The fear · 13 of 24

The receipt

Use a bad feeling as the doorway it is.

Any negative feeling is ego, and ego sits on a fear

Fear is difficult to find by looking for it. The material says so directly — fears are hard to detect precisely because ego and belief are so good at covering them up. Ask yourself what you are afraid of and you will mostly get a shrug.

Campbell's way round this is the most practically useful thing in his whole corpus. You do not hunt for the fear. You watch for its receipt. If you feel anxiety, if you feel hurt, if you feel anger, if you feel insignificant — any negative feeling at all — that is ego. And the ego is there because of a fear.

So the negative feeling is not the problem to be managed. It is the pointer. His question for following it is plain and unsubtle: what causes me to feel angry, to be upset? Why am I upset? Keep asking and you will find a fear underneath, and it will be about you.

He gives this as a standing daily instruction rather than an exercise: every time you feel upset, every time you feel annoyed, every time you are unhappy about something, go and find the fear feeding it, and try to let it go.

Today you are only doing the first half. Find one. Do not try to resolve it.

Campbell's own words

Campbell, Buddha at the Gas Pump interview(opens in a new tab)

This session deliberately goes looking for something uncomfortable. That is the exercise, and for most people it is unremarkable — but if it turns up more than you expected, stop. Nothing here is a treatment, and there is no version of this practice that requires you to push through distress.

Before you start

Lighten up. Do not be intense or serious about this.
Sit somewhere comfortable and quiet where you will not be disturbed. A chair is fine. He does not specify anything beyond that.
Close your eyes.
Pick a time when you are not already churning. First thing on waking or last thing before sleep tend to work; straight after a big meal, or while you are angry about something, tend not to.
Bring one thing that irritated or stung you recently. Small is better than big — you are learning the move, not attempting surgery.

How long

Campbell’s own instruction is twenty minutes, twice a day. The shorter lengths early on are ours, not his — starting at twenty is how most people stop after a week.

The two buttons during a sit

Campbell’s mantra is not a fixed thing you repeat for twenty minutes. Its size is a dial, and you move it during the sit against how much thinking is going on. His instruction is symmetrical: if intruding thoughts constantly stream into your awareness, give the mantra a more active form; as thoughts disappear and do not return, decrease the complexity.

Busier: Your mind keeps wandering off. Give it more to hold, so there is less room for anything else. At the busiest: fill your mind with the longer chant: ah-lum-bar-dee-dum · ah-lum-baa-dee-dum. no need to make an actual sound. let it be busy.
Simpler: Nothing much is intruding any more. Let it thin out — there is no point crowding a mind that has already gone quiet.

Keep going down and you reach the end of it: If the sound slips away and no thoughts come in behind it, let it go. Drift in the quiet blankness of your consciousness. That is the whole aim — the mantra is scaffolding, and you take scaffolding down when the building stands up. Arrow keys work too, if you have a keyboard to hand.

Keep this tab open. The screen stays awake and dims itself, so the phone can lie face down. On iPhone, locking the screen or switching apps stops the sound — a browser limitation rather than a setting.