Musings on fear

[Michael Larkin]

Premise: fear can only exist where there is vulnerability.

Hmm. Some things are definitely vulnerable - such as the body. The mind, too.

Still, we can in some circumstances ignore these seemingly legitimate causes for fear. For example, when protecting the life of a loved one.

Is there any aspect of us that is invulnerable and therefore fearless?

One can believe there is, but is that wishful thinking? Who knows...

Let's assume that there isn't anything that's invulnerable in us. If so, then we can, and will, lose everything.

But hang on. If we will lose everything, nothing means anything and so why be afraid of losing it?

So actually, fear only seems legitimate if there is something that can't be lost, and moreover, that fear can't be for the body or the mind, because as we know, they can both be lost.

So the only thing that's worth being fearful about is whatever can't be lost.

But hang on. If it can't be lost, it's invulnerable, and so why be afraid?

It seems that in any event whatsoever, there is no point being afraid. The original premise was wrong; fear has nothing to do with vulnerability, or for that matter, lack of it.

So what is fear and where does it come from? What conceivable use is it?

[Rajan Arulganesan]

Last night, I had a dream which seems connected to this discussion. Here follows an account of this dream;
The wife and I were sitting at a bus stop outside the hospital after one of her appointments. Sunny afternoon, I notice a short, well built black man in shorts and vest approaching us. I instantly dislike him - sort of an aversion - think of him as a low-life. He is followed by a trashy looking white woman who is pulling along a staffordshire bull - terrier with a marbled coat. The dog looks sort of cute.
The man asks us a random question about where he could get some peanut butter. I immediately become friendly and benevolent telling him the various retail outlets nearby where he could get peanut butter from. The wife chips in with the various buses that could take him to these shops.
He sits down next to my wife, rather too close, I feel. His gleaming, hairy legs are wide apart. His knees then brush against hers. I notice this, but, choose to ignore it out of cowardice, saying to myself, 'its only accidental'. He then grins at her leeringly, she turns to me with imploring eyes, terrified. I doubt my abilities in fighting this man unarmed, look around and find a metal bar of some sort lying around. Screaming abuse, I start attacking him with this weapon with excessive force as I fear to attack any less ferociously would give him an opportunity to hit back. All this happens very quickly.
His companion is shouting for me to stop and starts hitting me in the back and the dog starts to bark furiously. Somehow, my wife has also joined this melee now. She is also kicking, punching and screaming. They started running now, the black man, his companion and the dog. I still keep swinging the metal bar, hitting the dog and the woman, too. Eventually, they disappear from view, exhausted, we get home.
That night, I dream - dream within a dream-. I see the black man's face leering, exposing dirty, but, paradoxically white teeth. The face then transforms. It's the face of every man I fear; black, white, low life, and suddenly, the face that's leering is my own. I wake up in a cold sweat.

[Mike MacLeod]

We strive in the name of what we love. You could make a case that there cannot be strife with indifference, so the two motivations annihilate, leading to another occurrence of when "opposites combine and mingle", said to happen on the Path.

As the drummer in my three-piece band in 1969 we covered the long Spoonful jam on the Wheels of Fire album. Long live Ginger Baker.

[Michael Larkin]

Rajan,

It will be interesting to hear your take on PK's "Reality" in due course if you care to post about that. There are some aspects that seem more readily reconcilable with Sufism, such as the need to die before we die, etc. Maybe the rest of the book will resolve things.

Mike,

I never thought about the possible relationship of "strive" and "strife"; I checked the dictionary and they do seem to share etymological origins in a word meaning "conflict" (middle English/old French). But whether that is cognate with the ancient Greek word translated as "strife", I can't say. But if there is a cognate link, then I agree, "strive" casts things in a rather different light. I feel sure that Sufis would agree that we need to strive to reach Reality.

Love that song by Willie Dixon, by the way! :-)

[Mike MacLeod]

If "strife" means "conflict" in this context, it is one thing, but if it is the noun form of "strive" it means something else all together. What do we strive for?

Might be a spoonful of water
Saved from the desert sand
Might be a spoon of your precious love
Saved from another man

Some lies about dat spoonful
Some cries about dat spoonful
Some dies about dat spoonful
Everybody fightin' 'bout dat spoonful

- Mevlana Willie Dixon

[Rajan Arulganesan]

Very interesting, Michael. Oddly enough, I've just received my copy of the Peter Kingsley book 'reality' this morning. Ordered it from Amazon after reading your post about him linking Shurawardi with the ancient Greek philosophical tradition.

[Michael Larkin]

Hi Kareana,

Hey, go, girl! The best conversations happen when you just follow your stream of consciousness – ask James Joyce.

As has often happened at HR, the thoughts you’ve had seem to be weaving in and out of thoughts I’ve been having in between my last message and yours.

I’m in the process, as it happens, of reading Peter Kingsley’s “Reality”. You may recall from the old HR that I mentioned PK and how he is reviving the ancient Western spiritual tradition as evidenced in the works of Parmenides and Empedocles. He maintains that the essence of this tradition is continuous with the later tradition known as Sufism, but I have to say that at the moment, being about 75% through the book, I haven’t yet quite made the connection.

Why am I mentioning this? Well, your dream struck a resonance with something PK says. In ancient Greece, there were seen to be two competing forces – Love and Strife. Scholars have consistently interpreted this as saying that that the driving force of the universe, of evolution if you like, was deemed to be Love, personified by the goddess Aphrodite. This is contrary to Empedocles’ thinking, that Strife is actually the evolutionary force, the one that leads us back to our divine origins.

Aphrodite is the great illusionist, the great trickster, the one who uses mêtis or deception, to keep us bound within our mortality, keep us reincarnating. The only way out is to develop one’s own mêtis, to see through the illusion. We have to out-trick the supreme trickster, and we can’t do that unless and until we can see through Aphrodite’s tricks, see how she charms us into believing that this world of illusion is real.

What struck me about your dream is that your trickster, in the form of Batman’s Joker, turned into a sail and sailed off into the ocean. For the Greeks, the biggest symbol of a perilous place to be was in the middle of the ocean. Generally, they used to sail around coastlines, keeping landmarks in sight, and venturing beyond the Gibralter straits, out of the Mediterranean and into the wide open Atlantic, was unthinkable. This is an analogue of the way that Aphrodite keeps us bound within predefined limits.

But there were a few Greeks, the Phocaeans (and Parmenides was a Phocaean), who it is now believed sailed on the open sea all the way north to the Arctic circle, and all the way south as far, and maybe farther, as equatorial Africa. For centuries, this idea was dismissed as fancy, but indeed, it was found that there existed the northern “solid sea” and the various strange animals that Pytheas, the greatest of the Phocaean voyagers, had described. He made observations and measurements all along the way which were to prove very valuable to later generations of seafarers; they accepted those, but dismissed everything else he’d said as fabrication until rediscovered by them. They were trapped in Aphrodite’s illusion, you see.

If I’d had your dream, I might have interpreted it in the context of the foregoing. It would have been telling me that I would have to use all my own mêtis as a means of escaping the limited confines of Aphrodite’s mêtis. This inevitably involves voyaging into the unknown, an inherently perilous enterprise. We are never going to get anywhere, never going to discover Reality, without fortitude and guile of our own, without harnessing our own mêtis. The way forward is through strife, through facing and overcoming our fears.

As I’ve said, I haven’t yet quite reconciled Greek ideas with Sufic ones. Sufis continually bang on about Love as the supreme evolutionary force. And yet, it’s self-evident that we often grow and develop as a result of Strife. For Parmenides and Empedocles, evolution is all part of Aphrodite’s illusion that somehow we make progress towards Reality. What actually happened is that we started off as daemons (which originally meant gods, not devils), but that Love led us astray, and the way back is through Strife. We aren’t gradually progressing towards Reality with all our wonderful inventions and discoveries, this is just a trickster’s game to keep us deceived.

Differentiation, separation is, paradoxically, the way back...

[Kareana Kee]

Hi Michael and Rajan,

There’s nothing inherently impossible in the proposition that knowledge can eventually supersede faith.

I guess this is the reason for being on the path and participating in practices that will hopefully open up to us knowledge of our true self and God, and sometimes if were lucky we get little glimpses of a reality beyond us and our ego...and I guess both seeing and knowing others that have done it before us and are living (and not living :))examples by the way in which their lives have been transformed is faith inspiring.

On my computer desktop/background I have a picture of a whirling dervish with part of a well known Rumi poem, which seemed appropriate to transcribe here.

What shall I be?

I’ve again and again grown like grass.
I’ve experienced seven hundred and seventy moulds
I died from minerality and become vegetable
And from vegetative-ness I died and become animal
I died from animality and became man
Then why fear disappearance through death?
For the next time I shall die
Bring forth wings and feathers like angels
After that soaring higher than angels
What you cannot imagine I shall be that.

Im not sure it helps explain the point of fear, but I am just making random associations here :)

Another random association is a dream I had last night. I dont remember any details around it only that I woke up with a selective recollection of a smiling face, not unlike "the joker" in the batman movie; there was something not quite right about it! and then the wind came up and blew into the face and as it expanded, starting with the mouth and eyes and crevasses of the face it transformed into a sail and then a sailing ship and sailed off on the ocean. This was the only part I remembered and it seemed astonishing clear in my waking moment that this dream was about trust, fear and attachment. Although as I reflect a little more I see there maybe other ways to read it.

Back to the point of fear, im having a random thought that the point of fear, somehow ties in with the point of our existence. If God created us so that he may know himself through us, then there had to be some differentiation in our form and being to make that possible? Or perhaps there is a more adequate explaination...I am just teasing out rationale :)

[Michael Larkin]

Rajan,

I also feel part of the development or maturity of a human being is to overcome these fears ultimately, if they are attuned to life in the right way.

Yes, I think you put that well, and feel it's compatible with the further musings that Kareana evoked in me.

[Michael Larkin]

Kareana,

You're probably right. I feel sure fear is related to a perception of vulnerability, even if, when one reflects on it, complete vulnerabity would inevitably lead to complete loss. But that's a realisation that I think we are only really willing to accept later in life - until then, we tend not to fully accept our mortality; we tend to repress it. But if we fully accepted it from the beginning, we'd see that fear is pointless.

You’re definitely right that the instinct for survival through fight or flight is inbuilt. Every organic thing, even the most simple creature, acts to preserve its continued existence. And another point, I suppose, is that for the first part of life, there is in fact some growth and development: there does seem to be a developmental arc – but that arc reaches its zenith and then declines. Our powers fail. It is a cruel fact of all organic existence that the initial phase of it seems so promising, while the latter phase seems so disappointing.

You have an interesting idea that fear and pleasure are infantile attachments that get carried through to adulthood, that while in some ways we grow, in others we don’t. So maybe fear is most appropriate and constructive during development, something that helps ensure we actually get to function as adults. Maybe it’s just a legacy of prior evolutionary development, one that ensured the human species arose in the first place.

And in that there may be a kind of hope that there is some ultimate purpose in existence. Life not only exists, but evolves. The arcs of individual lives may rise and fall, but the arc of life itself seems, so far, to have continuously ascended. And fear was one factor that assured that that happened, assured that life fought or fled so that it could not only live in one little instance, but provide a platform for the endless ascent of life as a whole.

And yet, at a certain point, a little individual consciousness can transcend fear. It can do that through faith, and the hope is, that one day it will be able to do it through certain knowledge that there is nothing to fear because it can’t actually be destroyed. The evolutionary trend towards a form of consciousness able to transcend through faith is readily verifiable. Many people of faith do not fear death, are convinced that something will continue to exist.

There’s nothing inherently impossible in the proposition that knowledge can eventually supersede faith. But until we attain knowledge, there must always be at least a scintilla of doubt. And as long as there’s that, there must always be at least a scintilla of fear. A scintilla that, as fear has always done, will ensure we continue to strive to evolve. I wonder, is that the positive purpose of fear? Or, put differently, is fear merely a rather unpleasant subjective impression of an ultimately positive force?

Pain, after all, is subjectively unpleasant, but ultimately constructive. If you are in pain, you seek a remedy. If not, but still sick, you may injure yourself even more by carrying on regardless.

[Rajan Arulganesan]

I don't exactly know where fear comes from, but, I am a victim of it in all sorts of ways. I'm fearful of the disapproval of others, being unable to cope with stress, difficult situations, boredom, etc. I also feel part of the development or maturity of a human being is to overcome these fears ultimately, if they are attuned to life in the right way.