Facing Our Fear to Understand Reality and Rethink What’s Possible

Facing Our Fear to Understand Reality and Rethink What’s Possible

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into the mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, joining you in this moment so we can remember together that Real wisdom is dangerous, but it’s the direct, unconventional path to success and the good life for all. Dangerous wisdom can heal us and the world at the same time. 

Today we return to the contemplation of Apocalyptic LoveWisdom. We have our intentions set on living better, loving better, and helping the world. If we want to arrive at a significant revelation about healing ourselves and the world, we can improve our chances by confronting our fear. 

In our last contemplation, we tried to sense a need for compassion in relation to our fears. Maybe if we become totally enlightened, we can experience freedom from fear on the basis of wisdom and consummatory insight into the nature of reality. But for all of us on this side of that kind of enlightenment, we experience fear. 

As a sensitive psychologist who had many clients to learn from Jung saw this aspect of the psyche at work in both individuals and the culture at large. In his essay on the archetypes of the collective unconscious, Jung writes, 

Whether primitive or not, mankind always stands on the brink of actions it performs itself but does not control. The whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war, to take but one example. Mankind is powerless against mankind, and the gods, as ever, show it the ways of fate. Today we call the gods “factors,” which comes from facere, ‘to make.’ The makers stand behind the wings of the world-theatre. It is so in great things as in small. In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the ‘factors’ themselves.  But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors.  To know this is decidedly unpleasant, for nothing is more disillusioning than the discovery of our own inadequacy.  It can even give rise to primitive panic, because, instead of being believed in, the anxiously-guarded supremacy of consciousness . . . is questioned in the most dangerous way.  (CW 9i: 49) 

It may not at first seem scary to seriously contemplate the powers that live themselves through us. But those who have experienced such things often experience fear. In large part, in our context, this occurs because we lack a way of life that can prepare us for and help us skillfully integrate experiences that we would currently, culturally, label as anomalous and even insane. We tend to write them off, explain them away, and so on. 

None of this is abstract. We’re talking about something totally intimate and practical. This has to do with our very psyche, with the nature of reality, and with the ways we deceive ourselves, limit ourselves, and cause harm to ourselves and others. We want to try and find out how we could liberate and heal ourselves and our world, how we can realize the meaning of our life, and how we can fulfill our highest potential. 

Let’s continue with Jung. He writes: 

. . . since ignorance is no guarantee of security, and in fact only makes our insecurity still worse, it is probably better despite our fear to know where the danger lies. To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem. At any rate we then know that the greatest danger threatening us comes from the unpredictability of the psyche’s reactions. Discerning persons have realized for some time that external historical conditions, of whatever kind, are only occasions, jumping-off grounds, for the real dangers that threaten our lives. These are the present politico-social delusional systems. We should not regard them causally, as necessary consequences of external conditions, but as decisions precipitated by the collective unconscious. 

In other words, our contemplation together has global significance. When we look at the structures of power and domination that constrain our lives, when we look at the whole pattern of insanity as it appears in politics, economics, and our relationship with ourselves, each other, and Nature, we see decisions made by us. 

If we look at war zones and sacrifice zone, if we look at oil spills and landfills, if we look at the plastic in the oceans and the human beings in prisons, if we look at the massive inequality and the massive number of stupid jobs, we see our own collective psyche. 

There’s plastic in our blood now. Have you heard about this? 

Why do we all have plastic in our blood? One way to answer that complex question is to ask, Are we afraid of our life without plastic? Look carefully at your life over the next week, and see how much plastic you come into contact with, how much plastic you depend on for the way you now live your life, and sense the part of you that might cling to that plastic. 

That’s not an easy experiment, because we might not even see all the plastic in our lives. It lines food wrappers, coffee cups, and even tin cans. We also use plastic for medical equipment, parts of our cars and computers, and of course our clothing. 

Our life with plastic goes together with our fear of life itself. We find the wildness of life a bit scary. Freud went so far as to say the whole point of civilization is to protect us from Nature. That’s a horrifying thought. We live here. We come from here, from Nature. And yet we treat it as scary, dirty, and too hard to deal with. 

We want everything risk free, so we pave over anything that looks dangerous or difficult. We put up fences and walls to try and keep Nature out of our business. We shoot wolves just as we used to shoot horses, because they refuse to acknowledge our deluded carving up of the world. 

The rancher may seem to hate the wolf, but often when we look underneath our hatred, we find fear. The big bad wolf has long tortured conquest consciousness, the style of consciousness that now pervades the World. This has to do with the style of consciousness that the dominant culture encourages. We get educated into this consciousness. It’s not something we see, but something that creates what we see. We see everything filtered through a mind out of attunement with reality. 

And here’s the freakiest thing we want to consider: We want to seriously consider how it is and why it is that reality itself seems to induce terror in us—even in the most rational, sober, or passionate among us. Some of us may think we want the truth, or want to see things as they really are. Some of us may think we want some kind of spiritual or mystical experience. But claiming to want those things, and even passionately believing we want those things, doesn’t mean a part of us doesn’t fear them—perhaps an intense fear. 

How can we function well if we don’t attune ourselves with reality? And how do we attune with reality if we fear some part of reality? 

We all act on the basis of what we think of as real. We often think we’re being realistic, but maybe we all fear the truth—and maybe the truth we fears differs for each of us a little bit or a lot. 

If we don’t confront our fears and other psychic material we might repress or suppress, we will continue on an unskillful and unrealistic path. Any time we look at the world and see something tragic, and we wonder, “How could this happen?”—we are trying to inquire into that question together now, as well as to try and better understand ourselves and the nature of reality. 

It’s essential to understand that our contemplation has to do with far more than curious or anomalous phenomena. It has to do with our lives together, with the world we share, and with the major problems we face. Our contemplation here together has to do with daily life, with seemingly mundane affairs as well as with more momentous or expansive views, practices, and events in our lives. 

The strange phenomena we consider serve to sensitize us to our own deeply held fears and confusions. Something about the nature of reality seems to freak us out, and we can get downright stubborn and even hostile when any belief we cling to gets threatened. We look together at the heart of conflict and suffering and the degradation of the world that happens because of our ignorance and fear. It takes a great deal of courage to challenge our own beliefs. 

We have to sincerely ask ourselves if we will go on limiting ourselves mainly because of fear. 

Why do we continue to degrade the world, to pollute our own air, water, and soil, to fight wars and let inequality persist? It seems so crazy. Why would we do these things? 

Doesn’t make sense to ask if we do this, in large part, because of fear we have about doing something better? We seem to have a fear of doing what some part of us already knows what we need to do, and we also seem to have a fear of letting ourselves know things we need to know—letting ourselves listen deeply to the sacred and the whole community of life, so we can hear what the mystery itself wants us to do, and what all our relations in this world need us to do. The fear and clinging that blocks us can arise at such a deep level in the psyche that we can’t see it. 

In other words, some of the fear we have considered and will consider is unconscious or may have unconscious causes. And some of that fear may get evoked by glimpses of a reality that transcends the deeply held beliefs we have about what we are and what the Cosmos is. 

Collectively, human beings think, say, and do a lot of unhelpful, unskillful, and even tragic things because of fear, and our fear functions as a force that affects all life on Earth. 

The basic operating system of the dominant culture drives cultural activity on the basis of both hope and fear, or we could say craving and fear. 

We have made fear and craving and distraction and confusion a basic business model. In some cases, this appears explicitly, as it does in marketing agencies—and that includes political campaigns. 

This is what marketing and propaganda focus on. Both corporations and our government rely on craving and fear, and they deliberately try to exploit our suffering, including our pain, our confusion, our depression, our anxiety, our self-doubts, and our addictions. 

Most companies have this encumbered psychology as their business model. How many companies do work that focuses on reducing fear and craving, reducing distraction and boredom, reducing ignorance and self-doubt? 

How many things that people sell us—and how many campaigns for selling it—actively reduce craving? How many things that people sell us actively promote peace in ourselves and the world? 

And even if we can think of some examples of companies offering seemingly nice products, How many things that people sell us would be necessary in culture rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty? If our culture rooted itself in peace, well-being, wisdom, care, and some of our other most precious values, how much currently for sale would no longer be for sale? 

In any case, these things all go together. So, as we speak about fear, we naturally refer also to craving, boredom, distraction, and confusion as well. 

And when we focus on fear, we can see that the system has to keep fear active in order to keep so many of us in bondage. We may fancy ourselves free—and thus keep ourselves in bondage—or we may sense our lack of freedom, but worry that we have no way out. 

The culture actively uses fear to keep us trapped, and our own unconscious patterns will collude with the culture by short-circuiting attempts to see into reality if those attempts get too close to anything that feels threatening. 

If we leave our fear in the shadow, by denying it in any way or giving up on it, then we make liberation harder for everyone. Moreover, we perpetuate conflict if we forget that the people seemingly in conflict with us have fear in them too. They are just like us. Though some people may not experience much fear because of biological accident, we should understand that fear connects us with countless sentient beings who also experience fear. 

And, for most human beings, fear is no small matter in our lives. For instance, We so fear discomfort that we will avoid doing things we know we should do because it might result in discomfort. We can fear rejection so much that we hide our feelings from others. And yet the experience of rejection can’t possibly compare with the experience of having our sense of reality obliterated. We consider that kind of extreme fear to understand our whole existential situation. 

If we can become more fully aware of fear, and look into its nature, we can begin to liberate the energy of fear so that it can become more helpful. 

And if we continue to educate ourselves about the nature of mind and the mind of Nature—if we keep inquiring into the true nature of self and World—we will feel less fear as reality, as the great mystery begins to offer itself to us with greater intimacy, and we simultaneously begin to offer ourselves to the mystery in mutuality. 

Continuing this basic theme, we might turn to some reflections from the philosopher Aldous Huxley. In the introduction to his collection on The Perennial Philosophy, Huxley does a nice job of relating the spirit of the epistemology of mysticism.

Epistemology is the fancy word for our theory of knowing. We all live our lives on the basis of what we think we know or can know, and what we think don’t know or cannot know.

In the contemporary context, we have all gotten a big wake-up call about the need for agreement about what we know. We can see the pandemic as well as the wider political and economic situation as a crisis in knowing. We don’t agree on how to know ourselves and our world, and we fight over conflicting views of reality. 

We need to become better knowers, and we need to cultivate better ways of knowing. These things go together. If we want a litmus test of our way of knowing, we can simply examine ourselves and the world we have made with our current ways of knowing. 

We find a great many anxious and depressed people, a great many stressed and burned out people. We find toxins in our air, water, and soil. We find species going extinct and ecologies unravelling. What does all this say about the way we know ourselves and our World? 

Nature holds up a mirror to ourselves, but we can also look into an actual mirror, or consult the mirror of our awareness. Do we think ourselves so saintly and sagely that we can claim confidence in the way we know the world? Are we truly happy and at peace, and do we bring happiness and peace to those we claim to love? Does the world seem healthier and more vitalizing for our presence in it? 

These are questions we can begin to ask. Huxley brings together the spirit of such questions with the spirit of mystical philosophy. 

He writes, 

Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing. For example, the being of a child is transformed by growth and education into that of a man; among the results of this transformation is a revolutionary change in the way of knowing and the amount and character of the things known. As the individual grows up, his knowledge becomes more conceptual and systematic in form, and its factual, utilitarian content is enormously increased. But these gains are offset by a certain deterioration in the quality of immediate apprehension, a blunting and a loss of intuitive power. Or consider the change in his being which the scientist is able to induce mechanically by means of his instruments. Equipped with a spectroscope and a sixty-inch reflector an astronomer becomes, so far as eyesight is concerned, a superhuman creature; and, as we should naturally expect, the knowledge possessed by this superhuman creature is very different, both in quantity and quality, from that which can be acquired by a star-gazer with unmodified, merely human eyes. 

Okay, so there he points to changes we could characterize as intellectual and physiological. But, he says the potential changes in a knower go beyond that, and other aspects of our being affect what we can know. For instance, our ethics—the ethics we live by, not merely the ethics we profess—our ethics shapes our capacity to know. That can seem shocking. 

Huxley continues, 

What we know depends also on what, as moral beings, we choose to make ourselves. “Practice,” in the words of William James, “may change our theoretical horizon, and this in a twofold way: it may lead into new worlds and secure new powers. Knowledge we could never attain, remaining what we are, may be attainable in consequence of higher powers and a higher life, which we may morally achieve.” To put the matter more succinctly, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” And the same idea has been expressed by the Sufi poet, Jalal-uddin Rumi, in terms of a scientific metaphor: “The astrolabe of the mysteries of God is love.” 

A lovely passage, isn’t it? An astrolabe is something like the ancient version of GPS and google maps. It gave an image of the cosmos and helped people find their place in it, and navigate. Like Socrates, Huxley invites us to appreciate love as the soul’s compass as we journey the landscape of mystery. 

Let’s follow Huxley just a little further, because he makes an excellent point, and then he gives an excellent analogy. First, he writes, referring to the book he has put together, 

This book . . . is an anthology of the Perennial Philosophy; but, though an anthology, it contains … few extracts from the writings of professional men of letters and, though illustrating a philosophy, hardly anything from the professional philosophers. The reason for this is very simple. The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfil certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit. Why should this be so? We do not know. It is just one of those facts which we have to accept, whether we like them or not and however implausible and unlikely they may seem. . . . 

In regard to few professional philosophers and [intellectuals] is there any evidence that they did very much in the way of fulfilling the necessary conditions of direct spiritual knowledge. When poets or metaphysicians talk about the subject matter of the Perennial Philosophy, it is generally at second hand. But in every age there have been some men and women who chose to fulfil the conditions upon which alone, as a matter of brute empirical fact, such immediate knowledge can be had; and of these a few have left accounts of the Reality they were thus enabled to apprehend and have tried to relate, in one comprehensive system of thought, the given facts of this experience with the given facts of their other experiences. To such first-hand exponents of the Perennial Philosophy those who knew them have generally given the name of “saint” or “prophet,” “sage” or “enlightened one.” And it is mainly to these, because there is good reason for supposing that they knew what they were talking about, and not to the professional philosophers or men of letters, that I have gone for my selections. 

Okay, so he agrees with Thoreau that there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. We have lots of intellectuals who may think they know or may seek knowledge, but maybe not enough of them have done the work needed to become the kind of skillful knowers we need right now, knowers of transformative and healing insight into some of the most important things about the Cosmos and this World we share. 

When I was in the university system I would sometimes joke with my colleagues that academics try so hard to be rigorous, but in fact they are lazy. They lack the rigor that comes from a more holistic and robust practice of life. Huxley’s comments resonate with that suggestion. For many important questions in our life, we need to do more to find out things for ourselves, rather than to satisfy ourselves with beliefs, arguments, textual analysis, and the rest of the standard practices of the academic world. 

We of course need good dialogue and good conversation, as well as excellent spiritual education, no matter our field of expertise. And we also need direct experiment and experience. Rooting our exploration in ethics and a vitalizing vision of the Cosmos, we have to examine our own mind and experience, and run the sophisticated experiments the wisdom traditions have bequeathed us. All of that takes inspiration, passion, and effort. 

Why do we have to put in this effort? Here Huxley offers a nice analogy. He writes,  

Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest. Similarly, nothing in our everyday experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual [person] has, as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when that mind is subjected to certain rather drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest, not only to the mind itself, but also, by its reflection in external behaviour, to other minds. It is only by making physical experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of matter and its potentialities. And it is only by making psychological and moral experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of mind and its potentialities. In the ordinary circumstances of average sensual life these potentialities of the mind remain latent and unmanifested. If we would realize them, we must fulfil certain conditions and obey certain rules, which experience has shown empirically to be valid. 

We should clarify that “drastic” here refers to the rupture with habitual ways of thinking, speaking, and acting. It doesn’t mean we have to torture ourselves or turn spiritual practice into some kind of extreme sport. We may in fact do things that from a certain perspective seem extreme, such as meditating for many hours a day, perhaps in an intensive retreat that might go on for weeks, months, or even years. 

But we don’t brutalize our body or mind. We can meet the conditions of transformative knowing in a healthy way. 

Of course, a vision quest in which we have neither food nor water for four days could feel a little more extreme, and many ceremonies can bring us to somewhat extreme situations. However, these measures don’t work well if we do them in a manner that puts us in conflict with ourselves, as if we have to fight a war against our own heart, mind, body, or World. 

The main thing to keep in mind is that, even though we are reality right now, we can stare in front of ourselves for hours on end and not discover the true nature of this reality. When we look at water, nothing about it tells us it’s made up of two gasses. Why would we guess that water is made of stuff that appears as gasses in ordinary conditions? 

Our spiritual life is like this. We use our minds all the time, but we don’t know the nature of our mind or the nature of reality. We need education, and we need the tremendous energy of a meditative mind, a passionate mind and heart, in order to experiment in ways conducive to insight. 

The trouble is, we tend to get comfortable in our lives. We don’t arouse enough passion for spiritual or philosophical questions. Whatever passion we have goes into starting businesses, getting promotions, branding ourselves, developing all kinds of expertise, doing our taxes, keeping our car and home in good condition, and so on. From a holistic philosophical point of view, most of our energy either gets wasted or actively misused. The culture perpetuates itself by either making us too busy and tired to muster passions that could heal us and our world, or provoking in us passions that have negative consequences for the world. 

This general behavior led Socrates and other sages to tell us that we sleepwalk through our lives. Even in the aspects of our lives that seem very energetic, we remain asleep, and all that energy goes into a delusion. 

That creates a situation in which we may have to experience a philosophical thunderbolt to startle us out of our slumber. As Charles Seif wrote in the journal Science, “Every once in a while, cosmologists are dragged, kicking and screaming, into a universe much more unsettling than they had any reason to expect” (2005: 78). 

Doesn’t that sound remarkable? Scientists dragged, kicking and screaming? Some philosophers, politicians, business executives, and so-called thought leaders and influencers would do worse than kick and scream—if we could wake them from their slumber at all. 

At a deep level, many of us cling to apparent certainties about what the Cosmos simply cannot contain as possibilities. And so, many of our scientists, politicians, economists, and business leaders function as metaphysical police and arbiters of the possible. 

Why should they tell us what’s possible? Why shouldn’t we all have to take that guidance from Nature, from our own soul, and from the great mystery itself? Let us keep in mind that we shouldn’t let our ego proclaim what should be possible or impossible. Many people fall prey to that error too.  

Okay, we need to continue this arc, and get to the terrifying dream of William James. But you can carry some of these thoughts with you, and think about what we should think of as possible, and what we should think of as misguided. 

When we live in a culture that tells us it’s possible to become a trillionaire and have all manner of material wealth, it’s possible to have our minds downloaded into a computer, it’s possible to colonize Mars or live in vast ships orbiting the Earth—but it’s impossible to change our economic system, it’s impossible to live in compassion and cooperation, it’s impossible to root ourselves in wisdom, and it’s impossible to live in harmony with ourselves, other humans, and the community of life we depend on—when we live in that kind of culture, we should pause—really come to a stop—and ask what’s going on.

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If you have questions, reflections, or stories of magic and mystery to share—stories of wisdom and wonder, compassion and courage, creativity and insight—get in touch through dangerouswisdom.org and we might bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things; take good care of them.