Marriage and Pregnancy
Pages: [1] 2
Living In The Dark
Fear has many faces and most of those faces are in disguise. Fear can be so deceptive that we rarely recognize or define it, and therefore fail to challenge it when it sneaks up upon us in such an insidious way that it can paralyse, erode, control and ultimately destroy us. Fear is the most lethal weapon and the most toxic poison known to man. Fear is highly contagious and self destructive. Fear can be spread by word, suggestion, imagery, innuendo or intimidation. Fear is a chameleon and will most often show up as something completely different which makes it very difficult to recognize or unmask. Almost all destructive behavioural and emotional responses can be tracked back to fear when we peel away the layers of our feelings and actions. Fear is the core issue behind violence, jealousy, bigotry, anger, depression, greed, hatred, lies, insecurity or obsessive worry, just to name a few. When fear is appropriate it is a vital, effective life saving response which is critical to self preservation. Staying alive and protecting ourselves from harm is our most primal and instinctual priority. Appropriate fear, will prevent and protect us from danger; it will instantly ignite super alertness and superhuman strength. This is commonly referred to as the fight or flight response. Most of us will have experienced this super state of reaction if we have been involved in a potential car accident. In something like a nanosecond we are capable of processing an extraordinary amount of information and physically manoeuvre the car to avoid the collision. Appropriate fear is also an effective decision making factor. Most, if not all, of our choices are based on predicting pleasure or pain. We are predominately motivated by pleasure and pain, that is, gaining pleasure or avoiding pain. We all like to kid ourselves that we operate from intellect, and that we make decisions by using knowledge, logic and experience. If we just scratch the surface a little we will almost always find that our motivations are emotionally based. Pleasure is easy to comprehend; we choose and maintain our careers, relationships, homes, hobbies and possessions because they please us. Choices of pleasure may encompass comfort, self esteem, love, respect, acceptance, approval, security, safety and prosperity. Decisions based on avoiding pain may include any or all of the above, but from the flip side. Avoiding pain is extremely motivating and many of our decisions and reactions have a fear base. Pain avoidance is what fear is. Fear of physical or emotional harm, poverty, abandonment, violence, humiliation, loneliness, disapproval, disease and ultimately – death. It is vitally important to discern what appropriate and inappropriate fear is, as appropriate fear can and will protect us, and inappropriate fear can destroy us. Most of the time we don’t recognize it at all, so, it’s impossible to name it, let alone challenge it. The human condition has a huge emotional range and can appear quite fluid in its ability to change; we can be carried away or bounced around in a little cesspool of negative influences one minute, and then find ourselves lifted up and flying high the next . Emotions can be quite unpredictable, indefinable and often uncontrollable, and yet emotions can dominate, create or destroy us. Some people believe hate is the base emotion and love is the highest. Indifference is often considered to be the opposite of love, but it is my belief that both hate and indifference are by products of fear. The ultimate fear must be fear of death; being inevitable, we really should make peace with this and find it within ourselves to accept it. When we place fear in the realm of death, then we must place love in the realm of life. We are living anywhere between these polarities, and might view life as rhythms, vibrations and frequencies between polarities. We understand night and day, light and dark, coarse and fine, heavy and light, negative and positive, hate and love, thick and light and good and evil. When we consider all of life is energy, then we can place ourselves within the frequencies of these polarities. When fear is positioned at the darkest side of the polarity, we can include all of fears associates; hate greed, jealousy, anger, violence and poverty etc. The ‘dark side’ is also represented by death, decay, destruction, war, evil and disease. Negative frequencies are coarse, slow or stagnant, heavy, thick, lethargic, black and isolated. The dark side is asleep, lifeless and baron. Likewise, love represents all that is light, alive, creative, healing, joyful, energizing and fertile. As energetic bodies, within an energetic realm, we synchronize with similar energies. This is really huge, and may be hard to get your head around, but it’s also very simple. Thoughts and emotions are energies, which align themselves with compatible energies. The greatest minds, all religions, the sages and prophets and philosophers and Bob Dylan and John Lennon and every other person who ever had a quality thought, all said this: LOVE IS THE ANSWER. Love is light, Love is God, Love is the creative force, Love is freedom - because love aligns us with all that light represents. To be healthy, happy, creative, secure, energized, serene and loved requires saying in the light. Staying in the light obviously also means staying out of fear. I have already explained appropriate fear, but I now wish to put that aside and expose inappropriate fear for what it really is. To me, fear is Satan; an evil, destructive, paralysing force. I would suspect that every atrocity ever carried out was done so, on the motivation of fear. What motivates violence, wars, murders and suicides or evil, anger, hatred or prejudices? Peel away the layers again, and you will keep coming back to the same core – fear. Fear is imagination predicting the worst possible outcome. When the imagination is engaged in repetition and emotion, it becomes a belief. Our beliefs determine our actions and as the old saying goes, what you conceive and believe, you will achieve. For right or wrong, good or bad, this is the creative force within us all. We may feel sad and helpless when we look at the world, and many of the events taking place around us. We can become overwhelmed, to the point of depression, some feel rage and want to fight, and others feel paralysed and implode. There is so much injustice, poverty, waste, pollution and destruction. There are social and environmental issues and greedy, incompetent and spineless governments. Even when we bring ourselves away from the world stage, and just focus on our own little realities, we still find so much to analyse, consider, protect and fight for. Sure, we worry about aging, our health, finances, families and jobs. We worry about the quality and quantity of our food, pollution of our rivers and air, crime and the decline of communities. We argue that an intelligent and responsible person needs to be concerned about such things, and I agree; apathy and indifference or prancing around like Pollyanna in her “happy place” won’t make the world a better place. There are problems, big and important problems, and those problems do need solutions. Problems are solved by intelligent application of ideas and actions, not by obsessive worry, and not by imagined fears. Herein lies the crux of the issue: Worry and fear are impotent they serve no purpose, other than to use up creative intelligence, and destroy creative energies or attract destructive energies. All problems have two possible applications and they are: Fix it or accept it. 1. Find a solution to change, improve or eliminate the problem. 2. Or accept that, what is – is. That is F.F F. Find it, Fix it or Forget it. The third and most popular application seems to be, ‘Worry about it until it disappears’ and this does not and will never work. Worry, by the way, is fear’s little brother, the same genetic code if you like. Fear is big and powerful and jumps around like a trampolinist in our solar plexus, whereas worry is a silent and sneaky, tenacious little character, that you will hardly notice until the damage is done. Symbology In previous chapters, I have symbolized fear and worry, by giving them identities, so, I will just bring them back now for another look. They are the Chattering Monkey, the Barking Dog and the Witch. The chattering monkey symbolized the constant dialogue which goes on and on in our heads, when we are obsessively worrying. He engages us in a prolonged and exaggerated drama and reinforces our victim status. The chattering monkey, as a symbol for fear, demonstrates how we take a reasonably small fear, compare it to everything that ever happened before, and clump it all together and exaggerate it. Words like, nobody, everyone, always, never and forever, have this one problem sweeping across your past, present and future and gathering everyone and everything that ever hurt or offended us. The chattering monkey is a master at making big out of little. The barking dog, I have now decided, is a toothless, barking dog. Dogs are trained to bark, they are hardly ever trained to bite. Barking dogs will scare you away or stop you in your tracks by the implication that they may bite. We don’t even need to see the dog, it could be a miniature poodle for all we know, but if it barks we will give it power and control, and accept that we must back away. Symbolically, the barking dog is the reason we don’t do things that we do want to do or the reason we do things which we don’t want to do. Peer pressure can be a barking dog, shyness or insecurity, fear of being rejected or abandoned, are all barking dog fears. The witch is a complete fabrication, she never existed at all. For some unknown reason, when we are insecure, scared or threatened in any way, be that real or imagined, we justify our fear by inventing a greater threat than the one at hand. I guess we feel humiliated, small,Pages: [1] 2