Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1979, 1989) ("Our daydreams are imaginings of getting what we want; nightmares of being blocked from what we want. The planning mind tries to assure satisfaction. Most thought is based on the satisfaction of desires. Therefore, much thought has at its root a dissatisfaction with what is. Wanting is the urge for the next moment to contain what this moment does not. When there's wanting in the mind, that moment feels incomplete. Wanting is seeking elsewhere. Completeness is being right here." "When we see the depth of wanting in the mind, we see the depth of dissatisfaction because wanting can't be satisfied: when we get finished with one desire there's always another. As long as we're trying to satisfy desire, we're increasing wanting." Id. at 12-14. "Our 'bad trips,' our hellish experiences, are often the most productive, most fruitful. When we sit [in meditation] and it's uncomfortable, or a fly is hopscotching on our forehead and we are agitated and the mind can't get balanced, though our practice has been deepening, it seems at that moment as though we've never meditated in our life. If we can then relax the body and just be there, we see purely the tension that pulls us away into the dark dream again, and we can let go. When we accept hell, it's not hell any more. Hell is resistance. Suffering is resistance to what is: non-acceptance." "We experience many forms of this hell as we watch the mind and body. And it is here we meet the demons of our impatience, of our greed, of our ignorance; the demons of our attachment to the idea that there's someone to get enlightened; the demons of our attachment to even knowledge and clarity which makes it difficult after a good sitting or a good day to put up with the hustle and the noise and stress of a changeful life. The demons aren't the noise. They are our aversion to the noise. The demons aren't the impatience; they're our attachment, our aversion, our impatience with our impatience." Id. at 96-97.).
Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year As If It Were Your Last (New York: Bell Tower, 1997) ("When even an inkling of fear arises, acknowledge it. Note it as 'fear.' If you notice the mind is dwelling in it, spinning out its infernal yarn, note this as 'fearing.'" "The difference between fear and fearing is the difference between freedom and bondage. Fear arises uninvited. At times it believes it's protecting you, and occasionally it is. But far more often it is based on imagined tigers, or imagined selves to be devoured. It is a deeply conditioned, automatic reaction to any feelings of being physically or emotionally unsafe." "The more we turn toward it the more familiar with its body and mental patterning we become, and the sooner we can notice even its slightest arousal, perhaps as a ripple of energy just behind the navel, before its first sublingual incantation can be formed." "We meet it at its inception where what seems to be the possibility of choice exists. We observe it in its infancy as we let it float to the surface, display its last prideful gasp, and dissolve as it will, due to its natural impermanence." Id. at 48.).
