On NPR the other day, I heard a woman from a website called "factcheck.org" say that we look for facts to support our views. This is true, isn't it? Once we've decided we're "liberal" or "conservative," for instance, this of course becomes a filter for the information we come across, or for our experiences. I've had the experience of hearing the same exact news report as a friend of mine whose political views fairly completely oppose my own, and we've come to entirely different conclusions. And both of us somehow felt equally ideologically upheld by the "facts," right? It's not just a matter of interpretation or analysis, but of how we've come to see things in the first place, how we've learned to look at things.

Fear is like this. We tend to think of fear as a reaction to something, but more often than not it's a simple habit of mind that seeks a reason -- an excuse -- to exist. I was recently speaking with my good friend Charlie, who was distinguishing between fear and anxiety -- fear as our reaction to running into a grizzly bear, for instance; anxiety as our response to the possibility of maybe running into a grizzly bear at some point in the future. This distinction is important, I think. So let's keep this in mind: what I'm talking about is anxiety, really, but I'm going to use the word "fear" -- I always say "fear" -- because I don't think "anxiety" is substantial enough, is deep enough, to touch on the way our minds actually function.

Evolutionary psychology says that way back when, our "fight or flight" response developed in reaction to our immediate environment. "Oh shit, a sabertooth!" and then we run (or climb) or fight depending on the snap judgment our brain makes about what's most likely to ensure our survival. And, says evolutionary psychology, although we don't have sabertooths in the front yard anymore, we still react as though we do. Occasionally we may find ourselves in a dire situation these days, of course, but most of the time we're just over-reacting to all sorts of things that we imagine, but that have actually no reality of their own. Mark Twain said it best: "I'm an old man. I've had many problems in my life. Most of them never happened."

So for the sake of some kind of conceptual clarity, it makes sense to distinguish between "fear" and "anxiety." But for how we actually experience it, anxiety is fear. Our nervous systems react in the same way to a situation whether it's happening or we're merely imagining it. And because we're "full of false imaginings" as Shakyamuni Buddha once put it, we're full of fears that often have absolutely no basis in reality. We're often fearful because we've learned to be fearful, because we've developed fear as a habit of mind.

I remember the first time I really saw this clearly. I was sitting zazen during a time when to sit for me meant to hang out with a lot of fear. Practice was sort of "bringing up," as we say, all this sort of primal fear that I had spent years trying to assuage with late-night drunken philosophy in a cloud of cigarette smoke and jukebox propaganda. This is a common enough phase for people -- that to sit is to finally stare fear in the face, because to sit is to stay put, right? -- that it's probably universal.

Anyway, I'm sitting there with my old friend, Fear, and I start to notice very clearly that my mind is actually looking for objects to justify the existence of this fear. It's looking for a narrative anchor, really, because then maybe there's something to control, right? Maybe something "out there" to be angry at or blame or whatever. To grow, fear really does need a steady diet of our "false imaginings." Otherwise, fear is just fear, and when we we stop continually pushing and pulling at it, it settles into a more correct place in our lives, like dirt settles in a glass of water when we stop interfering with it.

Watching fear closely, I typically notice a tendency to convert fear into the currency of anger. We love anger. Fear is scary. Vulnerable. Anger, though, man, anger is ours to spend. Anger keeps us warm and safe, right? and when it doesn't, it at least numbs us to having to care one way or the other.

When I refuse to get angry, though, and when I let go of all the narratives and just lean up against fear, what's there, really? Just this raw heart. Just a naked vulnerability. And we don't like to be vulnerable, do we? We'd rather argue with each other, fight each other, blow each other up with intercontinental ballistic missles and car bombs than feel the least bit vulnerable.

Notice I said "feel." Because the truth is that no matter how we try to adjust it, we're always vulnerable. We all get sick, right? Everything that arises passes away, doesn't it? But hating this vulnerability is like the wave getting ready to crash on the shore, thinking "I don't want to disappear into the ocean!" when it's never been anything but ocean. So we still take our medicine and stop at red lights, but with increasing acceptance that no medicine works all the time, and that stopping always contains the possibility of being rear-ended by the car behind us.

My friend Frank -- a Dharma teacher in Ann Arbor who's taught at Still Point before -- recently spent some time with the monk Ajahn Amaro, a student of the great Thai forest meditation master Luang Por Chah [Ajahn Chah]. Frank's a carpenter and we did some work around the temple here recently, and anyway after we talked about Ajahn Amaro, later that day I found a recent interview where Amaro was talking about almsround.

In Buddhism, there's this tradition of going on almsround, where monks take their bowls and walk through the villages and cities or wherever and beg. And in the West, almsround has largely dropped away -- there's no social context for it, really, and most temples (like Still Point) just leave the begging bowl by the shoes and hope it fills enough to keep the lights on and the roof from leaking. So when some of Luang Por Chah's western students were headed to places like London, he said, "You're free to change things. Free to change the chanting, free to tweak the structure. But no matter what, you need to keep up the tradition of almsround."

Almsround in London? Are you kidding? But the monks did it, and actually one morning on almsround bumped into a morning jogger who just happened to be looking for stewards for this forest that he owned. Well, this forest is now the site of their monastery in England, given to them by this jogger.

But the point of keeping almsround, Ajahn Amaro came to realize, was to keep a kind of monastic vulnerability as an opening for laypeople to connect with Dharma, to make Dharma visible and available to the world at large without the monastics' desire for comfort or security getting in the way. At root, a true monk or nun (of any religious tradition) trains in vulnerability, and at root, this is every spiritual practitioner's task.

We speak of fear and anger, but our task is to know them as that primary rawness, to really experience the open-endedness of our experience, its porosity or insubstantiality, as courageously as possible. This vulnerability is the precise place where the universe enters.