There is No Actual Certainty In Our Minds Ever

Actually, fear is a very common and natural reaction to this ‘uncertainty’ as you called it. So, actually it is beyond uncertainty because what happens is that; as you are meeting yourself without your mind, as you are meeting yourself without relying so much on these mental representations, to the mind that feels like death, it feels like the great unknown and then fear is a very normal reaction to that. You don’t know, what are you doing, where are you going… and sometimes not even that, it can seem more primal than that. But this actually, this wobbliness, this shakiness is very important for us to go through because if you retreat from that point and go back into some certainty, which is actually nonsense, there is no actual certainty there in our minds, ever, about anything. So, don’t retreat back into a certainty or a seeming certainty because of the arising like you beautifully said ‘It’s just a set of sensations’ arising in your Being which remains untouched no matter what, how strong the fear may seem. So, the mind will say ‘retreat, retreat’ and I cannot tell you how many come to Satsang and they retreat just from this point because it feels so uncomfortable. It feels so uncomfortable, because you feel like - the mind will tell you, ‘I would rather be deluded and certain rather than being empty and uncertain.’ So, you have my full encouragement to remain in this emptiness and let the fear come, let the ideas about being lost, let them come. Let the attacks come in terms of saying ‘But you don’t have a plan, what are you doing with your life. What a waste you are going to end up becoming.’ All of these attacks will come. Let them playout, they don’t mean anything. Remember that the protagonist of all the attacks is never real. The one that is being attacked on both sides, it’s a made up battle. The attacker is unreal, the attacked in unreal. The protagonist of that story which the mind is saying ‘But you are so uncertain now, you are so lost, you don’t know what’s going on, how can you live like this’, but that ‘you’ is the protagonist of the story, the central character of a story. But the central character is just not real and therefore the story belongs to nobody. So, one tip I want to give you before we close is that many times we can say ‘Then what should be my response?’ and we can say that ‘Oh, then my response should be that I should be open’ , but in that position of taking the ‘open’ response you could still be buying into the protagonist which is this me, the nonexistent me who is now trying to live there life open. So, even the spiritual instruction that we apply, if we apply it from the position of closeness and then trying to be open then you are bit like a turtle with legs coming out but you are still inside the turtle shell. But open fundamentally means just remove the primal mask, the original mask, don’t be open as somebody, because that is not being open or don’t be spontaneous as somebody because that is not truly open you already in the turtle shell and now you are trying to just take your legs out and be free that way. And many spiritual seekers are trying to be free that way. So, not that, not a position that you are taking, openness or spontaneity is not a position that you take. It is the absence of all positions. And this is beyond the intellect because the mind cannot understand the pure absence even of absence. It can only understand opposites. So should I be like this [showing one position] or should I be like that [showing another position] and you say neither, the mind will say but then what am I suppose to do and then the Master may say something like ‘Just forget about it, forget about it.’ Because if you do that openness within that turtle shell you will always be judging yourself about how open your being or not being. It has nothing to do with any of that. It’s nothing to do with you or me.