Many of our fears today are magnified by the mind itself and these fears are not necessarily real. Fear makes you selfish. It turns you in on yourself, and the only thing that can liberate you from fear is turning your sights outward to the need around you.
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 today is fear, and everything that you’ll 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 on spiritual philosophy. This thought comes from the works of Alice Bailey: “Fear has its roots in matter itself and is an effect of the human mind.” I suppose that for a lot of people who are rather enlightened, the greatest fear is the fear that can prevent us from really living to the potential that God meant us to live up to. That’s a fear that might be the opposite of what some people think, but let’s speak about that thought by Alice Bailey, and we can explore that a little bit further. Can you comment on that opening thought because maybe that’s not understood by some people?
Sarah: I’m not sure I understand it; it’s really quite deep: “Fear has its roots in matter itself and is an effect of the human mind,” Alice Bailey wrote. To say that fear has its roots in matter itself suggests that it’s closely tied in with the urge to preserve one’s life, because all creatures, not only the human but the animal creatures too, live in physical bodies. People with a spiritual faith and an understanding that life is not only what we see on the outer material planes probably believe that life continues even after the relinquishing of the physical body. But on the level of fear, which is emotional, I think this urge—which is really a very healthy urge to preserve one’s life in the body—is also the source of our fear. The idea of giving up our body suggests that it’s giving up our life, our place on Earth. I think that’s implied in the statement that it’s anchored in the “roots of matter itself.” She also said that fear is inherent in the play of the opposites of the soul and matter, or substance—soul being the spiritual consciousness that enlivens and quickens the material form; its polar opposite is matter. Fear is inherent in the play of opposites, which again suggests that on an instinctual level, the living creature, whether human or animal, will do just about anything to preserve their life in the body.
Dale: Yes, there is that self-preservation instinct that comes from the animal nature, and I think we inherited that from the animal nature.
Sarah: It’s right and good, don’t you think?
Dale: Oh yes! Yes, it’s there for a purpose so that one does have to fight for survival sometimes and the fear of not surviving is very strong.
Sarah: It’s healthy. It’s a warning.
Dale: Sure, and that’s one of the positive aspects of that fear. But as the quote says, it’s an effect of the human mind, and many of our fears today are magnified by the mind itself and these fears are not necessarily real or they don’t have a reality to them. They seem real because they are so powerfully magnified and energized by the active principle of mind itself, and by our very thinking about something which we think is going to be a fearful situation we tend to magnify that fear out of proportion quite often. I think that’s why Roosevelt said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” because fear is so debilitating sometimes. If the mind is overactive on a particular fear, then it gets magnified out of proportion.
Sarah: Yes, it can leave you almost paralyzed to take any action at all, it’s so debilitating. I wonder, too, whether psychologically this fear that is the effect of the human mind is something that goes deep into our past and that includes a lot of ancient memories. On this program we’ve talked a lot about reincarnation, rebirth. If you believe in that basic concept that we are not born only once but live repeatedly in the body on Earth and have been reborn over and over again—if you believe in the basic truth of that then you’d have to say that in your past and in the past of all of us there are a lot of bad experiences as well as a lot of wonderful ones, probably. It’s part of life, and I wonder sometimes whether there’s memory stored up in the cells of our spiritual being that makes so many people of a very sensitive intelligence unusually prone to fear.
Dale: Like the fear of darkness or fear of the dark; it’s what you can’t see out there. I think that goes back way, way in the past, probably back in our caveman days.
Sarah: There’s another kind of fear that you can’t see, and that’s the fear of the past that you don’t remember. I guess that’s what I’m talking about. Something from way in the past that left its imprint on you. Maybe I’m being too psychological about this, I don’t know, but supposedly you could say it leaves its imprint upon your basic nature but it was so far in the past that you don’t remember it, but you just retain the fear.
Dale: Yes, well, that’s what I meant by fear of darkness. I think it’s one of those ancient memories that is carried forward and it’s stored up in our memory banks, perhaps.
Sarah: So, you’re saying that to be afraid of the dark is related to our past? I thought to be afraid of the dark is because there are a lot of bad things out there. (laughter)
Dale: No, there’s no boogie man in the dark. (laughs)
Sarah: I’ve always been afraid of the dark! (laughs)
Dale: Well, you’ve always been afraid of the dark, in many lives past perhaps. I’m just guessing, I have no idea, but I think this is a very real fear that is brought forward from one life to another, perhaps.
Sarah: Well, it’s definitely the case that people’s minds and imaginations, I think, are being stimulated more and more. Also, the exposure to media. We’re all reading mysteries and watching crime shows and horror movies—I mean some of us; I don’t like to watch them— and I think all of that feeds people’s fears too. They can imagine a lot more than they used to.
Dale: Absolutely, and as the mind becomes more active in human nature and as the human brain becomes more sensitive to the different fears, then everything gets magnified all out of proportion. That’s why it says in the quote that it’s an effect of the human mind; that’s much of the fear.
Sarah: I can remember reading two horror comics with a friend when I was a very young girl—she had them at her home and I was visiting her—and they terrorize me still just remembering them, they were so awful! One was about a kind of a zombie that lived behind bars and broke loose, and the other was about insane people who were driving in a car on a rainy night and broke into a house. It was horrible. Those things stay with you and I think people, especially children, are exposed to a lot of media that is probably very unhealthy for them in terms of feeding fears and wrong imagination, but…
Dale: Yes, I would agree with that.
Robert: There are so many different types of fears. I think one type of fear that’s interesting and that I’ve experienced is the fear that one day sometime in the future I might look back and say that fear has prevented me from actualizing the highest potential of my own existence. Another one is fear of failure, and that keeps me from launching forward into new ventures in life. The books of Alice Bailey discussed a number of different types of fear. What are some of those?
Sarah: Well, I think probably the most basic fear is the one we touched on in the beginning, which is the fear of death. That’s a kind of base fear, a fundamental fear to all living beings. Like all fears, the writings of Alice Bailey say they have a basically positive element at their base. The fear of death is what gives us the urge to live and to preserve our life, which is part of God’s plan, and yet the fear of death can make us compromise by taking wrong action, by being unnecessarily evasive of responsibility, of being unwilling to try new things, experience new ways of living simply out of the urge to preserve the status quo and to stay within the known and the comfortable. That’s one aspect of the fear of death.
Dale: There are many reasons why we have this fear of death. It’s explained in some of the Bailey writings that it’s based on the terror of the final rending process and the act of death itself, the restitution, or it’s the horror of the unknown—we don’t know what to expect after death, or there’s an unhappiness about leaving loved ones behind, or about being left behind. Also, partly related to the fears, we cling onto the form life, onto the physical world. There’s a holding on and there’s an unwillingness to let go because we don’t know what’s coming up next. This is the only reality that we know so we hang on for dear life and that causes a lot of pain and suffering. So, I think a lot of these are, as is pointed out in the Baily writings, a lot of it is illusionary. It’s based on illusions and false understandings and ideas that have been built up over the years, like the erroneous teachings of heaven and hell and that sort of thing.
Sarah: Don’t you think, though, that this fear of death is being lessened by the reports that we seem to hear more and more, of people who have had some out of the body experience or near-death experience? In fact, you did a series of interviews with people some years ago who had had those experiences. I’m sure that if one has had an out of the body experience—meaning someone who, through an accident or surgery or whatever, seems to pass briefly out of the body and then returns to the body and has some recognition or some conscious awareness of being separated from the body and yet enduring by living on in consciousness—that must be absolutely convincing in the sense that you no longer fear death, and I’ve heard people who have had those experiences say that there is nothing to fear.
Dale: Yes. In fact, they encounter this tremendous love—many of them—this powerful energy of love on the other side once they are released from this physical body. In fact, some of them, if they have been in an operating room, they’ll suddenly leave their body and they’re up on the ceiling looking down on the whole scene below with the doctors and observing the whole thing. There’s a total absence of fear at that point, and it’s very uplifting. The one thing they fear is coming back into the body!
Sarah: It’s usually out of a sense of responsibility and of being not finished with one’s responsibilities.
Dale: Yes. There was one lady I interviewed who said that when she came back into the body, she felt so angry because she was back in the world again, and she just wanted to stay out there, in that loving atmosphere.
Robert: Well, then it becomes the fear of life, I guess.
Sarah: There is another big fear: the fear of the future. I think particularly now as we are in this very uncertain time where we’re really betwixt and between an old age and a new age, and I think that feeds this sense that the future is something we really do not have a clear image of, and in many ways it doesn’t look too good. I think this is a fear that again immobilizes people, makes them cling to something that’s a way of living that’s outmoded, probably no longer really serves their present state of growth, and yet it’s so familiar that they’re willing to stay in the known and habitual rather than risk forging bravely ahead into something unknown and unpredictable that might very well be challenging and call for real growth on their part and maybe open up a whole new way of seeing life.
Dale: With the economic situation as it is many people have some fear of the future, especially if they have a job that’s rather tenuous or it’s not a stable situation they’re in and they have a big mortgage and families to support and children to put through college, yes, that can produce a lot of fear. So, as you say, it brings up a lot of those old fears that we have in our psychological past, and perhaps we fear insecurity or just being able to live.
Sarah: Another fear that’s quite prominent is the fear of failure; you mentioned that. There are different types of failure. One is that you might fear getting to the end of your life and looking back and realizing that you missed the essential point of your life. That’s a fear that I think a lot of spiritual and very sensitive people have. People with a lot of responsibility, people who naturally try to live up to the best within them, fear getting to the end of their life and realizing that they didn’t really recognize the essential, fundamental, guiding principles that they should have lived by and feel that they have failed because of it. There’s another fear: the fear of pain on all levels, psychic, emotional, physical. I think we can all identify with these fears and we share many of them with animals.
Dale: There’s also the little fears that sometimes we have: the fear of having to go in and meet your boss, because of what they’re going to say or they’re going to reprimand you, or the fear of public speaking, getting up in front of a group of people, and all these little fears. But it’s interesting about these types of fears; in the Alice Bailey writings she says that they’re based on a mental condition such as pride being behind all of those fears, because we fear rejection or fear being criticized or fear being made fun of or being laughed at.
Sarah: Or not living up to what our big ego thinks we should be.
Dale: Yes, and it comes right back to the little ego being hurt and they’re not real, these fears. That’s what we said earlier about the mind being able to create these kinds of reactions—the mind and the emotional nature working together—and it builds up and magnifies these fears out of proportion to their real substance.
Sarah: There is another aspect of pride and fear: the fear of what other people will think of you. That guides a lot of sensitive people. They don’t do what they would really like to do, what they might even feel compelled to do, because other people might judge them harshly. Again, there’s pride behind that because you’re concerned with what other people think of you rather than what your own inner self, your soul, wants of you. That’s the only criterion we have to answer to, really. But we put all this power in society and our friends, our family, our companions on the way, the people we admire, and we let them make our decisions for us by being so proud that we don’t want to fail. I’ve heard very creative people say that they were able to accomplish what they did because they were willing to take the risk of failing. They realized they might not be able to do what they set out to do, and they gave it their best shot anyway. They’re the ones that might really succeed in something new because they were willing to risk that.
Dale: That’s one of the positive uses of fear. That fear then becomes an opportunity to face the fear and to overcome it.
Robert: What could help us face the fear through, is the thought of what might be the consequences of not doing the thing that we fear. Last time we touched upon overcoming fear. Can you go back to that again?
Sarah: Yes, there are a number of suggestions from the writings of Alice Bailey for overcoming fear, beginning with: if you’re in a state of fear, relaxing and breathing— breathing evenly and deeply. That immediately settles the whole personal equipment or mechanism. Then using your imagination, visualize or call down a stream of pure white light and see that light pouring through your mind, your emotional nature, your physical body, filling you with light and driving out all impurities and all fear. You literally flood yourself with love and light. There’s a mantram from spiritual scripture that you can say to yourself–”Let reality govern my every thought and truth be the master of my life.” That has a kind of a command to it that’s quite powerful; I’ve used it and it’s very effective.
Dale: I think that anything in the nature of fear can only be conquered by approaching it from a higher level, in other words from the soul, because in calling in the power of the love of the soul, love is probably the most healing and uplifting energy that will get a person out of a fearful situation.
Sarah: Aldous Huxley said that in his book the Perennial Philosophy. He said fear cannot be got rid of by personal effort, no matter how hard we try; only the soul’s absorption in a cause greater than its own interest can overcome fear. That struck me as really true. Fear makes you selfish. It turns you in on yourself, and the only thing that can liberate you from fear is turning your sights outward to the need around you and identifying with the much greater whole. That releases you.
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 the 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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