There's an age-old teaching that has to do with the importance of being able to discern between a rope and a snake when it is in your presence. That's so easy, you say...a rope and a snake are so different - it should only be in rare and unusual moments that one gets mistaken for the other. Ok, so granted, when we mistake a rope for a snake in the moment, we might be tired or stressed in some way, it may be dark out, or our attention and field of focus is somehow split so that we don't really see or sense clearly what's in front of us.
The whole exercise gets a bit more complicated when we address the areas where we have been culturally conditioned to see a snake when in fact there is just a rope....or perhaps nothing at all. Being the egoic creatures that we are, shattering any mirror of illusion that we've carried with us for a good part of a lifetime can be a profoundly humbling experience. Bottom line is that, unless we are fully enlightened, we've all constructed our lives on the basis of certain illusions, and it requires a great deal of humbleness and humility to own and accept that...not to mention grief, loss, disillusionment, despair and defeat on shattering the illusions....followed by the willingness to pick up the pieces, regroup, reconstruct and move forward with a renewed and restored appetite for life.
As I wrote the last sentence, I was graced with the wonderful comic image of the somewhat hapless Agent 86, Maxwell Smart, tripping over something right in front of him, falling flat on his face into a pile of rubbish, and then immediately jumping up to dust himself off with full vim and vigor, resuming whatever he was doing, pretending like nothing had happened. Oh, sometimes life can be like that...laughing.
Over the last few weeks I've gotten much more serious about identifying and processing the various fears (snakes) that have, consciously or unconsciously, shaped much of my life and experience of it. Like I suggested above, the ego hates to be wrong so doing this kind of inner work can be akin to dealing with a stubborn, impetuous and creatively manipulative child who is employing every form of resistance possible to avoid going to the heart of the matter. Nonetheless, persistence, patience and the willingness to tackle this pit of snakes from many different angles is starting to pay off for me.
What I've realized/remembered is that there are two kinds of fear: justified and unjustified. Justified fear has to do with real reality danger, like my house is on fire and I need to get out, a grizzly bear is on the attack, my car is spinning out of control on black ice, etc. Unjustified fears are everything else where there is no reality danger. That has the potential to be a pretty long list. When these fears arise, they point to an illusion we hold about the true nature of life, and can also reflect the degree to which we've allowed ourselves to limit ourselves for fear of encountering a "snake".
Having said that, cultural conditioning and the resulting societal "norms" mean that many of us share some common unjustified fears - fear of death, fear of aging, fear of poverty and scarcity, fear of not being good enough, fear of loneliness and not fitting in, fear of authority, fear of God, fear of expressing our truth, fear of displeasing people we have identified as important in our lives, and so on goes the list.
Now that I have started to really unpack and deconstruct my fears, I am getting acquainted with many of my illusions about the nature of life. It's a sobering process - though not without moments of total disbelief and hilarity, especially when I see that any given snake I've habitually and somewhat unconsciously feared all my life is actually a cute, furry stuffed toy with a big smile on its face. The toy, the rope...ultimately it's a lifeline that threads through the illusion. In grasping onto it and following it through, it can take you through the illusion to the other side, a place where your sense of self can root in much more fertile soils.
