I’ve posted a few interludes, but this week I’m returning to my exploration of the barriers that are holding us in a separate, mind-focused existence and preventing us from collectively reaching the harmony and connectedness exemplified by the cinematic Na’vi in the Avatar movies. I don’t mean to suggest that I have all of the answers to life, the universe, and everything. I’m simply offering my perspective and stories from my own path. If there is an overarching theme to these explorations, it’s that I don’t think we’ll get there by trying – by affirmation or meditation or willpower. We’ll get there, I feel, by allowing ourselves to be, by choosing where we direct our attention in each moment, by giving our mind-identities the freedom to relax, by immersing ourselves in the wondrous world we inhabit.
Fear is a natural part of our animal bodies. When we encounter a bear or a flash flood or some other threat, we feel a surge of adrenaline that helps us to take action. Then, assuming we survive, the fear recedes.
The trouble is that our minds are good at conjuring future bears – or failure, or rejection, or illness, or suffering, or loss, or loss of control. When the mind is broadcasting threat, the body experiences the same fear response, the same adrenaline, although with no obvious action to take it creates a sort of paralysis and a perpetual biochemical imbalance – the state we call anxiety. What the body is feeling is very real, but it’s a reaction to stories that the mind is telling.
“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” --Yoda
Fear binds us in separation. That which we fear, we cannot also love, accept, or view as part of an interconnected whole. And furthermore fear motivates us to compete, to push others down, to hoard resources while others lack, and at worst to take up arms against our fellow humans and to declare wars of control upon the natural world.
The Covid-19 pandemic was, for me, a lesson in fear and its effects. Four years ago in May, when it became clear that the virus was here to stay despite our best efforts, I wrote this:
When I think ahead to a year without gatherings, without contra dances and potlucks, without concerts, a year of fearing closeness rather than embracing it, a year of religiously washing our hands, wearing masks, keeping our distance from our parents and grandparents, I think of a song that my father wrote, to the melody of Tom Paxton’s The Last Thing On My Mind:
In the morning the sun so gloriously greets the day Brings the light, ends the night And in the streets the people go the same old way Without sight, without light And how many days just pass us by When we never really live and we never really die And we never really laugh and we never really cry And we never really know the reasons why In the evening all the colors gather In the sky, the western sky Yet in the streets the people all would rather Just get by, just get by And how many days just pass us by When we never really live and we never really die And we never really laugh and we never really cry And we never really know the reasons why ~Ed Stone, sometime around 1980In this case we know the reason why, and we are accepting a lesser life in the hope that doing so will lead to lesser death. But perhaps that is always the reason why. Perhaps we don’t really live and really laugh because our fear stops us short, tells us stories that keep us small, keeps us confined to the past and future, the virtual and the distant, while neglecting the miracle of the here and now.
The standard discourse – the advice from the media and the “experts” at the time – was that fear is virtuous: that we ought to fear this virus and fear ourselves as potential vectors in the interest of avoiding a painful death or (worse) inflicting such a death upon others. I will admit that I felt that same fear, and I went along with the isolation guidelines for a while, but I also wanted to give voice to an alternate perspective. What if we assigned virtue not to fear and isolation but to surrender and community? What if we were to simply accept that our chance of dying was higher than normal, and that we were all eventually going to catch the bug, and choose to gather anyway, to visit elders and grandchildren, to allow a time of shared suffering to bring us together rather than drive us apart?
The first step in letting go of fear – I would say – is letting go of the idea that we need it, that it keeps us safe. I don’t actually believe that it does, and I think there is ample reason to believe that a world with less fear would feature a significant reduction in unnecessary death and suffering. If we don’t have fear, we still have wisdom, discernment, experience. Even if we don’t fear a virus to the point of upending our lives, we still don’t want to get sick and so we will still choose to wash our hands and support our immune systems.
But even if we are not attached to our fear, it can be difficult to let go of. Our mind-identities can easily conjure up possibilities and potentialities that we find unbearable, and since it could happen or perhaps even did happen before we cannot turn it off and our bodies live in that space of threat and adrenaline and anxiety.
From within a mind-perspective, I used to believe that there are three ways of dealing with fear: mitigation, conditional trust, and stoic acceptance. Mitigation includes such actions as locking doors, buying guns, installing security cameras, and stocking up on food and gasoline. In some times and places these actions might simply be wise, but if they are chosen based on fear they will seldom be effective at alleviating the fear. We can always imagine a situation in which we might need more food, stronger locks, bigger guns, and so we remain afraid despite our attempted mitigation.
Conditional trust means believing that the feared outcome won’t happen to us because we have taken some right action or adopted some right belief – I won’t get sick because I kissed my dreamcatcher sixteen times, or I won’t get in a car crash because God is watching out for me. These tend to be rather fragile mental structures, and they can be easily broken leading to a resurgence of fear.
Stoic acceptance means forcing ourselves to a point where we can effectively tolerate what our fear tells us is intolerable. It can be effective, but it leads to a certain hardening and toughening of self, and it strengthens the mind-identity further, encasing the fear and the broader emotional body in a sort of shell that walls off vulnerability and hides our true selves.
None of those really seemed satisfactory to me, which left me in a bit of a pickle until I found my anxiety much lessened after my spiritual process last year and I realized that it’s not just a question of dealing with fear that exists, but also whether that fear exists in the first place.
Fear does not really have an opposite, which unfortunately means that it can coexist with most other emotions and mental states. But I don’t think it can coexist with wonder. Wonder is looking at a flower or a warbler and saying “hello beautiful, I honor the life in you, how did you come to be?” And even if we think we have an answer to that, we can follow that answer to another mystery. How did you become that way? Why did life evolve on Earth? Why does Earth exist? Why does the universe exist? (Although if you have to go all the way to the existence of the universe to find mystery, your confidence in science is greatly overestimated, speaking as a former scientist.) Wonder brings us into the moment, out of past memories and future potentialities, into interaction with other life, other awareness, other consciousness.
There is wonder to be found in the bursting forth of buds and flowers and the germinating of seeds, for which our biologists and geneticists can provide only incomplete explanations that are themselves wondrous. There is wonder to be found in the tiny forests of lichens and mosses that grow on tree branches, in the coordinated activities of bees, in the ever-shifting patterns of clouds and flowing water, in the orbits of the moon and planets. There is wonder to be found in our bodies, in the trillions of processes continually happening in billions of cells that together create and maintain life. Even when a few of those processes are disrupted causing pain or illness, the other trillions continue their harmony.
Wonder is not a creation of the mind. Wonder is a perception that even the smallest life is far beyond our comprehension, and so we cannot really understand, and we don’t need to try. It is an embrace of mystery. Existing in a space of wonder frees us from our fears, at least temporarily, and the more we can exist there the weaker our mind-identities become. As our mind-identities relax, we can begin to enter into presence – a state of being where we realize that we are far more than our minds. Presence, grounding, embodiment – the English language is once again lacking in useful words.
Within presence, fear is not a thing. I have experimented with this myself, now that I find myself more often in a state of presence. I can conjure up a story or a situation or a possibility that used to generate fear and the corresponding somatic response and mental patterns are simply not there. The somatic response is still there if I hear a sudden loud noise or some other imminent threat, and my mind can still feel fear or anxiety at times, but I cannot exist in a state of embodied presence and feel fear simultaneously.
I don’t mean to offer this as some sort of simple recipe. We all have our own unique histories of traumas and woundings, inherited patterns, past lives, and our own life paths to walk. Some fears are more difficult to set aside, and the path from wonder to presence or embodiment seems to be a personal spiritual awakening that arrives with its own timing. But I do feel that wonder is universally accessible. Any of us, when we are feeling afraid, can gaze deeply into a flower, or into a flowing river, or at the Moon – give them our full attention – and begin to feel a softening of fear, a softening of mind, and an awakening of wonder and mystery.
There is, I realize, another well-trodden path out of mind, out of fear. It is one that I emphatically do not choose for myself, but many seem to feel called in that direction. The alternative path leads not through immersion into wonder and presence but through detachment into a sort of absence from the physical realm. There are versions of this path within many spiritual traditions, and they all emphasize a release from mind-identity but also from the body and from the physical realm altogether, a “transcendence” of sorts into a perspective of spirit from which the physical universe – with all of its warblers and irises and redwoods and rivers and planets – is merely a dream or an illusion or a lesser reality which we can and should leave behind.
I choose presence, embodiment, immersion. I choose it with all of my heart and being, and this is at the core of The Dendroica Project, as I wrote in the first post back in fall of 2021. To those choosing detachment and transcendence: I wish you well but our paths are diverging, and what you find here will not support that journey.
Next month I plan to explore social isolation as one last barrier to ending separation and creating a more harmonious coexistence. There may be more interludes in between – those tend to go from conception to creation in just a couple of days. I’ll close by sharing Coalition of the Unafraid, an aspirational political platform that I penned in 2021 at a time of great fear and division. I wrote it from more of a mind-identity than my current self, and a few of its lines are dated, but it still resonates with me.