The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it. Nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds. –Victor Hugo
Our bodies feel pain at the site of injury. They also block the surrounding muscles from repeating any actions that might reproduce that pain. We are hardwired to protect ourselves, preserve life and limb and everything between. We can also consciously retrain our defense mechanisms to surrender to new patterns, and reclaim the actions and reactions we’d shut down. Intervention is an appropriate way to think about creating that healing: breaking the cycle of what we expect, and what, some would say, we create.
The Law of Attraction isn’t the first philosophy to claim it, but its potency is current and worth weighing. “Whatever you’re thinking about is …like planning a future event. When you’re worrying, you’re planning.” Now you can worry about all your worrying actually being planning… Or put a Buddhist twist on it and train yourself to observe what arises in your parcel of mind stream, let go of what’s negative, and feel powerful about manifesting the positive. No matter how many times you hear that your external experience is only a reflection of your internal universe, there’s always some rational, practical counterargument on the objective nature of reality (war sucks, chocolate’s delicious). But do we need to change the world, or our experience of the world?
A few folks sent some wisdom on this: Man on the Mountain wrote of last week’s question re: fear and love, “Who is the asker? That guy under the tree said find the answer and fear disappears on its own.”
Who is it that's thinking the thoughts in your head?
“If the Buddha was right then there's nothing at our core that we need to protect. And if there's nothing to protect nothing can scare you.
If there's nothing to lose there's nothing to fear. Or as Chugyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, you are king precisely because you are nothing but a grain of sand. The universe is yours because you have let everything go, even the false idea of the permanent self.”
Row Ashore wrote about a longstanding fear of flying. Her aunt told her "I'm not afraid of flying because I'm not afraid of dying." Row realized the root of fear is “often anxiety about loss, and we wouldn't be anxious about loss if there were not things that matter to us to lose. So now when I am able to look fear in the face, I try to use it to examine and celebrate the thing that I love that matters to me.”
m2 wrote a keen parable about the characters Karate Chop Anderson and La Grincha, drinking cups of life from the river one day. They sampled myriad ambrosial flavors, but the most unpleasant and acrid of them all was fear.
It was a pity that such a wonderful drink had such an unpleasant kick to it, they could both agree on that. But as Karate Chop, who was well taught and thoughtful about such things, continued to drink in slow and steady sips from the sup, he began to notice that he grimaced less and less the more he drank in, and that the taste of the fear, while still not all that appealing, actually began to diminish as he went. In fact, to his amazement, a certain euphoric buzz seemed to follow every time the bitter taste disappeared, and he began to even welcome the taste a little, as he knew that without it the rest of the flavors would not taste as vibrant as he drank them. He slowly began to realize, as he finished his first cup, that fear was as much a part of the drink as electrical wiring is to a robot stegosaurus, and without it the rest of the drink could not exist. And he smiled at that and then took another cup.
La Grincha, on the other hand, couldn’t get over the taste, and stopped drinking entirely. m2’s moral is that fear can either determine who you are, or who you aren’t. And it leads me to the crux of this debate: the opposites – fear and love.
My husband doesn’t agree that they’re opposites, although he didn’t explain why. But he implicitly encouraged me to share what I’m learning about opposites. Yin and Yang teach us best, even or especially through the ubiquitous symbol that we learned to take for granted as teenagers but can revisit until our dying day: there is always the seed of one in the other. They don’t exist without the other. They depend on one another; they are so close to each other that they make up a whole (lotta nothin’...) So if at the core of fear is the closing of our hearts, a loss of trust in the universe – at the core of love and just around the corner from fear is an open and vulnerable and powerful heart. A trust in the universe that’s so great that nothing is defined as bad or good, but all is seen as learning. Pema Chodron taught me in the book Start Where You Are that it’s easy to drown in the manure of our lives… but that muck and grime is also fertile ground for the seeds of awakening. And I’m hard pressed to think of anything more beautiful or inspiring than loving oneself and the universe so much that no matter what happens, you keep dancing with that indomitable pair, keep tipping over, keep returning to the wide-eyed terrifying reward of waking up.
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