[kkstarratings] This is Dan from Vagabond Buddha. This talk is about the fear that grace has abandoned you.
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One day the grace will come to you. You’ll understand that you’re something much more permanent and beautiful than what your mind thinks than your personality than the dialogue that’s running in your head all the time.
One day you have that Grace you’ll feel an opening. You’ll feel that you have no beginning or end. That you are the undefined. That you are the one consciousness. And that your thoughts are a wave that rides through the consciousness. Insignificant small petty waves that ride through the consciousness. Floating along the surface. However, you say it.
And when you experience that awareness, you’ll feel the joy flood into your body. And you’ll feel the end of suffering that many talk about.
But if you’re like some people your mind will test you from time to time. You may wake up in a thought and you pay attention to it as if it’s real. And, if it’s really a problem, it’ll be something like this.
“What happened?” “Where did the end of suffering go?” “Where did my grace go?” “Why is my mind back … creating pain for me?” “Why did the joy stop?” “How do I get it back?”
And that indeed has happened to me … many times. I would say more in the 1st year or 2 after the grace first came to me.
But nonetheless, that thought will be received. It will be paid attention to as if it is true. When it is nothing but a lie that your mind has proposed and that you (as mind) has believed into existence.
The question will sound authentic to you. You’ll feel pain when the question is believed into existence. Why has the pain come to me? What have I done to lose the grace? How do I get the joy back? The fear that grace has abandoned you is itself just another thought.
It might 30 seconds after the first grace starts. It might be 24 hours after, it could be a week. There’s no rule about when the self-feels the mind’s pain.
Actually, the mind doesn’t see itself. And I want to go into that too much now. You’ll have your own sense of it when the grace comes. The mind wants attention from grace. The mind is able to posit interesting questions like, “Where did Grace go?”
And of course such a question … the mind will answer. And it will say, I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know how to get back it. It doesn’t work anymore. Maybe none of it was real. Maybe I imagined it.
So the mind has thoughts Grace just is. So when the mind has a thought. It just floats by. You listen to it, and you populate it as if it’s true. You own it, with all that your mind knows. You pay a deep attention to the mind. So there is only what the mind thinks. No attention is paid to anything but the mind. You have shunned the grace. Because, when you believed the question, “Where di the grace go?” There is no attention paid to anything else. Your perception is not living in grace-land. Perception ends at the edge of your mind. You are not living in Graceland.
And so the mind answers its own question. I’m lost. I can’t get back. The mind is off and running.
But if you’re like me. You’ll find that the grace will come to you again. And you’ll be populated by … the end of suffering, by the warmth, by the open joy of just plain living in your life. And so. My warning … my knowledge that … for you is. Is to is to know about this before it happens. So you can understand that your mind is asking for full attention when it asks the question (Why did the pain come back?) and that the question itself is why. The question itself is what has ended your access to freedom from suffering.
And in fact, it’s the same question that you were asking before the grace came to you the first time.
It’s the same question … it’s the same space you were standing in … before grace first happened. And it feels so real to you because you’ve been there. It’s like going home or something. That’s who you’ve been much of your life. The mind is the friend you grew up with. It is your mind that you believed before … without question.
So it feels like home. And pain returns as the question goes unanswered. Just like before that, you’ll have a faint memory that. If you if you choose to believe the question, into truth. Instead of seeing what it really is. The truth that you’re believing into existing like you did every day before grace entered you. It is the same constricted consciousness of the mind that gave you pain before you were freed by grace.
And so, if you can just see the mind when it does that. The mind is forming a thought, and that it creates an emotion in you, that brings you to the belief, that grace has left you. It is the fear that is the creation of pain. And the pain is a believed confirmation of the belief that grace has left you.
That’s the mind’s way of operating. It operates through fear. Its intention is, I suspect, and I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter if what I say is true or false it won’t help you at all. But it seems maybe the mind believes. It doesn’t know it believes anything. It thinks of beliefs as truths. But it seems to operate according to a principle, that if it can attach emotions good or bad to thoughts. Then it can move you. It can move you in a direction. Maybe that you’ve been procrastinating, that you know you need to go.
When you are aware that the grace lives in you. The material dance doesn’t end. The authentic part of the dance … that you do. The authentic part of the actions you take in your life, that have a meaningful, self-affirming purpose, continue. All of those actions continue. There might be other actions that fall away over time. Where they don’t feed you in a meaningful way … those will drop away, potentially.
So when you are living in the grace, the fear no longer lives you. You’ll find that you are propelled. You’re in a dance with life that’s propelled, only by the dance alone. There’s no fear of what will happen if you don’t dance.
The mind technique of control was giving you fear and negative emotions. The deadly sins if you would like. Instead, you are propelled from goodness without purpose. There’s no fear, or hate, or anger necessary to move you towards life’s purpose.
You don’t need to fear the grace when it comes. You don’t need to believe that you’ll somehow become less effective in your life if the fear is not there to propel you.
In truth, you’ll be more effective because of the lack of concentration on the fear that came with what the thoughts. There is little interest in fear from a place of grace. The fear that occurred, when you believed that you began and ended at the edge of your mind, is no longer of interest in the presence of grace.
That fear no longer possesses you. The mind will think the thoughts and they’ll be a shadow of the fear. You’ll remember the fear that the mind is trying to create in you but it won’t be able to create it. And you’ll move forward in your life gracefully and with the grace, without any fear of, or belief in, the fear that used to motivate you; move you.
And the choices that you make. They are made without that deep weighted fear. They feel more authentic and free. They feel more natural, less contrived, less manipulative. They feel authentically purposeful.
And so fear of grace is as illogical as all the other fears. Even more so since grace delivers you from all fear.
The idea that you forgot the grace is itself a thought that can not live outside the grace. Your mind has believed it into existence. The thought that something happened to the grace is just another thought that will float by unattended, once you have experienced transitioning back into grace.
And if you do get possessed again by emotions for the idea that you can’t feel the joy of living, there’s no reason to get upset or fearful about that. Just let that thought be with all the others and the grace will return to you. Because you haven’t bought into the fear. You haven’t bought into the fear that you used to live in before grace first came.
And that’s ultimately the only thing that trapped you, in a stream of beliefs. And it’s the thing that will try to pull you back. And so, let it be. And grace will be back soon.
This is Dan of Vagabond Buddha. Thanks for being here.