I was mowing the grass on a beautiful afternoon… blue sky, nice warm breeze… and flying high were turkey vultures… circling as they generally do. The thought occurred that something had died and that they were waiting to feed upon it.
In the previous weeks, I had opened a hidden layer within my self in which fear still presided and ruled. It was surprising to stumble across it and since it was a new angle… a new fear based territory within… it had been quite a challenge to deal with. If we reach a point where we feel we have arrived, a plateau of spiritual growth, and if we stay there, stagnation soon besets us. If we are on a spiritual journey of growth, we will inevitably reach into unexplored regions within… those that present new challenges… unlike any we have met before. So this is where I was.
Fear… it seems to be a pervasive elemental constituent that has roots in every aspect of human existence. To be honest, I have never found the well from which it springs. Some feel they have found it, for instance, in A Course in Miracles, as I interpret it, they seem to be saying that fear is a self-imposed state based upon a guilt for having created this human reality as an affront to God. Well, I do not know but there does seem to be this basic root fear in all human beings.
For most of us, fear is something we do not want to face. We bury it deeply within, under countless layers of thought and emotion, never to be felt. Yet, it seems we lose something of ourselves by living in this way. By burying fear we also bury our essence… we bury our love… the feeling of innocence is lost in creating walls to protect us from our fear. To protect our selves from fear in this manner… is to block the possibility of love.
It is often difficult for we human beings to realize that we are motivated by this basic fear in every aspect of our being. To see this would require that we drop these walls and feel the fear within. This is a frightening thought and something we naturally avoid at all costs. Most would prefer to attempt a life of bliss, free of facing fear… although inevitably fear will catch up with us in many forms throughout our lives. There is really no avoiding it… and the act of avoidance seems to strengthen it… to make it more powerful when it does surface. If there is to be growth… if we are to transcend our humanity… we must face it… we must end the building of these protective walls so we can feel… so we can look at our fear and make it our friend.
There are endless foci upon which fear can be placed. The fear of not being good enough, of not succeeding, the fear of becoming ill, of my partner being unfaithful, of a friend’s betrayal… the choices are endless. However, it seems that these are simply the tendrils of a much more basic humanistic state. It could be that the well from which this basic fear springs has to do with our mortality. Each human being is going to die… the human form, if it lasts long enough, will wither and end. Even if we are eternal energy beings, and we have a strong awareness of it, facing our human mortality is nonetheless a challenge.
Throughout the history of human existence, this basic root fear has been present. This can be witnessed by all of the wars and cruelties that have occurred both en mass and on a personal level. It seems that this fear is embedded within our DNA. It is a part of our conditioning as a human being. At birth, each of us entered into a world that is primarily driven by this unconscious fear. We were shown all of the various ways that those around us deal with it and we modeled our behavior after them. When our children are born we pass on our fearful ways to them, not suspecting that we are simply passing on an insane lifestyle that is based upon the avoidance of fear. We scratch out a living from the infertile land within the walls of our fear defenses. Within the fortification, nothing grows beyond the scant seedlings that are quickly trampled by the greedy feet that trod it… feet greedy for distance from fear.
Becoming aware of this basic fear requires that we allow it to come to the surface of our minds… we beckon it forth. Only by watching it, can we begin to tear down the walls we have been unconsciously built throughout a long history of human endeavor… that prevent us from feeling and expressing the love within. This is the transcendence of our humanity… living a life free of a fear-dominated mindset.
It may be that this basic root fear is so intrinsic to our humanity that it can never be completely ended. Yet by unraveling the layers in which it hides… in which it has been buried… when they surface… we can see it and face it. One day, perhaps today… one moment, perhaps now… those vultures will feed of the decaying remnants of a fear that once lived within. For now, it seems that the death of fear occurs each time it rears its ugly head and we go beyond it instead of burying it… avoiding it.
As the death of fear occurs instead of the fear of death… we have evolved.