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?

[Kareana Kee]

Hi Michael, Mike, Rajan and Jane,

hmmm thinking about strife, striving and love as deception. Unfortunately for this conversation im not very familiar with the Greek legends or have I read PK, so please forgive me if my ramblings here got the point confused :)

Firstly thankyou Michael for your thoughts on my dream...very interesting and I am still sitting with this one...especially pointing out the archtypal element, it has lead me on a path of inquiry too myself :)

Some thoughts Ive had though from the readings here are: what does PK mean by love as a deception? It is interesting I have been reading and nearly finished Love in the Western World by Denis De Rougemont. Rougemont writes on the rise and fall of the human love affair and links human ideas of love too the driving underground of the early mystics 'heretical' Divine Love affairs. The heresy reappeared in disguise in the form of the medieval troubadours songs and later lead to notions of 'human' love becoming indoctrinated into societies. One example of this for instances was the rise of the Romantic era of history. The way Aphrodites Love as deception is described here, reminds me of a Love that maybe should not be called as such. The Love that is often described in the West is one of clinging too (or flight from) some object of attachment.....and indeed could be said to be an illusionary kind of Love and not an evolutionary kind. The interesting thing here is that it is exactly that kind of love that causes strife and conflict.

Somehow it seems to be that both strife and conflict are bound up with Divine Love as 'spiritually'evolutionary forces. I dont think this conflicts with Sufi thought (although i am no expert). I am thinking of the first thing some teacher do with a student (llewellyn Vaughan-Lee describes this)who embarks on the sufi path of using 'shock' treatment such as unjust criticisims or acting coldly towards a student to create an unbalance, and generate what I would consider 'strife' for the student. This is all very key to breaking the illusion of ego and 'reality' we have become confortable in.

Ive also been contemplating a lot on the point of fear. Again i dont think ive come up with a coherent position, but if God is everything, then it seems fear must be included in this. Some would say fear is the absence of Love, or perhaps a Sufi would say fear is the absence of a knowledge or rememberance of Love/Oneness. So fear is only a reaction to an illusion (contraction and then expansion? Seperation and Oneness) and on a more positive note, it would seem to indicate fear is actually a signal of an illusion? It sounds very funny when I write that? Too think of fear in a postive way :) I guess the only problem with rationalising fear in this way, is clearly their are times we have to differentiate between putting ourselves in harms way and transcending our fears. If there is no duality, then couldnt fear and love be different sides of the same coin to use that metaphor?

My apologies again if my ramblings are a little confused! :)

[Mike MacLeod]

I have to say that I was not impressed by Kingsley's In the Dark Places of Wisdom. I only managed to get through about 80% of it, and that was hard work. I quit when it became clear to me that he was not going to provide any instruction in incubation.

You can tell when a writer has had a whiff of the real. It cuts through a lot of irrelevancies. Kingsley writes in teasing, pregnant prose, pleased with the significance of what he is about to impart and eager to tar and feather those who polluted the well.

A writer doesn't even have to understand the whiff he has had, but he needs a little humility. Consider Robert Graves epochal The White Goddess, where he wrestles with similar issues (broadly speaking) and openly confesses his confusion and how he is driven to find answers in spite of the convoluted trail. Kingsley, on the other hand, is far too impressed with himself and his research.

The book is also written as though he was told to "popularize" his work, with the result that he is writing down to a 12-year-old reading level. He repeats himself endlessly and goes on at length. The book would make a decent read condensed to about a 15,000 word essay.

Writing as a historian, he seems unaware of the practical advances made in psychology and their effects on spiritual expansion. As usual, I point to the work of A.H. Almaas in this regard, but he seems to be unaware of the simple use of binaural beat technology to reach meditative or noumenal states. Simply using an entrainment program for a week or two can teach just about anybody how to enter a Theta-band state in a few minutes, the gateway to the kinds of experiential practice he coyly hints about (I highly recommend the Insight CD from the Immrama Institute [http://www.immrama.org/] as the best of the ones I have tried - it uses rainfall as the carrier for the entrainment signal, instead of music as others do, but which I find intrusive).

Those who write from experience have an unmistakable solidity to their writing. Idries Shah has this bite to his work, but an even better example is A Course in Miracles. When I read a single paragraph from it I got the immediate impression of guidance from a tremendous altitude - a place where the writer could see far more than I could, to either side and in front and behind where I was sitting in spacetime.

My comments here are unavoidably conditioned by my own experiences. I am sorry to be so tough on Professor Kingsley, but in my opinion he should stick to lecturing his fellow pedants and leave off writing popular books.

[Jane]

Rajan
I was helped through 'a perfumed scorpion' a few years back at caravanserai!
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/caravansarai
Best wishes
Jane

[Rajan Arulganesan]

You may well be right Michael, I had this dream and felt that I should share it with HR as it seemed interesting. I did have my own theories about it, but, they don't seem that significant now. On a different note, following your exchanges with Jane and others about this whole 'strife vs. love' ( only figuratively! ) debate, I am itching to get started on 'Reality'. I have to finish ' a perfumed scorpion' first, finding it very advanced, struggling!

[Michael Larkin]

Hi Rajan,

Quite a dream! You know, I often treat dream interpretation with caution; I think dreams sometimes feed back to us in symbolic form something we have already decided is so in conscious waking life, rather than some absolute representation of Truth coming from a "higher source".

I'm wondering if this dream is feeding back to you your understanding of issues that you have been discussing at HR recently. For instance, the man you beat and who personifies a "low life", eventually turns out in your dream-within-a-dream to be none other than yourself. Well, we've discussed here how the accusing self tends to beat itself up, and how hard it can be for us to realise that is what is happening.

Dream interpretation isn't my strongpoint. I will leave it to others to comment further.

[Jane]

I studied them a lifetime ago and really it doesn't amount to much! 150 lines left of Parmenides and perhaps 500 of Empedocles
Actually I think a massive amount of real power could be in as many lines, sometimes less is more, but not really there, where it is fragments and speculation. Then again maybe it depends who is looking...

[Jane]

Well, a bit! I suppose what is interesting is that each brings their own slant to these writings, consciously or unconsciously and reflects their own time and their own tradition. And a change is afoot this time and this tradition is more able to look for the romance rather than the science in these old writings.

[Jane]

I studied them a lifetime ago and really it doesn't amount to much! 150 lines left of Parmenides and perhaps 500 of Empedocles, its just a couple of pages, really, intriguing though.

[Michael Larkin]

Hi Jane,

Thanks for your post. One thing that one has to bear in mind is that the translations of Parmenides and Empedocles (according to PK, who is a recognised Greek scholar of the highest order), is that generations of philosophers, starting with Aristotle, have "massaged" their real meanings.

Oftentimes, PK claims, they have managed to convert what was said in the original Greek into its exact opposite. Occasionally, they have even inserted words of their own so that the translation agrees with their predefined ideas. Hence they have made of Parmenides an icon of rationalism, when in fact he was pointing out the limitations of rationality and maintaining that human beings were incapable of reasoning their way to the Truth. The goddess of the underworld, Persephone, was providing true guidance in Parmenedes' poem. For him, she played a similar role as that of Strife for Empedocles.

Yes, Empedocles says that love brings things together, and strife separates them, but his point in the original Greek (says PK), is that unification contaminates the purity of the elements (earth, water, fire, air), confusing human beings as to the truth of their origin as daemons in the highest element, the air or aether. They are currently in a "mixed" state, living an illusion, and it is Love that has done that.

PK has shaken up the world of Greek classicists, apparently, but nonetheless, because of his credentials, he isn't being dismissed. I can't say whether or not he is correct, lacking as I do the ability to translate ancient Greek and PK's acknowledged encyclopaedic understanding of Western antiquity.

I don't think that PK is saying Love is more important than Strife - they both have a part to play in the natural cycle of the universe. But he does seem to be saying that for millennia, we have inverted the significance of their roles. It's a challenging idea, and I do not say I either accept or reject it, but it is providing me with much food for thought.

[Jane]

Heraclitus equates strife with justice, as in the way things are and the way things should be.
'One should knowthat war is common and justice strife and that everything comes aboute in accordance with strife and what must be.'
So seeing love and strife as opposites. You have what must be and then on the other hand through love what might be. Love creates new possibilities and changes even what is set in stone.
Looking up Empedocles it also looks like he has an idea about strife being about things dividing and becoming more sepatate while love is the opposite force which unites and brings things together.
'And they never cease from this continuous interchange,
now by Love all coming together into one,
now again each carried appart by the emnity of strife'
That sounds like the big bang idea too where the universe does all that expanding and contracting. The idea of a primary physics is what the anglosaxon philosophers focused on and yet they (the presocratics) seem to be reaching inwards for metapysics too.
Parmenides seems to have had the idea that everything is held together by the truth. He writes:
'A single story of a road is left, and it is. On it are signs, very many in number and it has always been there and it will never be destroyed.'