It has been noticed that nowadays more and more people suffer from several phobias, as is agoraphobia, which make their everyday life difficult. The Master of Omilos, Dimitris Kakalidis, has given a thorough analysis on the causes of these fears and their treatment in the book “The path from fear to fearlessness” by I. Dimakou.Below we quote the relevant abstract.

“At one of my meetings with the Master, I asked him to make me a deeper analysis than those which he had made up to then of the causes of phobias, and particularly of agoraphobia.

“Agoraphobia”, he told me, “is a mental illness. People who suffer from it experience fear when they are outside their homes, in open or enclosed spaces and among people.”

In answer to my question as to why the agoraphobe feels less fear when he is at home, he replied that man has associated his home with the place where, when he returns after the trials of the day, he finds peace and security, he forgets his problems and calms down. In this way, when he enters it, having convinced himself of the security which it provides, he begins to be at peace. He thinks that he has left his problems and fears outside the house. However, these are not solved by driving them out of your mind for a little while, but by dealing with them. Because if you don’t do this, you will be constantly possessed by the same fears and by the same insecurities. At this point, I couldn’t help thinking that what the Master was telling me was entirely true.[…]

These thoughts were interrupted by the voice of the Master, who was asking me what else I wanted to know about agoraphobia.

“What else, Master, but to know what these fears are due to, what causes them.”

“Fears are due to the fact that man does not accept his good nature, the nature which God gave him. He doesn’t recognise the good, and sees the good itself as evil. Thus he can’t cope with all the emotions which others impose upon him, or with those which he creates himself, and which are often very heavy. He can’t stand them and they often make him ill, because he hasn’t the good in his mind, and consequently colours them as evil. He sees the acts of others and on the basis of these, he divides others into good and evil and for this reason cannot stand them, just as he cannot stand himself, precisely because he is not in the truth, in knowledge, and suffers from ignorance.”

“That is to say, does the fact that I am made ill by the problems of others mean that I am not in the truth?”

“Naturally you are not in the truth – out of ignorance, of course, since you don’t see  it.”

“And what is the truth?”

“The truth is eternity, total health, absolute balance, pure knowledge and spirituality. The truth is a way of life, it is breathing, it is life itself. The important thing is to see where we are living, in the good or in the evil? What are we choosing? If we choose the good, we are always alright, nothing bothers us, and whatever comes to us becomes good. If we choose the evil, not in the sense that we ourselves are evil, but in the sense that we attach emphasis and importance to it, we are in the evil and we cannot escape from it. The negative features of life do not exist in order to cause us unhappiness, but to help us to learn to deal with them with a cool head, to become stronger, and to emerge from ignorance. You see how simple things are.”

“Everything is simple, but everything is also difficult.”

“Nothing is difficult. It is purely a matter of positioning the mind. What we call well-being, deeper spirituality, reflection are none other than the co-existence of two opposites, good and bad, man and woman, negative and positive. The mistake is to see only the one, isolated. It is like seeing only half of life. When we see the good within us, then we accept that what is regarded as evil is necessary, like the manure which is needed for flowers to grow. Without manure, flowers don’t grow. Similarly, without the lower moments, without the lower intellect, there is no higher one, or higher spirituality. Man has constantly to remember his good nature, and not let the evil intrude. Because then we are not within love. We are within hate, we are within the half. Love is the whole. What, then, is the good, to sum up? The truth. What is the truth? The whole.”

“Do you mean, Master, that for us the word ‘lie’ should not exist?”

“Yes, because a lie is the truth which man has made into a lie.”

“However, we started this analysis from my question about what happens when others  come to lay their problems upon us.”

“It depends upon where they come to lay them. If they come to lay them on the evil, things are bad. They will be ill and so will we. If they come to lay them on weakness,

things are difficult. If, however, they come to lay them on the good, on the truth, they are immediately assimilated. We must see things in their original nature – that is, the good. When the mind refers itself to that, the transmutation takes place at once. If, for example, we take a diamond and throw it into dirty water, will anything happen to it? Of course not. This is the good, and it is to this that everything must be referred.”

So this is the point at which we arrived. The cause of phobias is the non-acceptance of the negative aspects of life, and of the negative sides of others, which results in the non-acceptance of our own self, since others are none other than an extension of ourselves.”