Why Fear Is So Important To Us

The problem is we believe fear is important, even necessary! We use fear to make our personal lives antagonistic enough to appear “interesting” and to fulfill the sickness of our pathological need for dominance and conflict. Fear encumbers us with theories that bind us to the lesser part of our humanity; it is the underlying motivation that drives our efforts to survive through hate, human drama, the gratification of pride and the vengeance of self-righteousness. This epic struggle for survival at all costs and by any means feeds our spiritual ignorance.

Fear influences every decision we make, without our awareness or acknowledgement. It is an assumed reality that demands to be considered in every verdict we form about ourselves, about others and when deciding what to do in this world that we would believe is “good”…or at least in our “best interest.”

It is the foundation upon which we form all of our judgments, life commitments and personal perceptions. Fear shapes us as people, communities and nations, and is the one aspect of human nature that is NEVER questioned by the pedestrian mentality.

Our whole life can be summed up as the futile effort of seeking to avoid fear through our obsession with gratification. Many of us have created pathologies of avoidance by convincing ourselves that emotional appeasements are the way out of this maze of mental illness. In fact, we are actually sustaining a state of anxiety that we will live with our entire life due to the unacknowledged intensity of our fear and its influence.

Fear comes with having a body and placing it in a world where we live off of each other’s flesh both metaphorically and physically. Fear is an emotionality that cannot be avoided because we live in bodies genetically linked to the ancestry of our forefathers with a cellular history of violence and hate. Fear breeds hate. Survival of the fittest and the “cruelest” reigns supreme in the human genome.

Many enlightened Souls have come to teach us that we have options. But we are skeptical about giving up our fear and hate for the sake of Love, so we ignore their teachings of Love and continue sustaining our pride due to the atrophy of our fear. Through this hubris, as we continue to indulge our genetic desires for pleasure and comfort in the futile attempt to neutralize our fear, we ultimately allow fear to have complete control over our living.

To surrender ourselves to Love appears as “weakness” in the culture of fear we have created in our society. Love has no place here except as an assumed gratification through physical and emotional pleasure. Our Karma is created through continually choosing to live in the absolute crudeness of a seemingly justified fear. The Laws of Love elude us because we simply will not give up our basic insecurity (due to the unrequited emotionality of fear) for the sake of unconscionable Love.

Fear confounds the mind with the contradictions of the genetic heart that tell us that hate is more powerful than Love. Here is a simple story – let it fall into the compassion of your Heart and offer you a new meaning:

A man walking in the night slipped and fell from a rocky path. He knew that at the edge of the path was a very deep valley and afraid he would fall down thousands of feet, he grabbed hold of a branch that was overhanging the edge. In the darkness of night all he could see below him was a bottomless abyss. He shouted, but his own shout was reflected back – there was nobody to hear him.

You can imagine the man’s night of torture. Every moment there was death below, his hands were becoming cold, he was losing his grip…but he managed to hold on. As the sun rose he looked down and laughed! There was no abyss – just six inches below his feet was a rock ledge large enough that he could have rested during the night and slept well. Instead, he allowed fear to make the entire night an unnecessary nightmare.

So, will you go on clinging to the branch and live your life as a nightmare – or will you let go of the branch and stand on your own two feet? Ah, that is the question! As the old saying goes, “There is nothing to fear, but fear itself.”

Fear will never go away as long as we have a body. Fear is intrinsic to our bodies and trying to make it “go away” or disappear is foolish and impossible. The antidote to fear is to find acceptance of all the elements of our life experience. Buddha talked about how the body trembles in the face of death and harm, and how arrogant it can be when it is being adorned by pleasure. This insight is important.

To understand the nature of the body and to accept the body for what it is, causes us to live in a Love that allows everything to occur just as it is without our interference, and frees us to recognize the Truth through consciousness. Ah, the simple beauty of it all…