Fear

Richard: As a broad generalised categorisation, ‘sorrow’ (the desire to hurt oneself; active grief, suffering or melancholy; a deep sadness) is used here as a ‘catch-all’ word for what one does to oneself (sadness, loneliness, melancholy, grief, masochism and so on through all the variations such as agony; angst; anguish; anxiety; apprehension; bereavement; bleakness; crestfallen; deflated; dejected; depression; desolation; despondency; disappointment; disconcerted; disconsolate; discontented; discouraged; disenchanted; disillusioned; displeased; disquiet; dissatisfied; distress; dismay; downhearted; dreariness; edginess; fear; fed-up; flustered; foreboding; fretfulness; frustrated; gloominess; glum; grief; heartache; horror; lament; melancholic; miserable; misery; morose; mourning; nervousness; panic; perturbed; regret; sad; sadness; sorrow; sorrowfulness; suffering; tenseness; terror; thwarted; torment; trepidation; troubled; uneasiness; upset; woe; worry; wretchedness).

Being born of the biologically inherited instinctual passions genetically encoded in the germ cells of the spermatozoa and the ova, ‘I’ am – genetically speaking – umpteen tens of thousands of years old … ‘my’ origins are lost in the mists of pre-history. ‘I’ am so anciently old that ‘I’ may well have always existed … carried along on the reproductive cell-line, over countless millennia, from generation to generation. And ‘I’ am thus passed on into an inconceivably open-ended and hereditably transmissible future. In other words: ‘I’ am fear and fear is ‘me’; ‘I’ am aggression and aggression is ‘me’; ‘I’ am nurture and nurture is ‘me’; ‘I’ am desire and desire is ‘me’ and so on. This is one’s ‘Original Face’ (to use the Zen terminology); this is the source of the ‘we are all one’ feeling that is accessed in spiritual practices and mystical mediation.

Fear – We all know it at nauseam; it includes trickery, cunningness, numbness, confusion, escape, denial, excuses, guilt and beliefs in all kinds of good (helpful) and bad (harming) spirits. And, of course, there are panic, terror and good old dread and the escape into enlightenment. But fear is also the doorway to courage, thrill and excitement to reach closer and closer to one’s destiny.

It is an adventure and a delight to simply be alive, when one is free from the ‘I’ that has taken control of one’s body; the hunt for the ‘thrills and spills’ that is so endemic in the real world is over. It is ‘I’ who is easily bored, incessantly pursuing excitement. As ‘I’ am not actually here, one needs to feel that ‘I’ am real … that one is ‘alive’. The body can be persuaded to produce quite an array of chemicals; a veritable cocktail is available to the insidious entity that has taken up psychological and psychic residence within. Whereas I am already alive for I am actual. I am never bored, because being here now as-I-am is an escapade in itself. It takes great daring to be here now; anyone who has heeded my words and contemplated the actuality of what I am saying and doing, has reported to me that they invariably experience fear … and I too have known the full gamut of the anxious terror and horror and dread of the existential angst that comes as a result of activating the desire to disclose oneself as the contingent ‘being’ one fears one is. Initially one is deathly afraid to actually be here now, as it can feel rather rudely raw … one feels more naked and exposed than taking off one’s clothing in the market place.

PETER: The commonly held belief is that the excitement and tension that results from instinctual fear is essential to feeling alive and many actively court danger in order to ride the rush of fear. Contrary to this belief, the experience of the near-elimination of instinctual fear allows the thrill of doing what is happening to become increasingly apparent – and this includes doing nothing really well. Again it is universally upheld as a truth that one needs the instinct of aggression, currently manifest in the phrase ‘standing up for my rights’, or else I will be trampled, done in, taken advantage of, etc. What is discovered is quite the opposite, for one increasingly discovers that the actual world is a safe place, brim full of serendipity, delight and wonder.

Sometimes, in the course of a perfect day, ‘I’ have a more substantial experience of an emotion, usually felt as fear, tension in the head or/and in the stomach area. Over the period of the last weeks I have come to understand my own journey as less of a ‘psychic and psychological search and destroy mission’ and more of as a physical affair, where the brain is sorting out the necessary neuron-links to adjust to the dismantling of ‘me’. And the only thing that ‘I’ can do now to support my self-immolation process is to get out of the road, to not stand on the brakes. The process is happening and so, for freedom’s sake, Vineeto, get off the brakes!

The only way I can reach this 100% redundancy is by being here all the time, doing what is happening without emotionally interfering – and if there is an emotion, then investigating it, nutting it out, sitting it out, thinking it through, understanding its follies and furphies. In the end, every emotion is understood as nothing but an objection to and fear of being here – and an objection to being redundant as an entity.

I experience no fear whatsoever … which does away with the need for trust, faith, hope and belief. This is my on-going experience twenty four hours a day, year after year.

RICHARD: Properly speaking the word ‘altruistic’ is not a word for a feeling but a word for behaviour or action that benefits others at the expense of self (altruism is the very antithesis of selfism), such as fighting to the death to protect the young, defend the group or secure the territory, and as such could evoke any number of feelings … such as fear, thrill, courage, excitement, exhilaration, euphoria and so on.