Fear

What a bastard.

We all experience it same-same, but different. Some confront it in forms of common phobia, for instance when you’re on top of a tower in the open air. You can’t quite get yourself to look over the edge and you just want to lie as flat as you can on the floor and cry for your daddy; Those eight legged freak things that multiply into a thousand small ones when you try to kill it; Confined spaces, with or without a nasty passing of gas. And of course, our pesky friend mathematics. Others have stranger intimations of vague, but deep terror, often hard to explain.
Let’s pry it open! This illusive cesspit of nightmares…

A thing I’ve been playing with in the back of my mind for, just about 10 years now, is the human relationship with – arguably – the strongest in the set of forces that form the blind driver of our souls.

I should first address something: Soul.
Many people may object outright to the use of the word and attached concept of soul. One might say there is no soul just as there is no deity, and referring to it will only cause unnecessary confusion. However! I understand it to be more of a colloquial term than an empirically incorrect conception of the precise life-stuff that animates our mortal bodies. When viewed through the lens of the common people, who feel life on the inside as much as they hear it, taste it, smell it or see it, soul, fits right in.  It isn’t some tool for some religion to explain away questions we shouldn’t stop asking. To me, soul represents the strange, elusive and life affirming experience we all have, the place in our existence where body, mind and whatever abstract higher-order thing we might also be, comes together. Soul is the place where the magic happens, the place where you want to tell a materialist to fuck right off with the pedantic bickering and just feel the groove!
Soul neatly labels the ever present, strictly non-physical aspect of our human existence that everyone is aware of in whichever rudimentary way. It acknowledges something about us that a mind teetered on the fragile edifice of factual correctness cannot afford to play with.

I had been running some background thoughts on it due to the amount of frustration and disappointment caused by all the shyness and phobia vendors that have set up shop around every other corner in my mind. There is something particularly distasteful about having arbitrary limitations to one’s positive experience of life. It began to bother me more and more that I stood in my own way when it comes to adventure, insight and wisdom. How stupid is it to cut yourself off from whole arenas of existence merely because of what you don’t like or what makes you nervous?
We have one body, one life of unknown length, and there are many roads we will only ever pass once! Wouldn’t it just be such a shame, a waste, to stay in the zone you and millions, perhaps billions like you have always known? Something as simple as trying different foods in new dishes can bring such a wholesome character to your life! Something that evokes joy and curiosity! Something that tickles the senses and stimulates your creativity.

But the fear.

What I did was to start challenging my fears head on. One of the first contestants was the fear of heights. I still have a rather excruciating fear of heights, but it no longer gets to keep things from me. I have jumped off of cliffs and rap jumped off the side of towers, and I’ve even done skydiving. Challenge done and dusted.
I started replacing every usual lunch with a meal I’ve never eaten before, even if it had stuff in it that I don’t particularly like. I figured, there is no sense in being full of crap about what you like if you don’t know what there is to like out there. Stealing simple joys from yourself. Having a strange meal is like doing a tiny bit of international travel without the logistics problem. It’s wonderful!
So I continued challenging the set of fears that have made decisions for me until now. My fear of water got challenged when my best friend introduced me to river guiding on the Orange River. I did some training there, didn’t do very well, the embarrassment made me feel the burning gaze of onlookers kiss me in the neck. But we had to swim through rapids and face the terrifying forces that would usually have me paralyzed and probably drown, and it was fine, and it was fun! There are so many simple ways to help yourself feel like a brave conqueror of darkness, and you can’t quite put a cap on it’s value.

Another spark to my curiosity about fear came from a friend I met in London. She had been rather afflicted by nightmares, hallucinations and strange behaviour when sleep walking. She had a particular liking for horror films. I thought to myself there must be something to be learned here! She tended to land herself in situations where she let guys take advantage of her even if she verbally protested. She feigned not to like it but it kept happening in very similar ways, and that speaks of a somewhat voluntary motion toward specific situations. The strange hallucinations were caused by a brain tumor, but other things did lay raw from her past. She had been raped when she was younger, essentially still a child. This is where the curios rover of the mind goes “bingo!” This isn’t what there was to learn, the real lesson lies in the murky depths this child’s mind had been plunged to. I don’t think it’s necessary to explain this, just let your mind wander about the idea of a child being raped by a group of grown men if you’re still wondering.

It’s a disorienting place to be in. One traumatic event suspended in a situation with strange tensions a young mind can hardly begin to compute, and you have the seed for crystallizing a lifetime of trouble. Being tyrannically subdued and violated in the most physical and emotional manner causes a visceral disturbance that veritably screws up one’s sense of self and one’s relation to the world. When someone exercises such tyranny it induces fear in the sweetest of hearts. On one hand we’re quite attracted to the thrill of risk, the idea that you can experience the most tantalizing pleasures from something that could rather easily kill you. It gives one a sense of power, like taming a wild beast, or defying the odds against you. On the other hand, we’re susceptible to becoming that tamed beast, confined to the designs of others. You get pushed from one place to another by fear, it keeps alive a self depreciating confusion. You suffer blindness and repeated encounters with disappointment as life keeps turning out to be worse than you imagined. While perhaps not always bad, most certainly perplexing in unsettling ways. You keep reproducing bad quality experiences from the lack of a coherent internal conductor and slowly, with repetition, establish a poorer and poorer internal image of yourself as a result of all the negative feedback.

You have to know that, to the victim, it isn’t necessarily apparent that fear is implicit in these crimes against one’s dignity. Sure one will experience fear quite often, but the victim eventually begins to associate with the fear. It becomes part of one’s identity, and slowly, healthy preferences of the educated and instinctive self, preferences that serve the vital purpose of keeping us true to a path of balance and health become indistinguishable from the fears that invariably drive the self, however indirect. Bring a prolonged use of mind altering drugs (prescription or not) without critical  lifestyle adjustments and therapy into the equation, and you will see an even worse deterioration of a person’s conscious state. We become desensitized and our awareness drifts away from us. When we aren’t proactive about the problems that plague us, we fail to scrutinize vital aspects of our existence, hope for a better self leaks away like helium out of an untied balloon, and soon we no longer feel the urge to do something qualitatively meaningful. One might still want to be good to others, be desirable and loved. But if one doesn’t afford the basics of love and care for oneself, it sure tarnishes one’s attractiveness to others, and smears dirty stains exactly where nobody wants them, probably amplifying whatever fear you may have had about yourself in the first place.

When you move around in public spaces, and you take a moment to observe the other animated creatures moving around you, one can see them vibrate at different intensities. It remains rather vague until more data is acquired, but one can often tell what severity of terror someone might have lived through, even how they processed it. Many people try to bury their terrors, “what you don’t see won’t hurt” type of thing. They’re often highly strung, you can give them a fright around every corner with comical consistency, because somewhere deep inside they’re anticipating confrontation with a thing they once buried. They know there is something out there that can defeat them, and their solution has been to be as isolated from and unaware of it as possible. Others outgrew their terrors, either from consistent exposure and gradual mastery, or from being broken down and reassembling into a stronger agent. Both of these basic types that outgrow their terrors have distinct traits to observe, but the commonality among them is the fact that they have enough awareness of their enemy to find enough peace despite it.

There are of course people who have significant familiarity with their terrors and still suffer through a protracted battle with it. It doesn’t fade per se, and it tends to flip states in a disconcerting manner. As if it travels through your psychological landscape in search for every possible weakness it can exploit. Once you’ve become resistant to it in one form, it will take on another. This is where things become so much more tricky. This is where fear induced by an external source has been associated with and gradually becomes mistaken for an internal flaw. Which, in a way, it is. Our subconscious minds are like virtual simulators, incredibly powerful ones. With them we are able to recreate our own experience of traumatic events with remarkable consistency long after their relevance passed. All it takes is a couple of elements in a given situation to resemble a past traumatic event, and it will trigger a cascade of biological reactions. As soon as your adrenal glands are called to action there’s very little you can do to control what follows.
What we can take from this is that, someone who regularly repeats  experiences of stress related to old trauma through the function of a triggered cascade event, will begin to feel broken and lose trust in him/herself, and everyone else for that matter. It might even go as far as developing a belief that there is an autonomous part of yourself with cruel intentions, wanting to play tricks on you. Now, this is partially true. This is why you often hear the term ‘complex’ when people refer to mental states and their related behaviours. Our psyches are full of autonomous cognitive vehicles! The purpose of such autonomy is efficiency, so that we don’t need perpetual conscious awareness of all the tasks we are running, overseeing everything like some crazy micro manager. Such constant involvement would be exhausting, and it would make us much more stupid as a matter of physical, biological necessity.

Among the various types of people who have prolonged struggles with debilitating terrors, you tend to find a heightened sense of aggression. An unafflicted person might approach with a moderate demeanor and suddenly be faced with unwarranted hostility as the distrustful afflicted ones show their teeth like a cornered wolf. It comes from having trouble reading the advances of others and differentiating between real threats and possible triggers, the response is an increased readiness to retaliate.
This is a good instinct! In an uncivilised world your survival depends on a readiness to act with swift aggression against any intruder. Such decisiveness should be treated with respect. There are many wimps who lack it, and they pay for it.
It’s important to be clear about the nature of fears with such behavioural impact. They can originate from something as seemingly innocuous as loneliness or excessive comfort. You can move all the way through the severity spectrum of human experience up to physical abuse and rape, and you will find surprisingly similar effects. I suspect it has to do with the relativity of things.

How we often attempt to remedy the tax on our systems is by counter balancing the pain and stress of our terrors. This can be done with music, movies, video games and just about anything similarly stimulating to our senses. Horror films for instance, are tuned into everything considered as a human stressor. It hacks our instinctive nature by positing scenarios that are typically life threatening or nested in common superstition and slowly playing out what you know is inevitable from the evident context. What makes these films so successful is that it puts you on edge and triggers stress responses that harmlessly resemble the real ones you experience. The movie ends and there’s relief. In the light of drowning out real fears it makes sense why we would voluntarily stress ourselves in such a low quality manner with so little positive return. No adventure, no enlightenment or upliftment, just averagely entertaining stress.
It’s when our countermeasures aren’t so harmless anymore when you’re in real trouble. People start to hurt themselves physically, seek out abusive relationships, give themselves over to chance around strong, strange men with selfish motives, while intoxicated. When you indulge the broken yearning for a lack of control, you feed a monster that should never have lived.

I’m going to embark on another little tangent now, but keep this notion with you. The notion of a persistent energy we carry around that inevitably speaks to people or lashes out. It speaks of things we often desperately try to hide, but can’t.  Also keep in mind the aspect of this buried thing determining the tension in our strings, dictating our behaviour seemingly without consent. Confusing us, turning us against ourselves and often our friends.

In conversation with my dearest consort we once stumbled on an idea that clarifies some of the strangeness of conscious observation. As with neuroscience, where subjects are studied for having deviations from the norm, our conversation started after a visit to the dentist. Bad habits and sugar called for fillings, and so among the 2 of us we had a mouth numbed by anesthetics, and for a few hours that offered what one can consider a deviation from the norm. Complete numbness of an area one is usually very aware of. We noted how a numb cheek or tongue always feels considerably bigger than usual. I thought that this makes a lot of sense! If the brain can no longer tell the dimensions of a physical thing and it can no longer tell damage from wholeness in terms of pain, our conception of it becomes more vague. The physical and conceptual parameters of the thing – as perceived – now bleed out from what used to be a definite boundary. It could be smaller, it could be bigger. Best treat it as bigger! This makes for more cautious behaviour. We’ve all bitten our own tongue or cheek while being perfectly sober and untreated by needles. An enthusiastic chomping of your gourmet sandwich is all it takes.

So I extrapolated from this into the realm of things outside of our bodies, things we have and haven’t yet encountered. We are vaguely aware of many things that pose a threat to us, but in a well civilized and sometimes overprotective society we often hardly know anything about any given one of them. We treat guns like bigger threats than they are in and of themselves, because we know our interaction with them carries the potential for death and destruction. Conversely, when you’re a kid, the mere notion of what might be under your bed in the dark is enough to freak you out! It is as simple as thinking of something you cannot see… How ready are you for it?
Many other threats out there don’t carry the same potential as a firearm wielded by a talking ape! If we let these threats remain as large looming shadows in our mind, without familiarizing ourselves with the appropriate treatment of them – gaining a precise and well defined conception of it’s scope and dimension, the parameters of it’s potential – we allow ourselves to be chased around by monsters that don’t really exist.
Yes! It’s good to be cautious! But it’s just as good to take risks. So where lies the balance? One can only tell with sufficient awareness.

Speaking of awareness! This is a source of it’s own brand of fear, particularly strongly manifested in social settings. It speaks to the universal constant of balance. Being woefully unaware will have you running from monsters, and being overly conscious of the critical thoughts, attributes and feelings of others will wreck you from the inside. Overthinking they call it. Extreme empathy also. I think it’s important to distinguish properly between  different modes of cognition to give us the clarity that empowers us to grow beyond our greatest weaknesses. Thinking sometimes gets a ‘bad rap’, especially with pedantic individuals or those who think in circles, thinking themselves into anxious corners because they’re unduly afraid of not being good enough, or being incorrect. But our capacity for consciously processing incoming stimulus and turning it into ideas and abstract conceptions is what makes us so undeniably consequential! It is simply a matter of doing it in the most beneficial manner. Thinking is so important because all of our actions are not conducted in real time. So much of what we do sits at the end of a string of events that started with a thought – however brief or conscious. When we decide to throw a punch for instance, the brain isn’t actively involved throughout the duration of the action. We couldn’t just stop the thing before the target if it was released with intent to move through the target. If we throw a punch and stop at an arbitrary position short of hitting the target, that decision was made before the punch was executed. We all live a fraction of a second in the past, and look into the future through things like pattern recognition to negate the delay inherent in our perceptive and cognitive systems. So our physical life is run through small pockets of data that get sent back and forth, and if we don’t apply sufficient thought in order to exercise proper foresight, we lose control over the consequences of our actions. Its in the awareness of these consequences that we find fear, especially when we don’t understand our own relationship to the events that bring them about.

These days people love to talk about social anxiety! It is a promising sign of progress if we are able to express and discuss the issues that plague us! It makes us stronger. However there are many people who use it as a means to leverage a victim mentality. It is a rather detrimental practice pivoting on the notion that people don’t care enough and that the forces that drive society into prosperity and well-being are too harsh for the delicate sensibilities of more sensitively attuned individuals. The worst idea of all is that there’s nothing an individual can do about it. The truth is that raw reality is much more harsh than the competitive arena of society. The truth is that our younger generations are rife with frail wimps! Too scared or intolerant to interact with good people, too weak to fend off bad people. We’re all afraid of losing or being done in, but not enough of us are willing to do something about it, and so like mouthy spoiled brats we yap yap with insistence that someone else does. It’s a fucking nightmare! So much fear causing so much chaos, wrecking relationships, preventing successful careers, fueling self annihilation and awful cynicism. Fear is an extremely loud ghost, eagerly picking up your slack, ready to make you lay waste to all that even so much as smells of goodness. This is why I appreciate biblical teachings again of late. Besides all the horrid shit, there’s a lot of big picture wisdom regarding raw humanity and it’s interaction with reality. You don’t have to believe in virgin birth or bottomless bread to find utility in the teachings about patience, courage and hard work.

Over the past few years I’ve had the opportunity to see what happens to people who dump their religious systems without substitution. If ever you hear a good anti theist advocate for atheism, it is based in the proactive cultivation of characteristics that serve the same purposes as those built into Judaeo-christian  philosophy. It takes work! Often hard work, to keep our individual complex systems in equilibrium with all the other complex systems out there. There is so much at play at any given time, that you’d be most arrogant to think you can get by without the accumulated wisdom of our collective humanity. It is when your terrors knock at the door that this becomes tangible.
Since change is a constant, we cannot afford to let the wheel of life turn as it wills if we have our own specific ambitions. We have to apply our own force to it, and give our best to make it formidable. Because the odds are such that disaster will pay you a visit at some point, and if you can barely cope when things are going relatively well, the chaos that ensues will put you down and end you. Just as fear thrives on your imaginative capacity to dominate you, so you can and should use your imagination to transcend whatever pathetic state you may be in. Even if you imagine a bunch of unrealistic garbage, if it works and it moves you and uplifts you, how can you dismiss that utility in the absence of “appropriate” solutions? You can believe in a sentient, luminescent, benevolent dildo for all that matters! As long as the accompanying consequence steers you clear of murky darkness.

What I really want to say is: Fear is a stinking liar. A rotten, persuasive beguiler. It will hide the greatest of treasures behind it’s back if you let it, and you will pass away never having known what joy and satisfaction this life held for you. Fear is a shape-shifter, a shadow dweller. It thrives on ignorance! It occupies every dark corner of your imagination, waiting for you to step close enough. Fear will steal from you wherever  it possibly can, and you will have to sit through visceral reenactments of every moment of self betrayal.
Yes, everything you experienced in the past might have been exactly as bad as it felt, that is your relative reality. But we have the capacity to negate the effects of trauma and prolonged suffering. Our powers far exceed what we allow ourselves to think! As soon as we can stop trapping ourselves inside inferior complexes, fortified by resentment, superstition, pure ignorance and the whole bag of tricks fear can play on us, we can put up streetlights in our minds. We can build everlasting bonfires in our souls. We can make the floors and the walls glow if we want!

We can all know what it’s like to stare into the heart of our mortal enemy, and watch it crumble under the light of truth. Might as well find out what the truth is, and acquire a taste for it.