Fear As Ally

GemFireAir
Series on Fear-III: Fear As Ally
marty kleva
February 13, 2008
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About 10 years ago I read a news account of a very savvy elementary school teacher in Boulder, Colorado who taught a science lesson to his class involving the planets and their place in the galaxy. He had the students make mock-up planets in scale and then took them to a large outside yard to demonstrate the lesson where he had the students set up our heliocentric galaxy and figure where each of the planets would be accordingly located within the parameters of the yard.

When the planet positions were all in place, and the students discussed the different aspects, there was one overwhelming point that came to the forefront. The teacher said that what he could vividly realize by this elementary yet inspired demonstration is how little of our entire galaxy is made up of hard physical matter— both seeable and touchable. The flip side of that is that he, and eventually his students, also realized how much of our galaxy world is made up of something else which seems to be purely non-tangible empty space.

Given this model it could be said that in the entire universe of all matter, the percentage we usually believe to be reality can be represented by a number of infinite (0.00000’s+1%) — I’ll call this Reality #1 — and the remaining reality by the number 99. + an infinite number of 9’s (99.99999+%) which may actually be reality — but regardless of that near unbelievable statement, I’ll call this Reality #2.

Almost the entire amount of the Reality #1 is concentrated upon how one person/group can overpower another and impinge their beliefs and value systems upon the other, including the so-called religious righteous.

Out of Reality #1, in what we now call America, over 85% of the $2.7 trillion 2006 federal budget was allotted to 1) War: $580.5 billion; 2) Disease: $614.1 billion; & 3) Debt held against the American people: 1,115.4 billion.

These three top expenditures make a gigantic statement within the infinitesimal Reality #1; they are all founded upon FEAR—FEAR of other nations and people, FEAR of dying, the FEAR of not being able to make enough money if one is poor or struggling, and in the case of the wealthy, the FEAR is of a) not being able to manage their money, and b) of someone else taking it away.

Not to be simplistic, but this is Reality #1 in a nutshell, and if it is anywhere near the Truth of things, then one must wonder about the make-up of the remaining 99.999+%!

What is Reality #2, the 99.999+% of all that is, in relationship to Reality #1, the infinite number of 0.00000’s+1%? The comparison between the two is startling.

Now think of all that is in Reality #1 that we believe is important; those physical so-called needs we spend the majority of our energy in the form of time, money and worry, trying to acquire, or create. Think of the 2.7 trillion dollars within this context, and think of the FEAR that is related to that 2.7 trillion.

Stop reading and get the entire picture clear in your mind before continuing. Get the galaxy model set up in a large park and cordon it off as if it is the entire galaxy and work within this framework. All that you see of the physical planetary models is the only hard matter that exists. All the rest of the space around and between the planets in three dimension is empty — at least it appears so to our untrained eyes and senses. Science calls this remaining empty space ‘dark matter’. (See article here)

What we are concerned with here for the purposes of this article is what we call Reality #1, and its make-up of FEAR.

In today’s culture we are taught to not be afraid as we bluster through scenarios that appear to be dangerous. We are cosseted and kept safe by laws, ordinances, and decrees that are only the cover for the reality that escapes most of us.

We live in the Piscean Age that has its own repercussions by its Neptunian nature that translates to watery, and at its best, is illusory. This is the reality that we live in and the challenge is to understand that this is what we deal with daily — an illusion of the reality #1—so that even the print on the newspaper can be an illusion, as can the sounds of speech that we hear from those who represent the financial/political scene and those that report for them to us. The problem comes from believing without question that it is all-true.

Those who are familiar with this site know that my one stipulation to bottom-line thinking is that it leads to a quest toward the next one. Perfectly okay to reach bottom lines — it is in believing that they are the end of the road that shuts down all further inquiry.

Certainly we can take rests to enjoy the destination that we have reached, to explore it further and become familiar with the terrain there, but to live out the belief that this is all there is truly bespeaks of fear that is stuck where it first erupted — in the Root Chakra.

We depend on our survival-based root chakra to invoke our fear for good reason. This is an innate system of warning for us to be alert about what endangers our living, which can be anything, to knowing that we cannot simply walk out onto a busy highway, to someone holding a dangerous weapon on us, or that our health is threatened by the misuse of chemicals.

Healthy fear is when we can get angry enough to move the 1st chakra fear into our 2nd chakra and onward to engage our power in the 3rd chakra to action. Then over time, unless we move this raw unconscious knee-jerk reaction into the 4th heart chakra we remain forever on the wheel of karma, perfectly oblivious to everything else that the universe represents except for that one day when we wake up to find that we are powerless to have any say in our lives.

In order to be conscious, Fear moved forward by Anger and engaged in action of our Power center must also be ingested and integrated with the 4th chakra element of Love — the Universal Dispassionate Love for both ourselves and others where decisions are not made based on anger, hatred, etc., but upon an unbiased equanimity simply because we can also see ourselves standing in the other person’s position. We can recognize the hologram that reflects the raw unbiased Truth that we are no more, no less than that person we face, whether it is in an embrace or with a difference of opinion.

The point that our total health may rest upon is the foundation of balance. Fear is an extreme — so is bliss! We are meant to find the point of positive balance between them. They both will become negative influences if we stay on the exponential curve of either one too long without seeking the remedy. The remedy of balance is brought about not by simply tossing aside our fear or bliss, but learning to recognize them and giving them our conscious awareness.

Both fight & flight can be productive as there is a time to engage in each. The key is to know when we are engaged in either one that we are in an exponential curve to pull together and heighten our body’s defenses. It is important to not stay on that exponential curve, for if our body continually stays at full alert we are like a loaded dump truck going down the interstate with the engines at full throttle but in first gear.

The negative aspect is getting stuck in the upward curve and not coming off the mountain. Here is where Mindfulness practice is a way to rock the stressors by using breath awareness — observing the breath as it moves in and out of our body, feeling the air as it rushes past our nostrils, sense its temperature and velocity, then notice how that action coincides with the movement of our chest, how it expands and stretches the spaces between the ribs, and the fact that it also expands the belly as the diaphragm drops to accommodate our expanded lungs. Using these awareness practices allows the body’s wisdom to take over — and it will — to bring the hormones of fight or flight back to a normal reading.

Accumulated stress is a product of our reaction to fear that never finds resolve.

In the Buddha of Fear, in the time before I realized that my black haze was my fear, I was on that curve; so was the year that I spent every Sunday at the Cathedral in the throes of bliss. Once I acknowledged my fear and began to work with it using Mindfulness practice I began to ameliorate the exponential curve of negativity. I used the same practice with my ecstatic experiences in the Cathedral, but I neglected to monitor the amount of time there and thus became addicted to the bliss without realizing the pitfalls and possible dangers to the amount and power of Light I ingested.

Fear is such a complex emotion. I learned that my anger was fueled by my fear and that beneath that fear was also excitement, but most of all impacting upon me was to discover that by slowly walking step-by-step through and with my fear, I walked in to pure Love. Never before in all my life when I walked away from fear, or denied it, or got over it, or put it aside, or conquered it, did I encounter love like I felt and experienced when I walked with my Buddha of Fear.

Fear is out of the base chakra; bliss is from the 7th and beyond. The most powerful use of either is when they meet in the middle 4th, or heart chakra. This is where the most powerful experience of the love orgasm springs from, the union of these two extreme chakras at the heart.

Were we to push away all fear in our lives we would also miss out on excitement and a good healthy adrenalin rush, like that which occurs in the ultimate expression of sexual orgasm where our entire being — all our physical and energy bodies are thoroughly engaged. This does not necessarily need to be experienced with another person or with one of the opposite gender, but I do believe that if solo then we will also have had to do a lot of masculine/feminine integration of our subtle energy bodies.

This brings us closest to what the experience of death can be. Petite mort is simply an experience we achieve with all things in balance at the moment. It is a signpost for us to follow and explore in greater observation. For when a person fully surrenders to their own true self — the will of the soul — then life becomes centered in the heart chakra — not alone by itself, but with the streams of all emotions from the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd rising up to meet the downward streams from the 5th, 6th, and above chakras. When they meet and mingle in the heart chakra, then a wisdom arises out of the mix to determine our actions, not out of fear alone, nor from bliss alone, but connected and integrated in what we know as Universal Love or Non-Conditional Love.

To reach Love one must also come to know Fear.

Love is the full spectrum of emotions that streams through the center of the apex to merge into the Light. Fear may be the emotional spectrum that mirrors Love, similar to the phenomena of the mirrored light spectrum being reflected in a double rainbow.

I know enough now to not ignore my fear, not to allow my critical ego-self to say “I’ve been there, done that.”, because I’ve also learned that fear is not some linear emotion that picks that same criteria or set of circumstances to express itself — the next time. Fear is not a two-dimensional or even possibly a three dimensional emotion. I find it to be the mother/father of all emotions within the lower three chakras and find it to have a multidimensional spectrum that could appear to be spherical or holographic. It is connected to the root of our very existence and therefore may also be the connection to the transcendent.

Fear is no wimp to ignore or try to put off because being imprinted into our DNA, it is always present, at least for as long as mankind exists. So we must learn to ID it and then to acknowledge that it is ours and not project it onto others. Until we shift our relationship toward fear, it will rule our lives as it now does in this modern world of 2008.

We have devoted all science and technology to creating a world that appears to make us safe and protected from everything under the sun. We have lawyers and insurance to protect us from lawsuits. There is a medical world that has developed ways to artificially alter the body with implants and machines so that we achieve longevity.

We have gone so far in all our developed external technological systems of safety and progress that we are at the ultimate stretch of use/misuse of technology, and it has now turned in on us and instead of protecting us its use has become the very danger it was initially designed to protect us against.

We may in actuality be no further ahead in any form of enlightenment. Instead, we may be in decline since we have signed over all our power out of the 3rd chakra to something that exists outside of ourselves. We are no longer safe. All that which we believe to be in place to keep us safe is an illusion that’s been created and paid for dearly from our own pockets and with our own lives. We have no one else to blame for it as we take the hook every time the issue of safety arises and have given someone else the power to deal with it. We no longer believe that we ourselves can keep us safe. We look to buy our safety on the merits of someone else’s say so.

Fear has become the world’s greatest commodity. The sale of everything from war to identification is based on how much fear can be induced into the public to buy the product that promises protection or security. The irony of it all is that the very thing that was sold as protection has led to a massive invasion of further technology that threatens our safety and ability to lead a private, independent, and self-advised life.

The products that demand us to provide further information and disclose deeper layers of our unique features such as fingerprints and iris scans are the very ones that are now attached to our birth records, work history, medical history, our purchasing preferences, places we have visited and lived, and with the use of cell phones our exact physical location within fifty feet.

These safety features have turned a free country into a prison all under the auspices of wars waged on our multiple fears. As a collective we find ourselves acting out when we buy insurance of all kinds including life insurance, renter’s insurance and travel insurance to name the obvious. Then there are the more subtle products like cell phones for children and our elderly parents. These very systems that we believe and rely upon to keep us safe have failed to do so, and what ensues is that these systems go further to convince us that we now need to inject an ID module under the skin so we can keep track of our children and pets in case they are taken. The move is always to up the ante with the onus on us.

GPS features in the more recent vehicles are commercialized as the latest gadget to acquire, and we are sold the Madison Avenue line that they will also help anyone who is stranded on the road. All you need to do is call the GPS monitoring system and they can tell exactly where you are. Whatever happened to the good Samaritans along the road? Whatever happened to us taking care of us?

Our entire infrastructure of community has been infiltrated by the discount brokering of fear.

The foundation of our entire monetary system is also run on the emotion of fear. The stock market totally exudes fear — watch as moment by moment the NASDAQ & DOW figures go up and down according to what the President, the head of the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Secretary, or CEO of the largest bank and brokerage house happen to mention out loud or write about or hint about to be announced in the next two days time.

Religions of the world — I can speak to the Judeo-Christian religions in particular — are based on the fear of God and all actions are geared toward acting the perfect Christian because if a person does not, he/she will go to hell and Christians are taught to fear hell.

No matter where we go fear is used to sell us on whatever product the commercial world wishes us to buy. Remember too that our government here in America is no longer a republic, nor is it a constitutional democracy; now it is a commercial corporation just like ENRON, HALIBURTON, CITIBANK, MORGAN STANLEY, WALMART, etc.

It is this unconscious collective fear that adds to the collective stress that activates the fight or flight syndrome and refuses to let go. Fear does not need to be eradicated from our life, that’s impossible to do. What needs to happen to turn this entire package of fear that is being sold to an entire culture is for us to shift our perspective and attitudes toward fear itself.

Fear is a true teacher of values. To recognize it in all its subtle aspects demands savage honesty, and to face it demands an intrepid heart. To deny it is like turning our back on a cobra, a position much more dangerous than facing it, even as that might be terrifying.

It was easy for me to relate to my Buddha of Fear after the fact of discovering what it was — but prior to that moment of discovery, I had no idea what I was facing and it was terrifying.

It is never my recommendation to approach fear head on or with hubris. To approach with gentle caution is much more workable and is more likely to produce positive effects. It is also more preferable to approach without the usual ego-driven agenda of specific results; here I could almost guarantee that at its best this will backfire and at the worst it will look like a cure that later manifests to a discovery that our fear has only been buried deeper than before, and down the line apiece it will act up and act out in our personality and even in the form of dis-ease.

All of this I am describing is inside of Reality #1! Can you even fathom what Reality #2 is about? If anything we can use just the comparison of magnitude and size to help us keep a perspective.

Collective Addiction To Hype

In this culture of more is better and best, where our today’s performance is never enough and we are forced in our jobs and thinking to constantly strive for a higher level of everything — we have become addicted to the feeling of hype — the sound media especially bombards us with commercials that are too loud, where overtly brash actors must yell at each other and us at a speed that defies nature, to get it all in a 30 second sound bite.

TV news shows look and sound more like a shouting match in a bar. This is violence at its most subtle execution that serves as a model for collective behavior. These same high profile talk show hosts display abominable behavior denigrating guests who may disagree with the host’s views.

The level of stress on such shows is at the extreme — guests must not only compete with each other for their points of view, they must also compete with the host for the time to speak it. This type of display on public TV bleeds into the collective angst and raises the stress curve around the world. It incites higher levels of stress in both the the participants and the viewers alike. Evidently this is the intent of the producers because it seems that this is what gets the attention of the masses that watch TV. Little do the masses seem to understand what they are participating in and how it ultimately is affecting their health.

Stress: The Phantom Menace

Around my Buddha of fear there was this shroud of darkness. I could have tried to ignore it, wished it to go away, to get over it and get on with life. I decided rather to further investigate it. I knew it was a cloud of energy that had been opened by the accident fracturing my aura — unleashing all the past fears I had so well ignored and gotten over. This time it would have to be different.

Those other times when I have known fear and climbed over it to act fearless, I am aware that my actions were truly fueled by the very fear I denied, and those actions were like a man running from a tiger oblivious to all that is in front of him, only knowing the fear of being hunted, chased, to be outrun and caught by the tiger. That is the purest form of 1st chakra ‘survival’ energy in action.

One of the underlying causes for collective stress is that we do not know how to protect ourselves from those who convince us that they have jurisdiction over us. When we give over personal information to people we are not even acquainted with, it is at great cost to the subtle systems of our physical body. The cost over time may be much greater than the advertised rewards. This is an insidious element in our world today that on one hand promises protection and security, yet on the other erodes the very protection and security we thought we were buying.

The body’s systems when constantly barraged by such attacks go into the exponential stress curve, and without relief begin to break down creating greater number of dis-orders and dis-eases.

What to do about it?

First notice there is always 1) a cost up-front & center — the cost that we pay for our base desires — like the latest car model, latest designer jeans, newest computer, cell-phone electronic gadget, or the bars, clubs and memberships that promise exciting yet impersonal sexual encounters.

Behind all the merchandising of these base products is also 2) a hidden cost to our present and future existence.

We know and feel something is not quite so when “Energy In” is NOT EQUAL to or greater than “Energy Out!”

When we figure out what that cost is, not only in dollars, but also in the decreasing quality of life, then we can see that the disparate equation of energy is a negative cost to us personally and/or our family and community.

It is the complexity of fear that makes it difficult to understand, difficult to distinguish which end of the spectrum one is experiencing and knowing which feature of fear is the true catalyst behind our actions.

Different degrees and layers of fear evoke degrees and intensity of the emotion. There are also the different sources of it that incorporate different degrees of risk and danger with varying degrees of consequences.

All the symptoms of fight or flight can also be evoked by meeting someone of attraction, ratcheting up the pulse & heartbeat with blood rushing through our vessels, or merely by the anticipation of skydiving, preparing to go onstage, or entering into a sporting contest.

Like people, emotions are never what they seem — especially fear. Emotions can be so powerful that we are afraid of experiencing and expressing them. When our emotions are buried we act tired, dull, bored, sophisticated and politically correct. We feel dead and weak inside. We are empty, insensible, feel hopeless, and have no direction from within. Hidden feelings can be described in words such as afraid, scared, terrorized, raw, having a feral need to survive, and find us sucking in air with desperate pants.

Fear can be painful as it forces us to feel something — to feel alive— and gives us purpose. However, if we do not understand what is driving our actions then we are no longer at the reins, but are now in the harness.

What is it like to seize the reins and learn to handle them for our benefit? To do so in the face of fear, we need to get down into the base chakra and root out the information of what is running the fear. We need to learn how to pay attention to the emotions that are in reality in perpetual motion. The executive function of our brain is only the receptor and perceptive identifier of the rush of emotions through this gateway.

Emotions, specifically fear in this context, that initiate from the mind of the body, are the molecules of communication between that and the mind of the brain. They are like the wellspring of a river’s source. It is up to us to investigate, locate and begin to know them for the sustenance they provide.

Like our attention caught upon a colorful, flamboyant silk scarf being drawn out by a sleight-of-hand artist at a magic show — all the while reality is hidden elsewhere.

Sending the LOVE of 'hayam’ to illuminate the way.

Con Amore,

~ mek


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