FEAR 101 and FEAR 401

Vishnu Datta
Jul 21, 2017 · 5 min read

Everyone is fearful. We all hide our fear; some of us mask it expertly, deny its presence. We may try to challenge it. If we’re generally ‘healthy,’ we sort of get used to it. And if we’re fortunate, we work with it, see our rising fear in its many appearances and forms, and get acquainted with this universal aspect of ourselves — to the point, potentially, that we see fear as opportunity, as teacher, even as friend.

But, we must admit, that dancing with fear is a lifetime enterprise.

In this regard, I offer two stories. Each feels to me to be classic, meaning that they are valuable in their unfolding so as to be instructive and gifting.

The first happened on the Crystal River that flows down from McClure Pass toward Carbondale, Colorado. There’s a town on the Crystal called Marble. Above it is one of our nation’s largest marble quarries — like being in a cathedral. The marble for the Washington Monument came from this quarry (until the Civil War, when work stopped). There was a train that carried the marble from Marble to Carbondale, rails hugging the bends of the south side of the Crystal River, such that more than once the train — due perhaps to difficult weathers or bad brakes or an engineer imbibing just a bit too much liquid warmth — would topple over, its cargo dumped into the river.

That possibility — of searching for pieces of marble polished for a century and a half — took me into moving September waters warmed by a summer of sun. I lunged, carefully I thought, from rock to rock, the waters deepening in the center, until I spied what I thought was a piece or two of marble being the surface. That hope took me from rock to rock — never more than a lunge away. My treasure turned out to be sunlight on the water’s surface or cloth caught in a crevice. By then I was on a large rock, just 30 feet from shore, where my wife and friend were strolling the northern bank. But I suddenly realized I was stuck, that I’d not calculated for the current, such that I could not lunge upstream to retrace my path. The body was now cold. And tired, which added to the sense of feeling cold.

I called to my wife. Our friend pulled up a sapling and held out its leafy top to me. But by now I was shivering, my fingers slightly blue. and I feared the river current would carry me into rocks. Especially since the most turgid spot in the whole river was right before me — half the river pouring down a low rock wall so forcefully as to create a whitewater backlash.

Then my wife, a Leo to be sure, ran out onto Hwy 133 and flagged down the first car. A man appeared on the bank. He threw me a nylon line. Amazingly, he was a certified rescuer.: a pro. He told me to slide off my perch and into the water.

“This is the worst place in the river — just look at the whitewater!” I cried. To which he ordered me into the water with the voice of authoritative command.

The moment I began my slid down the rock face, I knew ease. The whitewater backlash on my right was evening the river’s flow on my left. The pro knew this, whereas I, the trembling and exhausted marble-seeker, did not know this — until the instant I slid. As a wind takes smoke, as a cloud cools the Sun, as a smile lifts spirits — so did fear dissolve the moment I gave myself to trust.

To see the mechanics of an acute but singular fear vanishing is what I am here calling Fear 101. But what about Fear 401: Chronic fear so deep as to feel in the soul?

I was a long-time meditator who had exited a five-year PTSD situation, and was unconsciously running (inside myself) from that pain. One day I sat up in bed to meditate and the world fell away. With my inner space unending and empty (even for a moment) my fear — elevated to the hilt by mental, emotional and spiritual pain — colored my spacious psyche as Hell, capital ‘H’. I saw I had run from God, and this was the punishment. A negative presence was with me and I couldn’t get away.

I didn’t meditate for two years. I could feel the wound-up energy hard behind my heart. I called first this ‘the devil’ and wondered if I were possessed, and if I could ever heal, or bad this strange condition I could talk to no one about grown irreversible and I was just too far gone? Then I labeled it ‘Fear.’ It took a few years until I realized it deserved other names: ‘Anger’ and ‘Reaction’ and ‘Resistance’ — my anger and reaction and resistance. Slowly I just accepted that this constant pressure was an expression of my incarnation challenge. Yet there was this “monkey on my back,” and I didn’t know how to shake it. I had been weakened and was resigned to perhaps never regaining my inner strength.

Years later, when our middle son suffered an accident and needed our help, my wife and I moved to LA for some months. There, one evening in our tiny apartment, I felt ‘the negative presence’ once again, like an invisibly thin yet incontrovertible fog that was about to destroy me utterly. My fear had lessened considerably over the years, but the recollections of terror had instantly returned! I could muster only the words, “It’s back,” to convey my situation to my wife, who did not understand and went on reading in her chair. I was in another chair, knowing I could not escape. The presence surrounded me. There was nothing I could do. And then, like a quiet wind, it passed right through me. And was gone.

I never have encountered this ‘presence’ again. But more than that, I have felt and seen the essence of fear: How its energy projects onto anything and everything — to the night sky, to parents and spouses and bosses, to lost wallets and lost loves and lost dreams, and of course to God. While fear is so obvious in the milieu of terrorism, inner-city tensions and war — the lenses of fear are too finely woven for its threads to be perceived…even as they are strangulating our freedom, trust and compassion.

But the real graduate-level lesson of Fear 401 is that coming through fear does not restore past strength and equilibrium. Rather, coming through fear deepens, increases and polishes one’s inherent strength. Fear is not inherent in us, but a necessary gift of being in a human body, and meant to be a transitory one.

For the universe is benign. It’s difficult gifts are meant to be opened, received, processed, integrated and then enjoyed. I still live with fear…for it still has gifts to bestow. Yet, having lived through the worst of fear — the potentially (in my fearful terms) ‘soul-annihilating’ finality — other fears that arise during the day are simply doorways into greater ease and dignity. Fear may be the best term to describe the opposite of love. Yet whatever love is, fear is simply the other side of the coin. Both sides are equally valuable.

Here is a final lesson (the post-graduate course that is hands-on and in-the-field): There is no thing called ‘love’ and no thing called ‘fear’. There is simply one openly and eternally relating essence of Life.

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Vishnu Datta

Written by

Interspiritual aspirant of 40+ years, author, poet, retreat master

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