Fear
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear - From Frank Herbert's Dune Book Series
Fear sucks. Fear is an emotion that I’ve spent a lot of time encountering and it has spent a lot of time paralyzing me. Fear is something that everyone faces at some level. Personally, I’ve been dealing a lot with the fear of being outcast for being Other.
What is Other? Other are the people who don't want to "fit in". Other are the people who go against the grain of society. They don't care about looking different or crazy. Other are the people who see reality for what it really is and decide that they can no longer serve to maintain it; then take steps to reshape it.
But why do we have this fear emotion? Fear is almost the base instinct of survival. Fear bypasses the higher centers in order to squeeze decisions through that prevent something deadly from happening. Fear is a paralyzing emotion. Fear is something that stops you in your tracks. Fear is preventative.
Except that's not completely true. We see that we have moved away from the need for survival on a constant daily basis, yet our sense of fear is still tuned for that. Fear pervades almost everyone's daily lives at some level, down to how people post things on social media. We all have these little nagging fears that add up; the intrusive negative thoughts; some have the phobias, the anxieties, the panic attacks. One fear in particular, that I call the separation/isolation/displacement fear, is a fear with many social repercussions. It's a fear that urges us to keep continuity of self, to avoid "standing out", to keep discussion away from particular topics (like the spiritual, for many). It keeps us wary of what others could do to us. It makes us feel small in a world that is, at best, neutral in our regards.
If there was ever something that gave us an advantage as a species about fear, it's clear to see it's currently corrupting the lives of many innocent people for no seemingly good reason. There are alternatives to fear with regards to handling one's inner and outer lives, and they are out there, but fear keeps making itself known and dominating the perceptions of the collective. Sometimes the alternatives to fear, themselves, are feared even stronger.
So how to make sense of this?
Sometimes it helps to see things from a fresh point of view, and sometimes stories is what manage to accomplish that best. They are ways to explore new situations in a way that doesn't strain disbelief as severely, so that new perspectives can be collected from faraway thoughtscapes.
A myth is a story that helps explain something beyond the mere scenes presented, in the context of it using the divine as actors. To help explain how these fears can be difficult to overcome, or even put a label to, I've found a story that will seem fantastical to many; however, the point of a story is not to be seen as truth, but merely to be heard, and to be collected, and to enrich the listener with its metaphors.
In Sumerian mythology, Anu was their Zeus, their sun and creator god. Their mighty god of justice that would one day fly down on a cloud and deliver humanity to righteousness. Sumerians believe their sun god Anu created their civilization as a gift to them. In some myths, the creation goes quite deeper, and darker, than that.
Imagine for a moment, an infinite universe of light and sound, of primordial vibrations. Vibrations that permeate the whole of existence, and create different experiences with their patterns of interference. The holographic universe. In such a place, everything is resonance of waves, everything all-encompassing, everything infinite, everything eternal.
And living in such a place are infinite beings, without beginning of end, not bound by space or time, as boundless as the waves they experience. Sovereign beings of grand destinies. And those beings colonized the Universe, explored its facets, its resonances, its properties, its behaviours.
Among such beings, so equal in their infinitude, some of them desired to experience creation in a new way; no longer just as dominion over the Universe, but over other beings in it as well. The desire to be looked up to, to be feared, to be revered. The new concept of godhood took shape.
To achieve this, this group of beings asked another civilization for help; they were all beings of vast reaches and etheric nature, but they claimed to need the gold hidden within the surface of a densifying planet called Earth, which they were not attuned to, and unable to fully interact with in their current forms. To do this, they would need physical bodies, meat uniforms that the civilization's inhabitants would don and power up, so that they could interact with the ground, and the mineral.
For convenience of telling, we'll call the group of deceivers the Anunnaki, and the deceived civilization the Atlanteans.
The Anunnaki had carefully devised this meat uniform, the newly devised human body, planned about it for an exceedingly long time, in order to completely entrap the Atlanteans. The Atlanteans themselves accepted the task because they had no conception that infinite beings could ever be limited or subjugated. It had never happened before. And in the donning of the uniforms, the trap was sprung.
Those uniforms, the human bodies, constricted the Atlanteans' attention to only what the body could perceive with its senses; it urged them to survive and to work; it distracted them from all other activities; it rendered them slaves to the mining. Every part of the construct was forcing them to forget who they were, and instead making them focus on their identity as human bodies. And when such bodies would expire, a part of them would still remain to keep the beings trapped, and they would be put in a space of holding in the astral realms, for them to be assigned a new body to continue mining.
Through the human body, the Atlanteans were subjected to a carefully constructed illusion, fed to them by the senses, through the mind, that left them unable to perceive, to remember, anything else but the illusion.
With time, many shortcomings of the primitive human bodies were corrected; from being clones that needed to be produced by the Anunnaki, they were given capability to reproduce; more independent thought and awareness was allowed, and ability to self- and group-organize; they were starting to be allowed to feel emotions; more and more, their world was being expanded, but with it, the structure of the mind system that contained their perception to the realms of the physical and astral, and prevented them to gain awareness of what was outside this narrow band of illusory perception, was developed and expanded in turn. Layers upon layers were put between those beings and the realization of their true, infinite selves.
The system of death and reincarnation was automated so beings would be recycled in a systematic manner into their next lives. The concept of God was introduced to them, so that they would fear punishment and retribution from something that they perceived as greater than them; and Anu, leader of the Anunnaki, manifested to the people of Earth as a supreme being of infinite power, so they could adore him, and so they could fear him. Language developed, a system of communication mired in separation, in division of concepts and the rigidness of categorization, so that they would not be able to speak to one another of their own infinity, of their unity with the whole. Fears of all kinds were injected into the mind system: fear of death, fear of nothingness, fear of punishment; but above all, fear of separation: the fear of not having the vital connection that makes us One, and that allows us to know and understand one another innately. The fear of not being understood, of not being accepted, of not being received, of not being helped, of not being supported. The fear that had kept them doubting one another, and kept them from uniting their efforts.
The Anunnaki took away the ability for the Atlanteans to even know they were Atlanteans. They took away the ability for them to even be able to get close to finding out. Just so Anu could be an absolute ruler. The first to ever have done this previously impossible task.
Myths were disseminated to keep people awash with fear of punishment, and mired in the guilt of their original sin, and distrusting, doubting of the nature of their own selves, and of their fellow neighbors'. Hierarchies were set up, so people would focus on controlling one another, instead of working together to liberate all. Not needing any more, the Anunnaki allowed the focus on gold to become greed, so that people would put desire for a mere metal above the needs of their fellow beings.
As the Anunnaki departed from the densifying planet, which was not allowing them to manifest as etheric beings anymore, tracks were set up in the collective unconscious so that while they were away, the people's societies would evolve through predefined paths, and would eventually set up for the glorious return of God, the Apocalypse.
Every single possible obstacle had been put in place so that the Atlanteans would never realize who they had been, and who they always were: infinite, sovereign beings, connected to the whole of the Universe.
Except this would not be allowed indefinitely. Other infinite beings became aware of such deception taking place, and realized it was being exported into other planets, and such an enslavement paradigm, based in fear and separation, was a degenerative, infecting force that had to be stopped. So the Anunnaki were prevented return, and in order to make it so that infinite beings would be able to never fall prey to such deceptions again, the seeds of destruction were planted inside the programming system of the human mind. Cracks were introduced to the barriers that kept people under deception, so that they could peer through them, and see the other side beyond the walls of the labyrinth. Pathways were provided so that people could be lead to the discovery of their true selves, and their eventual liberation from the deception, and self-realization as infinite beings, once again. The very liberation that the programming was designed to prevent through all means conceivable.
And that leaves us to the present time.
Sometimes the Other manages to find these cracks and go through them into the other side. They go to this other side and see a faint reflection of what is really out there. The world outside this world. An even bigger Infinity. They have trouble describing it. They have intense fear even thinking about it. They're afraid to acknowledge it to their peers. They want to help people but they are utterly terrified of their reactions.
They're terrified that someone might hurt them if they say anything about their experiences. They're worried someone might try to hospitalize them for their beliefs. They get it into their head that they aren't able to function in society, so they don't. They don't want to mine the gold. They don't want to serve the economy of the few. They don't want to maintain the hierarchies. They want to detach themselves from the systems that they feel are suppressing them. They want to help people save themselves from believing that their own finite existence is all that there is, but that fear utterly paralyzes them. They have trouble finding the words. They end up misphrasing things in ways that make the problem worse. Some lash out. Some get labels put on them.
These Other just want to be accepted like everyone else. They want to help their communities. They want to use their abilities to read between the lines, into the bigger picture; to do good things; but they are, ultimately, afraid to. Their fear of separation paralyzes them. People don't like them talking about spiritual topics. These Other just want to be accepted and use their experience to lovingly help guide and shape reality into what they think is a better place. Even as they struggle through the fear.
Who's really the crazy one? The one who fear controls, or the one who doesn't let fear control them?
How does the Other live with fear surrounding their actions, and doubt plaguing their decisions?
They can have people they can trust. They can have people who can help them deal with their doubts. They can have the strength of their determination to find the truth, and the resolve to put an end to the suffering of their fellow beings. But they still fear, and they still doubt.
The real difference is that they see fear as something imposed on them, not as a voice that they must always answer to, and not as something they need to wait hand and foot for, every day of their existence. In a way, they have been fed up with fear, getting tired of it and casting it out like the nuisance they now see it to be. Even if the fear was added there because of some programming of their mind, something that happened to them to make them afraid, even if they don't know where it comes from or why, they still acknowledge it, and reject it, and move on like the emotion never happened. They keep fighting for understanding, and for community. They refuse to give fear dominion in their lives, even if they sometimes fail at it.
It's such an easy and obvious thing to do that we could all do it, if we weren't so afraid of it.
I leave you with this quote from a book named Quantusum:
Uncle suddenly scooped down with his hand and brought up a closed hand. He then brought it to a glass box that stood on a pedestal I hadn’t noticed. He slid one of the box’s glass planes open and placed an insect inside. It looked like a grasshopper. “This creature lives its entire life in these fields without limitation. I just ended that.”
I watched as the grasshopper jumped inside the glass box hitting against the top and some of the sides. The grasshopper stopped as if he was stunned by the new circumstance of his environment.
“To the grasshopper,” Uncle said, “all is well. He is alive after all. He sees his normal environment all around him. He can’t see the glass. If I keep him in here for a few days he will stop his jumping and become acclimated to the dimensions of his new home. All he needs is food and water, and he can survive.”
“So you’re saying these people are acclimated to simply survive?”
Uncle slide one of the side panels of the glass box open. “If you were a grasshopper, what would you do?”
“I would jump through the open panel.”
“But how would you know it was open? It’s perfectly clear glass.”
I thought about it for a moment. “I’d jump in every direction… I’d experiment.”
Uncle took a stick and pointed it at the grasshopper through the open side panel, and the grasshopper jumped into the opposite wall, hitting his head and falling to his side. “Do you see that I offered him an exit and he fled? He could’ve climbed on the stick, and I would have freed him.”
“Yes, but he doesn’t know that.”
“True.”
Uncle opened another side panel. “What you said is right. You experiment. You try different ways to climb the mountain of consciousness. You don’t settle on one way… one method… one teacher. If you devote your entire life to the worship of one thing, what if you find out when you take your last breath that the one thing was not real.
“You find that you lived inside a cage all your life. You never tried to jump out by experimenting, by testing the walls. The people who never bother to climb this mountain are inside a cage, and they don’t know it. Fear is the glass wall. Wakan Tanka comes and opens one of the glass panels, perhaps offers a stick for them to climb out, but they jump away, going further inside their soul-draining boundaries.”
Uncle brought the stick out again and lightly jabbed it in the direction of the grasshopper, who hopped through the open side panel, and was instantly lost in the thick underbrush that surrounded us.
Uncle turned his eyes to me. “Are you ready to do the same?”