There is another kind of fear that is unique to humans alone. And this kind of fear is a state of mind rather than a momentary biological impulse. It is a state perpetuated by the Mind and its thought processes. It is a state that is simulated rather than real, since it does not need a real and present danger in order for it to perpetuate. Instead, it uses thought to construct an artificial image of threat which it then uses to mimic the biological fear response.
Everyone experiences this kind of fear (which I will moving forward refer to as 'Fearfulness' to distinguish ir from the natural animalistic fear all creatures are programmed to feel). All of us have experienced Fearfulness. It exists in varying degrees in most people ranging from mild dissatisfaction and unease to anxiety and panic to paranoia and terror. In fact, all human beings fall somewhere within the spectrum and will experience a range of degrees in their lifetimes. In a nutshell this forms the very foundations of the human experience and what we are here to learn from.
The Mechanism of Fearfulness
The mechanism of Fearfulness is a simple one. The human mind is a powerful tool and can be used to simulate any kind of perception, artificially. Just as it is possible to induce in yourself a temporary state of happiness and excitement by focusing on positive thoughts, it is equally easy for the mind induce an artificial state of unrest and unease by focusing excessively on negative thoughts. In the second case, all the mind is really doing is inducing the perception of a threat or of danger where one does not necessarily exist. The body which operates at a lower degree of intelligence than the mind is not programmed to be able to tell the difference. As long as the perception is one of fear, real or artificial, the body reacts the same to generate a Fear response and corresponding surge of adrenalin.
This is why you may find yourself terrified at a horror movie. You know its fake, but your mind will allow you to suspend that knowledge just long enough for it to be believable in the moment. Your body may even respond by cringing or in extreme cases send you screaming out of the theater. The threat may be artificial but the Fear response is real.
There are a large number of people, especially today, who suffer from a variety of anxiety disorders ranging from mild anxiety to full blown panic attacks. There is research that shows that some of these symptoms could be triggered by chemical imbalances in the brain. A defective sort of triggering process where the Fear response misfires periodically catalyzed by some sort of external stimulus or the other. And while this may be the trigger for some people, what perpetuates the anxiety or panic is often a negative thinking pattern that then sets into place and feeds the momentum of Fearfulness.
In fact, the negative thought pattern is the primary and predominant cause for the escalation of anxiety or panic. People who suffer from anxiety often complain of a particularly negative thought or set of thoughts that repeat themselves constantly. This may be thoughts of some impending doom, or thoughts of low self-esteem, thoughts of unworthiness, thoughts of failure, thoughts of suspicion and mistrust of others, thoughts of death or injury, thoughts of doing violent or terrible acts, thoughts of sabotage just to name a few. And each time this sort of thought occurs, it triggers the biological fear response and corresponding chemical surges.
The Addiction to Negative Thinking
So why do we indulge in these negative thought patterns? Most of will agree, that the vast majority of people unwittingly accept their own thoughts to be true to a high degree. After all, most of what we know and experience of our lives is filtered through our thoughts. And so there is this blurry boundary between reality and the mind-induced simulated reality that is difficult to separate. When watching a horror movie it is easy to separate the true reality from the fictional one. But when living in our own "mind movies" as most of us do, it becomes increasingly difficult, the older and more complex we get, to distinguish between what is real and what has been generated by our thoughts.
In fact, most people live almost entirely within the artificial overlay created by their own minds, with only brief moments of clarity when the mind becomes stilled or dormant for some reason. A scenery that takes your breath away, a moment of quiet meditation, being in-the-zone during some sport or focussed activity - at these times the artificial reality fades into the background. But for the majority of our day, we are caught in our own heads thinking about this that and the other.
When a negative thought pattern begins to predominate within our mental experience, we are naturally geared to believe in whatever the thought process is proposing. If the thought repeats, "you are fat, you are fat," after listening to it long enough it will actually skew our perception enough to actually see ourselves as fat. This results in disorders like anorexia or bulimia. If the thought repeats, "you are no good" we might begin to develop issues of low self-esteem. It doesn't matter what the catalyst was, whether we were abandoned by our parents or dumped by our lovers. The catalyst was a single momentary event in the past. What perpetuates the feelings however, is the thought process that makes us relive that moment again and again and again.
These negative thought patterns are highly addictive for two reasons. The first is biological. Just as the body can become used to (even addicted to) any drug and after a while that drug experience becomes its 'normal state', so too can the body get used to a hormonal/neurochemical experience. It’s all the same really if seen from a biology perspective. Whether you take a hit of a drug externally or internally, it causes a distorting effect in the brain and its processes. Adrenalin, for example, is a highly addictive chemical. It’s the reason why extreme sport enthusiasts are so obsessive about what they do. They "need" the hit of adrenalin. Similarly, every negatively induced state of Fearfulness has an associated chemically/hormonally induced state associated with it. Each time the negative pattern arises a hormonal imbalance (low or high) occurs. After some time the body begins to believe that this is its natural resting state. It feels "normal".
The second reason is that believing in a negative thought pattern gives some continuity to reality. Most people would rather believe themselves to be something negative than to be unsure about who or what they are. It’s insane but is actually very common. We live in a society in which we tend to define who we are by the roles we play. Each one of us is a mother, father, brother or sister, a boss, an employee, an artist, a scientist, a jock, a nerd, a misfit, a rebel, a conformist, a socialist, a capitalist, an anarchist, a doctor, a lawyer, a truck driver, a drunk, a devotee, an atheist or whatever set of labels you have chosen to define yourself using. Its all made up. Even our social realities are mind-made artificial realities at the end of the day. Our political boundaries are nothing more that imaginary lines drawn out on a piece of paper, our laws no more than invented rules for relating to one another. Even the value we attribute to things is all made up. That land in the city costs ten times as much as land in the country is an arbitrary value that we have all agreed to set upon. Land existed long before we showed up on the planet and to believe it has an inherent monetary value is absurd. Still we have all agreed to participate in this consensus artificial reality, and it works to some degree from a practical perspective.
Our Mind-made Realities
The problem begins to come in when the artificial replaces the real in our frame of experience and we begin to derive our sense of who we are from the very roles we have conceded to play within this invented drama. For most people, who accept the consensus reality to be real, to suggest that it is all made up is blasphemous. No matter how obvious or rational an argument, the sense of Self is a fragile thing and to threaten its existence or reality is huge. Let's take high school for example. For most adults who are well past high school, looking back in hindsight will reveal how silly it all was with its cliquey social circles and labels, the jocks and popular kids, the nerds and the misfits, the rebels etc. It all seems like a fantasy even, yet the experience of actually being there at that age is something entirely different. Similarly the high school student looks back at kindergarten or elementary as a time of silliness and naiveté.
Even though we are able to look back and laugh at the unreality of it all, it doesn't mean the reality we are living in at the moment is any more real. It is only a different one yet just as artificial. To the high school student, elementary school was silly and childish. To the adult, high school and its drama was naive. But what about adult life, work life, life in society? Isn't wealth, social status, work politics and all the social drama that we engage in everyday just as naive and childish? And yet, the human mind is defiant when its reality is threatened. Trying to convince an adult that wealth, fame and social status doesn't matter is like trying to convince a high school kid that tests, popularity and acceptance into cliques don't really matter. The stage becomes grander but the drama remains the same. When governments and countries go to war we all shudder at the seriousness of it all and the devastation and the mayhem it propagates. Yet, from a different viewpoint it is no different than a bunch of high school hooligans getting into it with their rival school. Different scale, different degrees, same stupidity, same naiveté.
For people who experience regular anxiety and Fearfulness, the negative-thought pattern even though traumatic is actually validating. It reaffirms their belief in the artificial reality they live in and even assigns them a role within it. That role may be "loser", "low-life", "whore", "mooch", "fatty", "worthless", "evil", "selfish", "anti-social", "weirdo" or whatever. And yet, even those labels are better than not having one - of "N/A".
The mechanism of Fearfulness may be obvious within people who show overt signs of anxiety and low self-esteem but it is also and especially operating within others who don't. In fact, the majority of self-referential thinking that we all do has a component of Fearfulness embedded within it. It may not be so easy to identify but you'll see it if you observe it closely.
Fearfulness is built into our social psyches and the way we operate. The choices we make day to day, the paths we take in our lives are predominated by this Fearfulness. Our economic systems and justice systems are fashioned from this experience of Fearfulness. The way we relate to one another at work, the way we measure our words, the way we mistrust strangers, the way we worry for our security, the way we worry we will be lonely, the way we worry we will be abandoned, the way we worry we will become redundant or unemployed, the way we worry we will be perceived by others, the way we need to control how others perceive us, the way we need to control our circumstances - all this is rooted in and perpetuated by the state of Fearfulness. Nobody is immune - no matter how well they seem to have it all together. Some of the most "with it" people, the ones who exude the most confidence and control over their circumstances are also often people who are extremely dominated by the mechanism of Fearfulness. One of the most primary indications is any form of rigidity, aggression or exertion of power within the personality. Some of the greatest leaders of our times were also some of the greatest control freaks. Corporations, governments, banks and nations are nothing more than magnified super-structures constructed and fed by this same need for control, perpetuation and securtiy - in other words, Fearfulness. This is the world we live in, because it is the one we create for ourselves, in agreement with one another, day after day, because it is how we operate within ourselves.
Arriving at a Tipping Point
Like any addiction, habit or pattern that pushes the mind to a tipping point, so too can this experience of Fearfulness reach a critical mass within the human psyche. This tipping point can be experienced in a variety of ways. It can be instantaneous, sudden and dramatic. In my own case it felt like a fuse had blown within my mind. For months my brain and its thinking patterns were completely silenced. In others, it can be a more gradual process that happens periodically and in waves. But regardless of how this tipping point is experienced the purpose it serves is the same.
This tipping point is nothing more than a reality check. It is a momentary experience of the true reality that exists independently of our Minds and its perceptions. Whether the experience lasts a minute or a month, the effect is that it dislodges (even if temporarily) the faith we place in our own artificial realities. There are a number of mystical and spiritual traditions that sensationalize such an experience as something divine, but robbed of all its trappings it is nothing more than a simple and clear view into the reality underlying the one we compulsively project through our thoughts.
This experience can also be one of great relief both mentally and emotionally. It can feel like a huge burden has been lifted off you, and the response is often one of causeless joy and feelings of deep love and connection with the environment and others. Yet even this is only a reaction. Imagine having in a drunken stupor for most of your life to the point where you have no memory of what it was like to be sober. Imagine living in a haze and then suddenly one day sobering up and seeing what the sober reality is like. It can feel tremendously liberating.
Yet addiction works the same no matter what the drug, whether the drug is alcohol or the drug is thought. And just because you get sober once doesn't mean you will never relapse. In fact, most addicts do, because even though they have glimpsed what it feels like to be sober, there is a momentum of Fearfulness that continues to operate and propel them towards the drug. And so we do relapse again and again. But the only difference this time around is that we now KNOW what it means to be sober. And that is the knowledge that eventually comes through in the end.
The more you become aware of the existence of a reality beneath the mind-simulated one, the more unreal the mind-simulated reality becomes. But it is a process. The momentum of the mind uses not just thought but emotion as well to reinforce itself. It is one thing to believe something mentally, but to feel it reinforced in your body as an emotional response makes it all the more real. Its one thing to think you are fat, but to see yourself and feel yourself as fat gives a whole new dimension of realness to it. And so even though the thought is the disguise, the emotion and feeling it generates is the energetic component that completes the illusion. And it is this energetic component that fuels the momentum. It is literally like a car running on gas. As long as you continue to fuel the car it will keep running until it eventually breaks down. Rather than waiting for a breakdown, it is possible to recognize the mechanism at work and respond in a manner that doesn't continue to fuel the momentum.
Releasing the Mind’s Momentum
Until, you are willing to see that the reality your mind projects is nothing more than an invention, none of this will really apply. Because Fearfulness will continue to be the experience you actually desire in order to keep the charade going. But once you have had a taste of the sober reality underlying it all, you can make the conscious choice to stop feeding it. In a number of traditions, people respond to this rather extremely by taking severe measures and austerities in order to deny their minds. They meditate until they are blue in the face, attempting to use their will to supress their thoughts but all of it falls flat in the end. Because the very premise of wanting to suppress something is because you think that thing is undesirable or harmful. Believing thought to be undesirable or harmful immediately serves to reinforce its reality. And so whether we are believing the thought, or suppressing/denying it, we only reinforce it.
What is thought at the end of the day? Is it not just a random bunch of words strung together in some sort of sentence that passes through your mind? The thought "I am a loser" and the thought "a green bear has wings" are both equally meaningless. The only difference is that one triggers an emotional/bodily response and the other doesn't. But the thought in itself has no reality other than the language and alphabets it represents. So, thought itself is really harmless. What can be potentially harmful (and even this is only a relative perspective) is the emotion and energy that it triggers. A simple thought like, "he's an idiot" can trigger a flash of anger. Repeating that thought again and again can feed and inflate that feeling, building the momentum into rage. This when the internal experience can potentially transform into some sort of violent action.
If we see thoughts as harmless, then the energetic/emotional experience is ultimately what we are really dealing with. Without a thought to justify it, an emotion is simply an emotion. Anger is just anger. It is not "good anger" or "bad anger", "righteous anger" or "evil anger". That's where the thought label attached to it rationalizes the emotion as necessary. For example, if you get angry at your boss and start yelling at him this sort of anger is considered inappropriate. But if you get angry at a criminal this is considered acceptable. It’s only the way the Mind justifies it. If you see thought as unreal, your justifications, criticisms and judgments of how you feel will simply not seem all that relevant anymore.
Then whether you are happy, sad, personable or anti-social, the experience of the emotion in the moment is allowed to be experienced simply because that is what is happening at the moment. Even if there is a "should", "shouldn't", "this is good", "this is bad" thought trying to validate and feed that emotion, you cannot believe the thought for long. As a result, the emotion/energy isn't fed and perpetuated as before.
We all have a reservoir of unreleased emotions within our systems that have accumulated through our entire lifetimes. These relate back as far as our infancy, our feelings of fear and inadequacy, our upbringing and feelings of abandonment. Every thought that we ever believed became paired to an emotion and locked into our psyches. And there it continues to remain until it is released. There is a saying that goes, "if you believe yourself to be enlightened, go spend a weekend with your family." Some of our deepest fears are also some of our most earliest.
Perceiving the mind-made overlay reality as unreal is not enough. The only way to stop fueling its momentum and its believability is to allow an energetic release ie to spend the fuel. The momentum will keep going until the fuel is spent. This is where it becomes important to develop the Art of Being Fearless.
The State of Fearlessness
Fearlessness is simply the practice of acceptance. It is the practice of being rooted in your being. When thought is seen as unreality, then the emotion and energy momentum within the psyche is what is left to deal with. This practice is only centered in the present. Because the only emotions/energies you have to deal with are the ones you are experiencing right now. It doesn't matter what you experienced yesterday, nor the ones you are afraid will come tomorrow. The past and future experiences of emotion need thought to perpetuate it. In other words, you have to "think" about them to experience them.
Fearlessness is a complete acceptance of yourself in this moment, exactly as you are. Not as you wish you could be. Not as you know you can be. Not as you are afraid you will be. Just as you are. Because what you are doesn't need you to think about it, the rest of them do. When you accept yourself in the moment, then you accept whatever energetic expression is happening within your being. Whether that is a feeling of rage, feelings of guilt, feelings of unworthiness or restlessness or boredom, or anxiety. They will come up and your acceptance will allow them to be experienced and released.
You may find a thought creeping in here and there trying to validate, suppress or deny the feeling. These are only old patterns and habits at work. If you have seen thoughts as harmless, you realize there is no reason to respond to them. In fact, when you do respond to them that can be your indicator that at some level somewhere you still believe that thought to be true.
Practicing this acceptance allows a slow and gradual rewiring and reconditioning of the Mind. As the momentum begins to dissipate your perspective becomes more and more clear, balanced and rooted in sobriety.
Fear, the momentary impulse of the animal brain, continues to operate of course as it does in all creatures. There is a practical benefit to this sort of impulse. It is what causes you to jump out of the way of an oncoming truck. Yet this kind of fear lasts only as long as the threat exists. Once the threat is gone, you return to your natural state of ease. Wouldn't it be strange if animals walked around constantly paranoid about predators. They continue to revisit and share the same waterholes because their fear response is only activated if there is an actual threat. They don't have the ability to think and so don't experience Fearfulness.
By glimpsing the sobering reality that lies beneath the drama we call our life, by seeing our thoughts as harmless mental phenomena with no reality and by cultivating an attitude of acceptance towards ourselves and all our emotional/energetic experiences in each moment, the momentum of Fearfulness gradually subsides. What is left in its place is a spacious, present and deeply rooted state of Fearlessness. In this state, everything is allowed, good and bad, enjoyable or painful and even fearful.
Fearlessness is not the opposite of fearfulness. It is not courage. Courage is nothing more than the desire to control fear. And in this sense, even Courage is just another face of Fearfulness. Because to want to combat or control fear, is to be fearful of it.
Fearlessness is the space in which you are allowed to be whoever you are and whatever you are in this moment. Whether you are a loser or a winner, a coward or a hero, a sinner or a saint. You are allowed to be whatever expression you take in that moment, because who you really are is much deeper than that, and for that there are no words.
