On Fear

I am afraid.

I am afraid of losing loved ones, of losing my material possessions, of losing my job, of social humiliation, of failure, of rejection, of amounting to nothing, of racial violence and white supremacy, the effects of it on my children, of the effect of climate change on my children. And I am afraid of death. The list actually goes on. It’s a constant pursuit to answer the single question — what will become of me?

I live in this state of fear. All these fears appear the minute I wake up. I manage them through the day. I notice that these fears are the subtext of the choices I make throughout the day.

What I should I express, what I should not express, what I associate with and what I should not associate with, what I should wear, what I shouldn’t wear — all these are largely informed by what I’m afraid of.

I don’t want to live like this but I cannot find another way. I try to examine each of these fears separately, discretely and I find myself twisted in knots.

I try mindfulness, and other rebranded ancient techniques of meditation to calm my mind so I can manage these fears but it does not seem to work.

I medicate with marijuana, browsing through reviews of a thousand strains to find the right one that will help me calm down or make me euphoric. I get a sense of momentary euphoria but the dark clouds descend right after. In fact, I’ve noticed that my condition gets worse after regular use. It’s a downward sloping trajectory with spikes of euphoria. It feels like it’s helping everyday but on a longer timeline I feel worse.

I workout on the Peloton trying to beat my own best effort, eat clean food, hydrate in hopes of developing whatever it is that is needed to manage or rationalize these fears.

All of last year, I dug into the ancient philosophical/spiritual tradition of Advaita Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism to find a way to manage these fears. I memorized verses from the major Upanishads, the Shiva Sutras.

I pored over several other texts, listened to endless talks by scholars, made notes, discussed these with anyone who would listen. I chanted mantras, worked on my breath, meditated using techniques from different traditions.

And yet at the end of it all, these fears remained.

Are these fears just the nature of human existence? Is this a burden I have to constantly carry; what it means to be alive?

Find gratitude when afraid, someone told me. Gratitude is the opposite of fear, I was told. Be courageous in the face of fear, someone else said. Courage is the ability to withstand, persevere through fear. It sounds quite convincing but I have no idea how to be courageous about the fears that I listed earlier. How can I be courageous in the face of the fear of climate change or effects of racial violence on my children? I cannot will my way out of it either. I can’t just decide to not be afraid.

I realize that in trying all these different methods (philosophy/spiritual books, lectures, marijuana, exercise, meditation), I am really only trying to either accept, manage, deny or avoid my fear. Meanwhile, I actually have no understanding of what is happening when I’m afraid. What is the phenomenon occurring under the word “fear”?

Every morning, I read the news on my phone and I can’t help but notice that fear is everywhere. It almost feels like the whole human race is caught in the throes of intense fear. It appears that social media now allows (encourages) us to form clusters based on the specifics of personalized fear. It’s almost as if, society is splintered into factions based on shared fears. If you and I are afraid of the same thing, we can be friends, so we can be afraid together.

In all this, fear remains intact, untouched, unexamined.

I want to examine fear. I want to see its inner workings. I want to deconstruct the apparatus of fear. What is it made up of? What is the origin of it? How does it work? Why am I consumed by it and yet don’t know anything about it? Is it entirely a phenomenon of the mind?

How I experience fear does not change based on a specific fear. I don’t experience the fear of humiliation differently from the fear of racial violence. While both these fears seem different, my experience of fear is the same.

Looking at this phenomenon more closely, I discover that these discrete, single, separate topics (fear of humiliation or racial violence) are actually only branches that connect to a much bigger structure. Smaller chapters of a much bigger book. Smaller narrative branches of a much bigger storyline. This bigger storyline is my sense of self. This main storyline is made of information. All of this information is stored in my body at a cellular level as psychological memory and as muscle memory. It doesn’t matter which branch I start with, I always arrive at the full structure. My main storyline about who I am.

Fear is connected to memory and to my sense of self.

This storyline is arranged chronologically; it begins at my birth, when I was given a name, where I was born, to whom, when, under what circumstances and follows a linear incremental pattern. Year after year of experiences imprecisely and vaguely stored under different labels of age, gender, race, likes, dislikes, moments of joy, sorrow, building upon each gradually solidifying in the process of engaging with the world with other humans with similar narrative structures.

This storyline is filled with imprecise, inaccurate memories, imagination, and speculations. This is the whole structure of time. The tripartite view of measurable time — the past flowing into the future through the present measured in seconds, minutes, hours etc creating an illusion of continuity.

Fear is connected to quantified time and continuity.

Physically, I experience fear as a barely noticeable tightening in the chest, a change in posture and a subtle unnoticeable change in breathing — my breathing becomes shallower, heart rate is elevated ever so slightly. I’m unknowingly ready for action.

Psychologically, the changes are even more subtle and even more unnoticeable.

First I notice a vague sense of seriousness, a weight about the subject/topic of fear followed by a sense of urgency to action. It is not evident at this point that it’s actually the starting of the movement of fear. At this point, it appears only as something important, not frivolous, something to be taken seriously, something that requires attention and action.

My attention is racing through time — back and forth, past/future, speculating outcomes, consequences, strategies, narratives over narratives operating with my limited knowledge. I feel psychological exhaustion and overwhelmed.

I notice feeling like my sense of self is under threat. Also this threat is not immediate, at 2 am in the morning when I am afraid but eventual, maybe at 6 am or later at 10 am in a meeting that’s on the calendar or tomorrow or the day after or in 3 years or in 10 years or in some abstraction of time; when I’m 60 years old or 80 years old. It’s a potential threat — placed at some seemingly measurable but entirely vague point in the future. I give it all the attention though. Fear takes all my attention. There is no room for anything else/anyone else. At this point, my attention is devoted entirely to the past/future dance in the corridor of identity working hard to keep it intact. In giving it all my attention, I’ve taken attention away from everything else, isolating myself in that corridor, feeling exhausted and overwhelmed at the same time.

This movement is not happening somewhere else separate from me. These are all acrobatics of thought. This is all happening as thought. It’s happening in me.

I become fear.

When all my attention is elsewhere, I’m inattentive, not present, not available to those around me. I am irritable and easily annoyed. I am isolated in thought, separate from the rest of it, disconnected struggling to keep my narrative intact even if it denies fundamental qualities of existence like, compassion, beauty, love.

Compassion, beauty, love require change. Not incremental change measurable change, but the quality of continuous change. Compassion, beauty, love require no reliance/dependence on memory but only on attention.

Fear creates a separation and denies change.

In summary, it appears that :

Where there is fear, there is the self.

Where there is the self, there’s memory, and time.

Where there is the self, memory and time, there’s inattention.

Where there is the self, memory, time and inattention there is separation/division.

Where there is the self, memory, time, inattention, division, there is no compassion, no love, no beauty

Where there is fear, there is no compassion, love, beauty.

The corollary follows —

When I’m fully attentive and present, not relying on memory, or time or identity or separation, there is no fear.

When I’m fully present, not relying on memory or time or the narrative of the self and am faced with loss or rejection or failure, the response is very different. My experience then is of a quiet freedom from the self imposed limitations of my self narrative. It’s an indescribable directionless energy.

When I’m faced with rejection/loss/failure, and still fully attentive, fully present, my fear apparatus transforms into the apparatus of intelligence. It’s pure energy not limited by memory and all the inaccurate information stored in it. It’s the phenomenon of unlearning, a phenomenon of awareness and an ability to see without analysis, without relying on memory/time.

Only when I’m fully present, I am not afraid.