“Is fear inherent in the soul, as you said the angels feared the contact with the body?
Fear is a shadow cast upon the light of the soul. And of what is that shadow? That shadow is of something that the soul does not know, something that is strange to it. For instance, take a person near the water who has never learned to swim; he is not acquainted with water, he is not at ease, there is his fear. Another person gets rid of that feeling of strangeness, he knows his own power over the water, he has no more fear. Therefore, fear comes from ignorance. As everyone fears to go in a dark room when he does not know what is there, so the soul in entering the body of clay naturally is frightened.” Hazrat Inayat Khan
Sometimes people do things that I simply do not understand. I try to understand but it is not always possible. And then I get it, they are afraid. Which is totally understandable. From the paragraph above we could extrapolate that we begin our journey on the Earth in fear, the fear of the unknown. I have a very clear memory of that moment when my soul decided to take the plunge and enter into manifestation. Don’t know how I have it but it is there. I remember the emotion mostly, one of terror and excitement – wanting the experience yet afraid of the unknown. That emotion seems to always be there just at the moment of a spiritual breakthrough of some sort. It is there every time. Isn’t it strange that we come in with the very emotion that we must constantly face?
Pir Vilayat often talked about this moment of terror that one must go through before any breakthrough. He also was fond of saying, “A breakdown can often aver itself into a breakthrough.” The second part of that was always an explanation about how one must push through the fears that accompany the breakdown in order to discover what it is hiding. Another thing he was talking about at the end of his life was that if a person does not push through then they go backwards. I think I feel like a yo-yo.
What seems to happen for most of us is that we will get right up to the point of almost wanting to push through, we will feel that breakdown, that despair or deep disappointment or however it manifests. We might act it out in some way, causing difficulties for all the innocent bystanders. And then we back off because we are afraid of the fear, the memory we have of that deep terror/excitement state that precedes the breakthrough. Then, if Pir Vilayat is to be believed, we go backwards for a time and have to do the work - that got us to the breakthrough place in the first place - all over again. Yo-yo’s indeed.
As near as I can tell, this is the way that it is. If it is any consolation to you, everybody seems to have the same problems. Maybe knowing it is this way will ease the stress somewhat. At least you will have a clue what is happening even if you can’t stop the cycle.
Many Blessings, Fatah
