The Conquest of Fear — Part 1 of 3
We are not going to dwell upon the psychological constitution of fear through the Freudian temper, for the Internet is replete with his theories and well substantiated by research scholars and practitioners of modern psychiatry. Such theories, even while they are based on meticulous scientific observation, do not really explain the deeper aspect of the problem.
All data so far gathered and theorised is nothing more than a surface observation of the critical intelligence, a stumbling mental notion of things aided by a vast apparatus of external science still in its infancy and dubious reliability. And to admit a higher Knowledge in the place of science may be dubbed as a useless attempt or vain self-hankering; science believes in a material dissection of the problems of Life, for it is incapable of a truly unified approach.
Neither is it possible to substantiate spiritual knowledge by scientific methods. Insanity is viewed by medical science as a mental disease but it does not take into account the occult forces that cause such mental imbalances.
Fear is viewed in the same way or rather admitted to be constitutional to the nature of man, something subconscious and instinctive. A fearless man cannot be, according to science; he can only be a freak of Nature and therefore a mental aberration. It may admit certain exceptions, a Napoleon or Achilles for example, but it denies the common humanity the privilege it grants to a few exceptions.
And there is a good reason for its denial too. An observation by science takes into account the inframental portion of our mind, submental or subsconscient to be precise, for even while science moves by a combination of different approaches, it does not have a totality of vision and its quest is essentially to dissect and analyse, to posit a theory out of its orderly ruckus; it does not inevitably arrive always or arrives at best at something stripped of the actual truth. In its place a half-truth reigns which is far more dangerous than the ignorance of mind itself. To substantiate its theories is the only aim of science, at least so it seems.
In spiritual definition, fear is a vibration constitutional to the nature of ignorance, but not to the higher nature of man. For essentially all is a vibration here on earth and the lower nature of man moves by a fiat of the unseen forces which determine his destiny a great extent.
These vibrations form a cortex on the lower nature, a fixed apotheosis of a lower type, which often define man’s external personality. Material and scientific data gathered so far point to a collective symptom or a universal apotheosis, to an ingrained human instinct of reaction to the external life and its surroundings through shock and surmise of nature, steeped in the nebula of the Subconscient, the bedrock of all our frailty and insuperable difficulties.
A parallel drawn from the Gita in the context of Arjuna’s debilitating weakness and his refusal to fight his own kith and kin may shed some light on this complex problem in the life of a practical man, as was in the life of a warrior, afraid of carnage and the impending doom and therefore, his moral refusal to fight and uphold God’s dharma.
It may not be a tenable example for the purpose of our analysis, which is to understand the vital as well as physical nature of man and his subconscient mechanism and its morbid instincts. All our moral dilemma derives its support from a primal, hidden instinct of life in the subconscient physical, the motor of the physical machinery, a dark inframental Nothingness without a personality.
It is from these depths rise into our nature all sense of fear and doom and death, all accidents and mishaps, all ill-will and sacrilege, the very bankruptcy of the modern man and his dark age.
Arjuna had won his battle by rising up to his higher spiritual Nature by the help of the standing Godhead in the battlefield, but also by stunning his physical to the sense of carnage and destruction of the enemy, and not by teaching the physical to be conscious as a channel to the divine action and execute the divine Will without nervous or physical breakdown.
It is not in the momentary conquest of fear that we can build a larger puissance of the Spirit or by a brief upliftment into the higher but by bringing down into the last human strata the infinite dynamism of God and the larger synthesis of His workings.
The advent of the Kalki avatar is symbolic of the transcendent Godhead coming into the physical and transforming all its imperfections into a perfect figure of His limitless strength, and no longer confined to the mental and moral perfection of mankind.
Note: In the subsequent essay, we shall discuss how fear affects or triggers a sense of incapacitation and impotency in the lower, triune nature of man, and also, how it prevents us from responding to the right impulse of action in the physical.
