FEAR

"A life lived in fear is a life half-lived."

Fear is an irrational, primitive, elevated state of emotional arousal that seems to be a fact of life. It is governed by the amygdala and the limbic system, that part of our brain that was the earliest to evolve And it is not confined to humans. It is an almost universal alert system that gets our pulses racing to pump hormones and energy to all parts of our system, fueling the freeze, fight or flight mechanisms that, at a very primitive level, keep us alive. In Fear we are in Survival mode, the most basic of all levels of consciousness.

Fear is a Claytons form of engaging with life -- the kind of engagement you're having when there's something else you desperately don't want to engage with. It is a negative substitute for engaging creatively with what's in your face. Fear is creative, but its creations include isolation, separation, disengagement, and all manner of physical and emotional diseases.

We jump at shadows. We can manage to feel threatened by even the most imaginary and innocuous things. All at once we feel a cocktail of emotions that may include insecurity, fright, anxiety, superiority, inferiority, outrage, insult, self-importance, self-consciousness, self-righteousness, guilt, rage ....... it's all fear.

While we are living in fear, we are locked into a very primitive stimulus/ response existence, defending something we fear we might lose. Because Fear is entered emotionally, we are not likely to have much success trying to reason/rationalise our way out of it. But in the less hectic times when our level of emotional arousal may have abated for a few moments, a possibly enlightening line of self-enquiry might be "What am I afraid of losing here?" "What am I attached to here that I find myself to be so anxious about?"

Fear is a negative attachment to something we identify our self with, and Attachment is the chief cause of all manner of suffering. Any attachment, even to altruistic values like integrity, love, service and sacrifice, means we are not free. There is nothing noble about high-mindedness rooted in fear.

Fear gives rise to most of our actions. It comes to us in the feeling form of every negative emotion known to mankind.... including anger, jealousy, prejudice and guilt. Fear lurks behind the need to bully, manipulate, cajole, dominate and control. Fear hides inside the compulsive overkill of effusive friendliness and niceness. As we are with others in times of stress, so we are with what we fear from within.

Because we fear from others the very rejection we have meted out to ourselves, we're reluctant to give a true and whole picture of ourselves to others. We pretend. We hide behind masks. We fake honesty, reliability, integrity and spend enormous amounts of energy and mental sweat keeping the facades in place. Then we get outraged when others do to us, seemingly shamelessly, what we would "never"do to them!

Anything we see to be a source of our fear, we attack, and every attack intensifies our fear. You can almost pick it up on CB in Alaska! Fear attracts fearsome events, characters and consequences.

What does fear attract into your life? Now there's a question worth spending time in!

Fear is the polar opposite of love: the two go together. Little wonder we find it so hard to experience the love we have for one another when we are so wary of each other.

Why?

What is it about the "other" that is so daunting? Let's begin with the unacknowledged bogeymen from within our hidden selves that we project onto others. We pin feared and rejected aspects of our selves onto people we don't like: it momentarily helps us to feel better about what's left of ourselves.

There is also our fear of Judgment -- both of judging and of being judged.  Many of us fear the judgment of others because we think -- a) that others are thinking about us all of the time and judging us as mercilessly as we judge ourselves; and b) we need the approval of significant others  to survive. And we fear our judgments of others because, deep down, we know who is really being judged and that we are inexorably becoming what we judge. We all expect to be judged, whether by others now, or by God some time around 4pm on the day of Armageddon. We cannot imagine God and others not judging us! Because we are doing it to ourselves and we can hardly remember a time when we were not evaluating and criticising our self.

It is all our own creation.

Can life be lived without fear? I doubt it, but maybe there are some for whom fear has ceased to exist. But for the rest of us for whom fear is a reality, here's my suggestion. Say "Yes" to your fears. They will then do one of two things; either they will disappear, or they won't. If they disappear, say "Yes"to their disappearance. If they do not disappear, say "Yes"to their non-disappearance.

Fear may well be the price and the spice of being alive. Otherwise, would it be such an adventure?