Abiding in the prajnaparamita means actually reaching the fearless state, which is called enlightenment. It's a synonym for enlightenment, the fearless state —where you actually don't need security anymore, you don't need confirmation, you don't need predictability.
Needless to say, the whole path is about making a relationship with fear.
The whole path is a slow weaning process of having to grasp, having to hold on to things, having to have it be certain and sure. In tiny, tiny ways. It doesn't work to try to leap into the void. Just begin to notice your prejudice.
If we begin to notice our prejudice, begin to notice where we get hot under the collar and dig in our heels and say, "It has to be like this!" Where we get stubborn and stuck. And notice, Does that sow seeds of happiness or suffering for us?
And begin to wonder, Does it really make sense to spend the rest of our lives training, very gradually, in this weaning process, of weaning ourselves from needing to have ground under our feet? A very, very slow, gradual process. A very compassionate, loving process. An enormously patient process of beginning to relax with groundlessness. That means, relaxing with disappointment, relaxing with the heat of boredom, relaxing with groundlessness in it's multitude of forms.
You could say that as long as we need this security (which would be a description of myself and all of us, we do need it), to the degree that we need it, we will be afraid. This is sort of the incentive to begin to train in relaxing with groundlessness, so that we could in our lives be less and less afraid.
And here's the kind of pith instruction: the way to relax with fear, or to work with fear —the fear that we feel as soon as we're insecure or uncertain or groundless— the way to work with that as a path to enlightenment is to come to know the nature of fear.
We don't say: Get rid of fear. The path is one of coming to know the nature of fear. They say: without knowing the nature of fear, one never knows fearlessness. So, that's a very different approach.
