The key to becoming who we truly are is this: We must overcome our fear of ourselves. This is the fundamental prerequisite for being all that we can be. In fact, in the final analysis, every kind of fear amounts to a fear of the self. For if we had no fear of our innermost selves, we couldn’t possibly fear anything in life. We wouldn’t even fear death.

But when we start to make our way along a path of self-confrontation, we don’t know that what we really fear is what lurks in our own unplumbed depths. And so it is that we so often project this very real fear of self onto all kinds of other miscellaneous fears. Then we deny we have those fears, and we set about covering them up.

Until one day we wake up and realize we have some enormous fear of some particular aspect of life upon which this tsunami of fear of our self has landed. Or maybe we just end up fearing life itself and so endeavor to avoid living it altogether. We do this in the same way we avoid knowing the self, to whatever extent we fear it.

To go one further, we’ll sometimes project our fear of life onto the fear of death. Since really life and death are two sides of the same coin. So actually, if we fear one we’re going to also fear the other. Fear of life and death, then, are a package deal.

Only when our search for self-knowing has gained a little traction do we become aware that what we’re really most afraid of is ourselves. We can recognize this by the backpedaling we do when it comes to seeing our part in our problems; when we resist, in all the more or less obvious ways we do so; when we won’t face our terror of letting go of our defenses, which would allow us to experience our natural feelings.

Listen and learn more.

Read: The Mother of All Fears: Fear of Self

As we’ve probably heard by now, love is the greatest power there is. Every spiritual teaching or philosophy, along with every religious scholar and psychology professor, proclaims this truth: Love is the one and only power. If you’ve got it, you are mighty, strong and safe. Without it, you are separate, scared and poor. Sounds simple enough. Yet this knowledge doesn’t really help us unless we’ve discovered where—deep down inside—we can’t love or won’t love. Why is it that we resist loving? Why do we have fear of loving? Unless we sort out the answer to this question, no eternal truth about love can possibly help us.

If we’ve already made some progress on our search for inner knowing, we’ve probably already run headlong—after considerable digging and exploring—into our fear of loving. Becoming aware of such a fear is quintessential for taking further steps. It’s not enough to have a theoretical understanding that such a fear of loving exists; we have to actually experience this fear. For people who don’t yet wish to know themselves, such an awareness will not yet exist.

But even for those of us who have become aware of this inner conflict, we may not yet fully comprehend the why of it. Why am I so afraid of loving? Let’s explore some of the facets of this perplexing phenomenon, a topic we’ll return to in future teachings when we illuminate this very basic problem from other angles.

Let’s start with this: Those who cannot love are immature. And when we are immature, we are not living in reality. To live a life based on unreality, then, must lead to conflict and unhappiness, for where there is untruth there is ignorance and darkness.

Maturity, as such, means essentially having the ability to love.

Alas, we all hold fragmented aspects within ourselves that are trapped in childhood states. And these child parts require an unlimited amount of love. For these child fragments are one-sided, unreasonable, demanding, and lacking in understanding, as all immature creatures are. Its laundry list of impossible wants includes: to be loved by everyone, to be loved 100%, to be instantly satisfied, and to be loved in spite of our selfish, unreasonable ways. This, in a nutshell, is why we are afraid of loving.

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Read: Fully Facing our Fear of Loving

Life is a trap, of a kind, stuck as we are in this struggle to overcome the duality between life and death. From this fundamental predicament stem all our other problems, fears and tensions. It shows up in our fear of death, of course, as well as in our fear of aging and our fear of the unknown. What’s the common root of all these fears? The passage of time.

In an effort to deal with these basic fears, humanity has devised various philosophies and spiritual or religious concepts. But even if these concepts are true, evolving perhaps from someone’s attempts to pass on a true experience, they’re not going to do the trick in relieving our tension. Truth be told, the only way to truly overcome our fears—to reconcile the great divide of this giant duality—is to dive deep into the mega-unknown we all fear so much: our own psyche.

Well, how hard could that be? Turns out, it sounds simpler than it is. For to explore the hidden corners of our own minds, we have to do more than resolve dualities. We’re going to need to discover all the facets of our innermost selves, without glibly explaining away any tensions and disturbances we encounter along the way.

Our incentive is this: To the degree we are in the dark about what is going on inside, to that degree we will fear the passing of time; we will fear the great unknown. When we’re young, it’s easy to brush these things aside. But sooner or later, if we won’t face ourselves, we’ll come face-to-face with our fear of death. To the extent, however, that we know ourselves, we will feel fulfilled in life. And to that same degree death will not be feared. Instead, it will occur as an organic development, and the unknown will no longer seem like a threat.

Doing this work of self-discovery is no picnic, friends. Plus, there are escape hatches everywhere. If we look for them, we’ll even find them within the framework of this particular path of growth and healing. The only way then to succeed in unifying ourselves is by ruthlessly searching to see, evaluate and understand ourselves.

Listen and learn more.

Read: Finding Freedom and Peace by Overcoming Fear of the Unknown