man has legs but that a particular man does not have legs. In the truth there is no contradiction or qualification. Science, business, industry, technology, and the information media which publicise these activities, deal in the particular and what is true changes according to a particular pursuit or liking. The truth of science, business, industry, technology and the media is that everything in life that is worthwhile is in the future or the past and does not exist now; so it has to be pursued. Each pursuit is a movement, never an achievement, never an end in itself, as the truth is. The pursuit of all pursuits is called progress. Progress is the overall movement or aberration of the rational mind. As what is worthwhile - love, life, beauty, peace and truth - already is and never changes, all movement or pursuit has to be a movement away from it. So science, business, industry, technology and the media - representing the great movement of progress - each day take man further and further away from the truth of himself. from 'The Word of the World' (Only Fear Dies) p 73 • Nothing makes man more unhappy than the untruth appearing as the truth. The only news that is new and real is the news of the cause of unhappiness and how to be rid of it. That alone is the truth. But everything on which the media feeds and thrives is an effect of unhappiness, not the cause. To report, investigate, discuss and expose the effects of unhappiness, day in and day out, is as unreal and meaningless as saying in different ways that water is wet. Water is wet. And existence is unhappiness. The intelligent question is: Why is existence unhappiness? Why is water wet? And since it is an intelligent question there is no answer. Only the solution. Water is wet only when you go into it, or it goes into you . . . Existence is only unhappiness when you lose yourself in it; when you serve or believe its unhappy effect or allow its effect, unhappiness, to enter you. from 'A Political History of The World' (Only Fear Dies) pp96-7 • The only death and rebirth for you, the individual, is now. This moment is your only incarnation. You can only be incarnate, in the flesh, now, as you can only be true now. You can't be true yesterday or tomorrow. You are always true or not true now. If you quit a situation or a person in order to be true to yourself it will be now not tomorrow. In that moment and all the other moments of your daily life, whenever you have the opportunity to be true or not true to yourself or life, you either die (to be true) or you do not die (to be true). You either die in that moment to the person you are, or you don't. You either die to the ignorance that you're holding on to, or compromising with as yourself, or you don't. If you die to that personal self, if you face up to the falsehood of it you are immediately reborn, instantly freed of that part of the old person or false self that you were. If you don't die to it you continue to live on as the old person the same old wearying problem that you can't escape from. The person is the only problem. Getting the person to the point of dying, however, is unpleasant, uncomfortable, difficult or painful, as everyone knows who has had to be brave and true and face up to themselves in a crisis. But the release, the blessed, cleansing energy that comes from being straight and new is unmistakable. Only fear stands in the way, the fear of dying now to what you are used to. from 'Death Birth and the Secret of Hell' (Only Fear Dies) pp125-6 • This is not an ordinary book. it is energetic, spiritually energetic. (Only the spirit is energetic). It is true to its teaching. Used rightly it will work to make you free of unhappiness. Whether you believe that, or anything in the book, is of no consequence. The book works direct, now, immediately in your subconscious, where all unhappiness is lodged . . . In dying daily to my unhappiness, dying for life, I finally realise the incredible truth: There is no death. All that dies is my fear of dying. Only fear dies. And the death of fear is liberation. from the 'Epilogue' (Only Fear Dies) p145/p147 © Barry Long