Fear is a creation of the mind, which may be why the imagination is such a powerful tool for fanning the flames of fear.
Robert: Welcome to Inner Sight. Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present but not yet fully recognized. You have within you, the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way with new eyes, so stay with us and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our topic for today is fear. All of the dialogue that you hear on this show emanates from the works of Alice Bailey, the founder of the Lucis Trust organization, who wrote twenty-four volumes of literature. This particular thought is from Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” I think to a great extent, that’s true. Most of the time when I’ve feared things in the past they’ve never really come to fruition, so a lot of the things that we fear never really happen. We’re going to speak today about the ways that we can deal with fear. That statement from FDR is kind of a bromide, isn’t it? Is there still some truth to it after all these years?
Sarah: I think so. I think there’s a lot of truth to it. It’s just that because it is true, we have heard it over and over and over. He said that in an address to the American nation in the depths of the Depression, I believe, soon after he became president in 1932, when people were impoverished and without jobs and without any money, and the future looked really, really bleak. He spoke to the nation in one of his fireside broadcasts, and people—as I am told and have read—were truly reassured and comforted by this new President who was coming to the helm and assuring everyone that things would work out all right. He didn’t promise that they would work out in a way that was completely free of pain or completely stress free, but that they would work out and that the worst thing would be the fear of fear itself, and I think that is because he understood that fear immobilizes. It causes one to panic and freeze up in one’s ability to tap one’s inner resources. So, while it’s true, as you say Robert, that a lot of the things we fear never come to pass, on the other hand there are things we fear that do come to pass. I can look at my own life and say, yes, some of the things I’ve dreaded have happened, and they were absolutely awful. But I think the point is that they happened and I lived through them and I’m still here. We are given, I think, enough resources to bear whatever life hands us. There’s another old bromide that God never gives us a burden too great to bear, and I also believe that’s true. So, whatever we fear, when and if it does come to pass, we will be strong enough and resourceful enough to bear it if we don’t give in to the paralysis of fear that freezes us in a state of panic.
Dale: Yes, that’s the worst thing about fear, that it does just what you said, it freezes us up, it causes paralysis and all thinking stops, and thinking begins to be centred around the fear and anything creative just doesn’t get through. Any new way of thinking or new way of acting is just no longer there. It also tends to isolate the person who is encased in fear and the isolation causes more separation and that state of separation is really what cuts us off from the source of our self, the source of love, because the only true way to overcome fear is through this energy of love.
Sarah: We have a question in our application for people who want to apply to our school of meditation and spiritual training—they have to complete a questionnaire and one of the questions is—have you always suffered from fear or have you ever suffered from fear? I’m always astonished by the people who answer that question saying, “No, I’ve never been afraid.” I always react with a kind of astonishment. How can you not have been afraid? The world is a scary place. Haven’t you noticed planes fall out of the sky, they fly into buildings, wars rage, the bottom of a floor opens up—I mean, heaven only knows what might befall us! I find the world a frightening place. What I’m getting at is: I think to be afraid is normal, and not only for humans, but for all sentient beings, because fear pervades all of the human and animal kingdom, apparently. Animals with any kind of a brain and a solar plexus know fear, they know it very well. The writings of Alice Bailey say that; I guess you could call it the instinct to be afraid—it goes back to the dawn of time. It’s one of those characteristics that’s just part of being a living thing. I suppose if we could look back over the annals of our planet’s history, we’d find that things have been pretty dreadful from time to time. There have been floods, fires, famines, vast climate changes, and whole species have been eliminated and animals were eating human beings for ages before human beings learned how to shelter themselves. It’s a scary place out there. We think it’s bad now, but it might have been a lot worse then. I wonder if whether all of us sentient beings don’t carry that memory in our cells somehow—that deep, inexplicable fear—because so many small children bring it over with them. I’m always astonished when I see little kids one and two years old, hiding behind their mother’s skirts, afraid of people. Why? Nobody’s ever done anything bad to them, presumably; they’re too young to have had bad experiences but they’re instinctively shy and fearful. Not all of them, but many are. So, I don’t think we should be too hard on ourselves if we’re a little fearful.
Dale: No, as you say, it’s bound up in the very substance of which we’re made, and that’s something we can’t escape. It’s something we’ve inherited from the past, from the very dawn of time, and it goes back even to the animal stage. So, it’s something we’ve carried over and it’s an instinctual reaction and I suppose that’s why FDR said, “nothing to fear but fear itself.” Fear is basic to human life and to anything involving a physical form, so it’s very natural.
Sarah: When we talk about this, what we’re really talking about is the desire which is innate in all of us to preserve our physical being, our body, our place on the planet, to stay in incarnation in this particular physical form. All of us, animals, birds, human beings, we all want to preserve our life in the body and that’s, I think, a sound spiritual instinct, the desire to stay alive. The fear we’re talking about does seem to focus entirely on protecting and preserving our physical existence, and that’s where most of the threat lies. There are some scary things in the world which we can talk about in a while, which focus on a more spiritual and mental endangerment, but for most of us, the typical fear we’re thinking of is a threat to our physical being. The writings of Alice Bailey say that fear actually has its roots in matter itself. It’s something that’s in the composition, the cellular or atomic structure of matter on our planet and that it’s a creation of the mind, which I suppose is why the imagination is such a powerful tool for fanning the flames of fear. Anybody with a good imagination can really get themselves into a panic.
Robert: It’s probably a lot better that we face our fears too, because I think by doing that we really experience life. There’s really no such thing as security. I think security is a myth. Look at the poor man who suffered from agoraphobia, who stayed in his house for many, many years and then a plane crashed into his house. So, we might as well go out there and experience life and face our fears, for our own growth really. Does it seem to you that fear is increasing?
Sarah: I think so. Not only because of the past year and the events that came with September 11th, 2001, but that certainly is one major source of fear. We realized on that day and gained a new insight into what human nature is capable of; at least I did. I never would have thought human beings would drive planes into buildings, so in that sense it’s a little bit like the Holocaust, where they took human behavior to a new depth. I never would have thought they could have dreamed that up. So, that’s deeply frightening, but it’s also probably due to the fact that we’re—according to the Ageless Wisdom—transiting from an old age that has been familiar and working along a particular line of energy for about two thousand years. We’re moving into what is called a new age, and we’re at the very beginning of it. This sense that we’re on the threshold of a completely new world is no imaginary thing; we are! We don’t really have our footing yet. It’s an exciting time, I think, and there’s a sense that a new era, a new world is dawning. That’s exhilarating, but it also has a lot of people in a state of deep questioning and uncertainty.
Dale: That’s true. The causes of fear today are perhaps a little different than they were, even back in FDR’s time. There was economic fear or fear of losing your job or even finding a job or finding enough to eat and that sort of thing, but today the fear is based on an unseen kind of enemy, of terrorism. I think that probably can be more pervasive. So, the types of fear or the causes of fear perhaps change over time. Even during the Cold War there was fear, but I don’t think there was the kind of fear that we have today; at least it wasn’t quite so apparent.
Sarah: Well, I think we could put a label on it: we were afraid of the Russians or we were afraid of the atomic bomb or whatever. Now we’re not sure what we’re afraid of, are we?
Dale: No, you’re afraid to get on an airplane, you’re afraid to go up in a tall building or you’re afraid to go to a big public event, because the threat of somebody planting a bomb there.
Sarah: You’re afraid of the world your children might inherit because we don’t know what that world will be like. It’s a lot more intangible.
Dale: I think what really increases the fear or the depth of fear is the mind itself. The awake and creative human mind tends to take fears that aren’t really there and manufacture them and create them into a larger thing than they really are.
Sarah: Yes, it’s true. The spiritual stimulation of the times that I think many people feel, is a good thing, but it’s also exacerbating this very sensitivity that you talk about.
Dale: Yes, because it’s a spiritual law that if the good gets stimulated and the vibrations of good are heightened and become stimulated, then those on the lower side, on the evil side, will also experience the same stimulation. So, you get this balancing of the good and the bad, the good and the evil. I think that’s very much in evidence of what happened on September 11th.
Sarah: Right. It isn’t very often spoken of in that way, but it was really the effect of great evil meeting with a great reciprocal response of love.
Dale: Yes, and so I think today we have perhaps more fear because of terrorism, but I think also there is the greater understanding and a greater sense of reaching out to people. That’s an expression of love, so you get the good and the bad.
Sarah: There’s a good image for how I think people feel today. I was reading in National Geographic this month about the meerkat, which is a little creature about a foot tall that lives in South Africa. He spends a lot of his day standing on his hind legs with his long tail acting as kind of a kickstand behind him, and he’s on his hind legs with his body standing up, looking out as far as he can over his little world because he’s terrorized. It’s a very dangerous place where he lives. All kinds of things would like to eat him up, and so they have worked out this extremely cooperative society that surpasses human beings’ ability to cooperate, and they look out for each other and post sentinels among their fellow meerkats who stand on their hind legs looking out, watching on guard duty while the babies play and eat and sleep; it’s amazing. They embody how we all feel.
Robert: Sarah, I was thinking about what you said before and I thought it was a good comment: that fear can be very immobilizing and really can prevent us from growing as individuals. One of the best analogies I can think of was a man I know who became very wealthy and he invited me to his beautiful yacht one time. It was early in the morning and after about three hours of being there and having coffee, eating and talking, I said, “When are we going out to sea?” He said, “I’m afraid to do that,” so we spent the whole day on the yacht sitting in the harbour. The boat was meant to go out to sea, not sit in harbors! I guess that’s what fear does: it immobilizes us and sometimes obviates us from becoming the type of person that God wanted us to be in manifesting our talents. To get to the core of this, what is the real basis of fear?
Sarah: Well, we’ve already touched on the fact that, according to the Ageless Wisdom, it’s innate in matter itself, and that it has to do with the creation of the mental aspect, the ability to imagine and visualize future outcomes. Also, you can view it as a kind of energy. It’s an instinct that has a divine potential but is usually misapplied or misused. That means it can be redirected. For example, the fear of death is subjectively the urge to self-preservation which pervades all sentient creatures, and it’s the initial impulse that leads to the urge to immortality of the soul. The fear of abandonment lies behind the instinctive drive for sex and the perpetuation of the species, which is a lower expression of spiritual union or yoga, which is the true basis of the religious impulse: union with God. The fear of aloneness lies behind the instinct to join a herd or a group, and it’s the lower counterpart of the very spiritual expression of brotherhood that we see more and more today. The fear of annihilation, of being rendered nonexistent, lies behind the impulse to assert oneself, and when that is stepped up a notch, it becomes the urge to seek the soul, the higher nature, and this is behind the whole study of psychology. The fear of ignorance, of being left literally in the dark. is what spurs on the human mind to inquiry and develops the intuition which leads to an awareness of the divine Plan.
Dale: As we said earlier, a lot of the fears are self-generated. There may be a core fear there, but it gets magnified by the mind and it’s the interaction of the mental nature with the emotional nature. That builds a huge thought form and it’s described in the Ageless Wisdom teachings as clothing this idea with mental substance that vivifies it and vitalizes it and keeps it alive and keeps it moving. As long as you focus on this fear and magnify it, the bigger it gets and the more it stays with you and it becomes something that you obsess over. So, these are the kinds of energy and force patterns that are at work in the process of fear, so it’s something to just to be careful of and to be thoughtful about when it gets a hold of you.
Robert: I think for a lot of us, our greatest goal in life is to become the kind of person that God wants us to become, and if we’re to do that, we have to overcome fear. What are some techniques for overcoming fear?
Sarah: Well, one technique is really a reorientation of one’s focus. That ties in with what you were saying, Dale, which is fear can turn you in on yourself and keep you totally focused on your own panic and your own well-being. The best way to dispel the fear is to think of others, to turn your focus outward to the need of others. We saw that so much on September 11th. It was an incredible experience of people in a state of panic and terror who cared for others, many of them—certainly not all of them, I’m sure there were plenty of them that did everything they could to save themselves and that’s all too human—but many of them turned their focus to others and that’s the best antidote for fear that I know of. It is said in the Bible that perfect love casts out fear. In terms of a spiritual technique, there is an exercise or a visualization that one can do when one is afraid that begins with relaxing physically and breathing slowly and deeply—just breathe and concentrate on your breath—because that brings in spiritual vitality. Then you imagine with your mind calling down a stream of pure white light and seeing it flooding through your being—through your mind, your emotions, your physical body, cleansing all impurities—and you see yourself flooded with love and light. Simply say to yourself: let reality govern my every thought and truth be the master of my life. That’s a very effective technique.
Dale: Yes, I think it’s the way to really overcome fear. You have to call in the power of that which is above, on a higher plane, which for most of us is the soul. It’s the light and the love, the pure white light of the soul that you call in, and that will alleviate all that fear.
Robert: That’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with a world prayer called the Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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