DO YOU WANT TO DRINK FROM THE OVERFLOWING OASIS OF THE ANTIDOTE TO FEAR? WELL OPEN YOURSELF UP TO TRUST
Travelling from a place of fear to love is like travelling from control to flow, or from distrust to surrender.
Let’s start with a definition from Gustavo Zerbino, a survivor of the Andes plane that ended up in the cinema in the film “Alive”. In a lecture he said: “Fear is the mental projection of an event that has not yet occurred.”
And the thing is that fear sells you the assurance that it will protect you from a fear that it gives you itself on a silver platter. It blackmails you to delay being yourself. It darkly whispers the worst events in your ear so that you go on to analyse them to the mouldy back room of your worry. There where you keep an eye on the crazy madness of infinite possibilities in a cold room of solitude.
So, little by little, you make small concessions – like the woman who gives in to cutting her hair or putting on a longer skirt due to her abusive husband – and thus your life and your being are waning before a rain of sulphuric worries that relentlessly intensify over you. With you there, rusting and limping along the paths of resignation.
Like the abuser, the voice of fear tells you: “it’s for your own good” and that way you spend your whole life preparing yourself, drafting the draft of a piece that never premiers and conforming to a surrogate of life that is not Life. In this way, one by one, you ruminate the possible scenarios that present themselves in your imagination. Living in “the simulator”: that parallel and virtual reality where threat looms over you and where the chill imposes its cold climate of helplessness and darkness.
That voice of fear screams a lot and makes a lot of noise because it is the voice of the lie. However, there is another voice, the one of truth. That sweet voice that only articulates itself once and comes from the heart. It is very important to learn to distinguish them.
The voice of fear gets all its power when you believe it, but in reality it doesn’t know anything. In fact “it doesn’t know that it doesn’t know” and for that reason believes that it knows. Your greatest fear is of that voice. To what it will tell you through judgements in the darkness of your room when you go to sleep. If you become aware that your freedom lies in not knowing, that you only know that you know nothing, then you already know more than fear and then you can neutralize that metallic voice. Ignoring it, that is, and focusing on your essential ignorance, innocence.
Doubts disappear when you assume that you don’t know. Because doubt comes from feeling obliged to have to know. But we do not know, and that ignorance produces fear and guilt. But not knowing what will happen is the essential uncertainty of life. The very freedom of life, because life is also free and the freedom of life is your freedom. For only true freedom is total.
Where does fear come from?
When a human being considers themselves wrong and feels unworthy, they experience guilt.
And since they feel guilty they feel they deserve to suffer, for they conceive the hidden belief that suffering will make them learn to be better. That it will correct and teach them.
Suffering serves a purpose in this sense. It puts the subject madly at its service, constantly repairing the personal image, urging the human to keep serving and keeping it informed in a constant attempt not to fail. Suffering becomes the apparent servant of the person, but in reality it is the person’s master and that is how it is experienced.
Therefore the fear of punishment and the subsequent strategy of defence mechanisms at the service of control that arise and that will make the person’s psyche a tool of oppression that will keep the doors of the heart, the home of the Being, closed.
One of these strategies is completely masochistic and Machiavellian and consists of attacking oneself. It is like a preparation for “the great failure,” as if it were hitting itself and damaging itself before life “gave it its due.” Even more convoluted, as if it were unconsciously trying to please, through self-punishment, that cruel life that is determined to pursue the person with its scythe and its black book of evaluations. The one that points out everything that it claims and demands.
The same thing happens when you blame life and condemn it as chaotic, dangerous, cruel and meaningless. At that moment, we capture in our condemnatory perception the greatest thing that exists and we lock it up and imprison ourselves with it, because we are it.
Some people feel like “prostitutes” of fear, and that fear would be the pimp that looks at them with suspicion from across the street, crossing in their vision when they try to look up towards the horizon of the infinite. Eyes that watch incidentally. Black guardians of the regions of your deepest desire: peace.
Guardians, because some people say that fear is the signal, the red light that shows you the way, indicating: “That way”. An image as an example would be like a bird flying over a field that sees a scarecrow and is frightened, but later becomes aware that it is a sign that there is food there and plunges into the banquet of life.
And as Alberto Varela says, there are two groups of people: “those who are afraid” and “those who are afraid”. What is the difference between the two groups? The difference is their attitude to fear. Some decide to take a leap in spite of fear and others are paralysed in the face of it.
When we give in to fear we do not live completely. If you have two options and one makes you more afraid than the other, you choose the option that you are less afraid of. This means that you do not choose, but rather your fear chooses. However, if you chose the option that most frightened you, you would be doing something that is apparently against you. A suicidal act. But in reality it would be a homicidal act of a part of you: the part that prostitutes itself when faced with what you believe others think or judge. That part that feels guilty and ashamed to be as you are.
There are other people, however, who are recklessly hooked to choosing the option that scares them the most. As if they were addicted to that endogenous substance called adrenaline and had to prove to themselves constantly that they have courage when faced with their own provocations. This can become a self-torture and the healing process of these people will require great courage to stop being “brave”, as they will have to go through the withdrawal syndrome of not feeding the courageous person they have created.
You have to ask yourself if your teacher is fear or if your teacher is love. To be afraid is to underestimate love; it is to believe that the love that you are will not be able to comprehend, to rest in its embrace. That the situation that you fear will happen so much. Any problem is a speck of dust compared to what you are. Fear is the Wizard of Oz. That old man with a loudspeaker making a lot of noise behind his big monstrous cartoon models.
Confront any possibility within yourself with confidence because if you fear a situation and by all means try to avoid it, it will create a hypnotic effect over you. Imagine that you were on a bicycle and wanted to avoid crashing against a pole. The very fact of fixating all your attention on that event would cause you to fall bewitched by the pole and finally you would crash like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you fear something, simply imagine yourself in peace in that situation, whatever it may be. If you are next to a sick relative in the hospital, enjoy them in peace, if you fear being in prison imagine in peace in the cell, drinking only the free and infinite source of your being. That way you will deactivate one by one the terrible scenarios that fear creates in you and you will no longer have fear of facing any situation that causes you anguish because you yourself have already plunged into it.
To distrust is to ignore love. In the moment we make a choice, we establish something as desirable and something as undesirable and at that moment, what is undesirable we do not love and not loving is what hurts us most. We divide life in that moment and we split into two . We can absolutely affirm that “fear is the negation of love”.
We are love and being afraid is denial of ourselves. It is to believe that love is not here now, that love can be destroyed. So powerful do we believe ourselves to be in our arrogance that we think we can, like demonic magicians, withdraw love from existence for a moment.
Sometimes I think that God decided to separate himself in order to test himself. To see if he was capable of loving everything, any event, however terrible it may seem. To live it and to go through everything, letting himself be the whole to live it all.
We have all made a one-way trip. We have built a character and now some of us want to start the journey back. The trip to disarm this character and merge again with absolute peace and gratitude of unity. That’s why I ask you: Do you live your life as a one-way trip or as a return journey?
There is only one real decision: trust or fear. If you trust you surrender, if there is fear you fight. Seeking and waiting is also fighting; to question and judge is to fight; to compare is to fight. Get rid of the fight! Stop investing in insane psychological life insurance and open up to love! Far from trapping us, love liberates. Love will make you disappear. It will crumble all your beliefs, as long as you dare to let it decide. Let it decide for you. But this can only be done if you give up that false idea of freedom based on the control we call free will. You can do it only if you trust, because trust is the deepest bond that exists with life and is also the precursor to love; The portico of glory.
All fears come from fear of death. If you have a death experience with bufo alvarius or ayahuasca, you will realize that there is a continuity and that there is nothing to fear because of we come from the sea of energy and to the sea of energy we go. It is then that you relax and realize that you do not even have to make an effort to breathe. That existence is what is breathing you and that you can slip through life without forcing yourself to do anything. Without abusing and violating yourself. And above all, far from that sinister echo that came from the confines of the non-existence that you used to call with caution and trembling: “my greatest fear.”
Sergio Sanz Navarro
psicologí[email protected]