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Fear
"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." – Alfred Hitchcock
You're on a small plane flying through heavy turbulence. You can feel the nose of the plane swimming left and right in the wind. Suddenly, the plane drops into an air pocket and you plummet for several seconds until the wings catch another stream and you finally stop falling.
You're walking down a very quiet street at night, alone, and you hear footsteps behind you. You stop to listen, and the footsteps stop too.
You have to retrieve something you need from the basement of your house at night. It's completely dark. You start to walk down the stairs when you stop and grab the banister. Did you just hear someone breathing?
Fear is the ultimate emotion of ignorance. With illumination, clarity and understanding, we find peace. In darkness and confusion there is only fear. Sudden fear can take hold of us and transport us to what seems at the moment to be another world entirely. The world of fear is not sunny and it is not even cloudy. It is black.
When your heart starts beating triple time, you can feel it pounding through your chest, your breath comes quickly, the blood is pumping in your temples, nothing you see or think is clear. Your mind is completely taken over. It's no longer yours to control. It's like driving into a severe downpour where the rain soaks the windshield and cloaks everything farther than two inches away in a fog of water. And no matter how hard and fast the wipers work, you simply Can't. See. A. Thing.
Fear like this is all-consuming and, yes, painful. Frustrating. One minute you're moving about in the world with relative freedom and then out of nowhere you are a prisoner, trapped in a place with no doors.
It is said that recognition is liberation. Let's try to understand more about this prison, so we can achieve some freedom from it, so we can at least see the outline of a door, even if we can't yet quite walk through it.
Fear is the failure to recognize and embrace what is. Fear is the imagination of what might be. Our sudden mental journey into an imagined scenario is usually far worse than the actuality. The key is to will our thoughts back to the present from the abyss of the imagination. Then, whether our imagined scenario matches the horror of the reality or not, we will be infinitely better able to take any necessary action or process rational thought.
The one thing most people are most afraid of is death, the ultimate unknown. It is when contemplating death that we have the greatest potential to create an elaborate and terrifying illusion in our minds. Why? As the saying goes, "Dying is easy; it's living that's hard." But we have countless examples of lives to follow, seemingly infinite stories: of achievement, failure, drama, pain, ecstasy, and all their permutations. These experiences are unique when they happen to us individually, but nevertheless, we have some reference point for them when they happen. That doesn't make our lives any less challenging to live, nor our challenges any less frightening when they manifest themselves. However, the one experience that most people would admit is still an overwhelming mystery is death. Of course, there are people who have written about near death experiences, people who have been declared officially dead and who have then been resuscitated. They often describe very similar experiences. Unfortunately, these stories are somewhat rare and far enough from mainstream belief that they provide little comfort to the majority of people facing real or imagined death each day.
It may be that hearing stories about what it is like to die is not enough to remove the fight or flight reaction, the abject terror that can cause near-catatonia. So, what else might provide relief? Understanding, discrimination, and wisdom. Relief comes from the exploration of that which is the opposite of fear. If fear is darkness, wisdom is light.
Understanding, discrimination, and wisdom are very difficult mental states to access in a moment of panic. However, they can be developed over time, through a daily practice of meditation and a constant vigilance of the mind, known as mindfulness.
We can easily imagine that pursuing deep inner peace and exceptional mental clarity will lead to enlightened states of mind, to liberation, or freedom. What we sometimes fail to realize is that freedom is not a disassociation from experiencing life. It is an exploration and subsequent dissolution of that which imprisons us. It's not simply a hypnotic or psychoanalytical practice of resolving immediate fears stemming from particular activities, like air travel. Rather, true freedom is the recognition and ultimate dissolution of the root of all fear: confusion and ignorance of the great unknown, death.
In confronting the spirit, approaching the doorway to the annihilation of the ego structure, and sailing through it and beyond, we meet death just as surely as the person who slams their car into a cement wall at 100 miles per hour. The difference is that through meditation and mindfulness, freedom and death of the ego don't necessarily come at the expense of the physical form. With freedom, we move the mind into the chasm, not the body.
Once you have inwardly entered the infinite sea of consciousness, which the Indian saint Ramakrishna compared to a salt doll falling into the ocean, nothing about dying physically can frighten you. It's just a doorway, a change of clothing and scenery.
This may all sound pretty far out for some of you. We can also look at it in much more practical, and perhaps more relevant, terms. While seeking enlightenment per se may seem meaningless for you, seeking a state of mental development where you have transcended fear may, in contrast, sound more tangible and appealing.
What if you could sit on a plane that seems to be bouncing all over the sky, and just calmly read your book? What if you could simply not worry about the turbulence, or your personal safety?
What if you could be walking alone at night (despite how un-intelligent this may be in reality), hear footsteps, and then with absolute cold, calculating clarity, take the wisest possible course of action to ensure your safety? What if you could be rational enough at that moment that you could realize the footsteps you heard were merely your own, echoing off the pavement?
What if you could march down a flight of stairs in pitch-black darkness and not feel your heart seize up when you thought you heard a ghost, or who-knows-what, down there? What if you could be calm enough to realize you were only hearing the sound of the wind outside the house?
These scenarios are all common. Handling them fearlessly, with poise and discrimination, is less common.
Meditate for a few minutes every day. Monitor your mind for negative or unproductive streams of thought and replace them with more positive, productive mental activity.
Finally, when you are seized by fear, practice immediate exploration of reality. Ask yourself, What is really going on? What is the root source of this fear I am feeling? If the answer is, well, dying in a plane crash, being killed by a mugger, or being devoured (or worse) by a ghost, then your fear has as its root the end of the experience of this body, this life. Remind yourself that this is nothing more than stepping through a doorway into another time. It is without pain, without drama. The only reason you feel fear is because you don't know the end result, you don't believe you have any example to follow, any proof that it won't be terrifying and awful. This is darkness, ignorance. Through self-discovery, meditation and mindfulness, this darkness is quietly replaced over time by light, wisdom and understanding. You are not alone and you cannot die. The spirit is infinite and journeys on forever.
So don't be afraid. Laugh instead. And bravely step forward into the eternal tomorrow, every day.
Happy Halloween!
Nicole Grace
October 2006
"Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness."
– James Thurber
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