The End of Fear: Vulnerability as a Spiritual Path for Realists

Copyright © 2022 Bonney Schaub and Richard Schaub.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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Interior Image Credit: Ava Grace Brosnan

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2499-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2500-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022910896

Archway Publishing rev. date: 8/31/2022

Contents

Author’s Note

Preface to the 2nd Edition

Introduction

Part I: understanding fear

Chapter 1 The Human Condition

Chapter 2 The Material World

Chapter 3 Belief and Disbelief

Part II: transforming fear

Chapter 4 From Denial to Decision

Chapter 5 Strength in Surrender

Chapter 6 Practicing Vulnerability

Chapter 7 Love Rises

Part III: beyond fear

Chapter 8 The Skeleton in the Church

Chapter 9 Seeking Oneness

Chapter 10 The Ground of Being

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

Artist’s Statement

Suggestions for further reading

With gratitude to

Massimo Rosselli and Richard Grossman

Author’s Note

I have written this book in the first person in order to openly show my own fears and vulnerabilities, but everything in it is also the work of my wife, Bonney Gulino Schaub. All the insights and practices here have been tested, retested, and refined in our work and in our relationship.

The people, events, and dialogues presented in this book are taken from our 40 years of practice as psychotherapists and Clinical Meditation and Imagery (CMI) teachers. All identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals.

Preface to the 2nd Edition

In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sometime after the publication of the first edition (2009) of The End of Fear: A Spiritual Path for Realists, we were invited to train health professionals in Florence, Italy. During the second day of training, an exasperated doctor said that she had been waiting and waiting for us to present the answer – how to get rid of vulnerability. When we replied that you can’t get rid of it, but you can learn how to live with full acceptance of it and receive the benefits of that acceptance, the doctor shrugged, showing her displeasure with this response.

We are not making fun of this physician. She was a perfectly rational person who simply wanted a reasonable answer for getting rid of the number one emotional challenge in the entire human world – awareness of our vulnerability and the fear and anxiety it provokes in us. In The End of Fear, we wanted to state the problem as plainly and directly as possible and utilize this undeniable fact as an inner path to finding peace. Letters from around the world told us that we had partially articulated the path in the book, but others were like the good Florentine doctor who was displeased that we offered no escape route.

In fact, we have found two answers in our vulnerability. The first is full acceptance of it by realizing that every living being in the entire world, including us, is vulnerable and that we are all in this together: as Dante expressed it, "We are all in our little boats out on the great ocean of being."

There can be compassion and solace in the fact that we are not alone, that absolutely everyone you see, without exception, is in exactly the same boat as you are. No special status, no great beauty, no wealth, no scientifically-backed special diet, no fame grants you an exception from this factual reality of being vulnerable in this world.

The second answer in our vulnerability is utilizing it as a motivator to open up to seeking and discovering more about reality. If we start out with the fact that reality includes the mystery of death, what other mysteries exist that we don’t yet know about? This second answer has been the basis of the spiritual search worldwide and throughout time – to seek and experience non-visible realities that help us reconcile with our vulnerability.

An earlier book of ours, Dante’s Path: Vulnerability and the Spiritual Journey, and two books after The End of Fear - The Florentine Promise and Transpersonal Development – described the discoveries of seekers and, in some cases, their life-changing impact. Perhaps the single unifying theme of such discoveries is a state of oneness in which the separate, frightened self drops away and is replaced by the quiet joy and bliss of connection and participation in something greater than ourselves. Something more.

As we write this, there is a trend in medicine to introduce psychedelic drugs into healthcare so that people in life-challenging physical and mental health crises can possibly experience discoveries about non-visible realities and receive the peace of knowing that there is something more than this body and this mind. Based on our over 40 years of clinical experience with hundreds of patients and clients, we know that people can experience these same results without psychedelics. In fact, such transpersonal discoveries have become the major focus of our work.

The End of Fear lays the groundwork for this seeking through the stories of people of all ages, ill and healthy, who feel the need and the longing to know something more. We wrote it, as Emerson said, for those who incline to dwell…in the fundamental Unity.

Introduction

The 3 a.m. Mind

My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.

— Desmond Tutu

It was three o’clock in the morning in a small hotel room in Paris, and I was wide-awake. We were supposed to fly home the next afternoon, but my wife, Bonney, had a severe and painful ear infection, and in the next room I could hear our pregnant daughter retching from her morning sickness. In my 3 A.M. mind, I imagined we would miss our flight and be stuck here, in these two small rooms in a foreign country, until our money ran out. Then it occurred to me that the unusual ache in my head, which I’d had off and on since the day before, was a brain tumor. It was a remarkably clear and convincing thought.

I tried to go back to sleep, but some bad door in my mind had swung open and more fears came crowding in. I saw images of dead children crushed under bombed buildings, their frantic parents digging like animals to get to the bodies. I saw women in head scarves cover their faces and sob. I remembered that the ache in my head really was a tumor—that it wasn’t just my mind playing tricks on me—and then I told myself that couldn’t be true, and then I realized that it was. I imagined myself disoriented, collapsing, lying unconscious on a street in Paris while my wife and daughter begged for money in a corner of the Gare de Lyon train station.

On and on it went, a total takeover. I saw a flood of apocalyptic images—starvation, killing, anarchy. I recognized the world as a place of war, stupidity, and greed that would inevitably destroy all the goodness in life. I saw that all my relationships were fake, all of us performing in masks and pretending to care. I got angry at my mind for torturing me with these thoughts, but it immediately countered by throwing The Big One back at me: You’re having these thoughts because you’ve gone insane. I lay back on the bed, stared at the ceiling, and begged the God I no longer believed in to stop my mental breakdown.

What really happened, after all this drama and torment? Nothing except a crazed, sleepless night. The next morning Bonney and I went to the American Hospital and consulted with a wonderful physician. Medication was prescribed and we were told it was okay for her to fly. My daughter felt a little better, and we flew home as scheduled. Even if we hadn’t, we would have figured something out. After all, I was over 60 years old and had a lot of life experience; how hard would it have been to get by in the great city of Paris for a little while? In the light of day, I knew this reasonable view to be true. But in my 3 A.M. mind, the only true thing was my fear.

Sitting in the plane waiting to take off for New York, I savored the normality of people talking to one another, the announcement of the funny in-flight movie, the courtesy of the flight crew. I felt safe and secure. I had my experience in the hotel room in perspective; I believed that what I had gone through was a purging of accumulated fear in my system. I figured I’d gotten it out of my system, at least for a while.

My perspective didn’t last long. Three days later, I was driving into Manhattan to go back to work. For those of you who don’t know New York, there’s a tunnel between Long Island and Manhattan that goes under the East River. Just before you enter the tunnel, you can see the whole New York skyline—all the way from the Empire State Building and the United Nations north to the 59th Street and Bronx-Whitestone Bridges, and, looking south, the empty space on the horizon where the twin towers of the World Trade Center used to be. The road that feeds into the tunnel, the Long Island Expressway, is considered to be one of the busiest highways in the world, so traffic jams and backups are the norm.

On this particular morning, the traffic was barely moving. Glancing around at the other drivers, I saw one young man reading a thick textbook propped up on his steering wheel: I guessed that he was certain we were in for a long wait. Eventually our snarl of cars crawled and merged into two lanes and we entered the tunnel. Then about midway through we came to a dead halt, the brake lights of hundreds of cars and trucks lighting up the tunnel walls in red.

After a few minutes, with no signs of moving and the noxious smells of heavy exhaust seeping into my car, I felt a jump in my nerves, a big shift toward anxiety. I had the impulse to open all the windows, but I knew that would only make me feel worse.

And then I heard a dull boom from somewhere up ahead, farther up the tunnel. I imagined that a bomb had gone off, breaching the tunnel walls and exposing us all, trapped in our cars, to the full force of the river bursting through. In my imagination, I frantically looked in both directions to decide which end of the tunnel to swim for. As the water rose toward the tunnel roof, I realized I’d have to swim out underwater. Down in the pit of my stomach, I knew I wouldn’t make it out of the