Wall

Learning

Walls are made of fear; bridges are made of love!

Everyday life proceeds along no matter how terrible circumstances become. But when traumatic events occur, everyday life doesn’t solve them. Time alone cannot heal deep wounds. One after-effect of having something bad happen, whether it is the loss of a loved one, a bitter divorce, the outbreak of war, or being the victim of a crime, is anxiety. Millions of people suffer from anxiety and seek help from the billion-dollar market for tranquilizers or, less legitimately, opioids.

Anxiety often feels mysterious to those who suffer from it. Instead of being linked to a cause, such as being anxious to get to work on time when your car dies in traffic, modern anxiety is often free-floating. It’s like a chronic condition that needs no immediate cause or is triggered by tiny causes that normally don’t justify a feeling of anxiety.

To get at anxiety, there has to be an understanding of fear, because anxiety is residual fear. Despite the seemingly normal, untroubled activities of everyday life, something deeper down is generating the response of fear.

What constitutes a primal fear? “Primal” means that it is built into the very state of being human. Does this imply that simply by being human we must be afraid, without remedy or escape? No–our primal fear runs very deep, but not as deep as that. Our primal fear is that we are alone, unsafe, disconnected from Nature, prey to random harm, and fated to suffer traumas. This describes the state of separation, and there is no better or deeper explanation of where fear was born. it was born of separation.

If this is true, then the solution to fear of the lingering, psychological post-traumatic kind is to expose separation as an illusion. Getting out of separation is usually put in spiritual terms, but any category is too limiting and ultimately artificial. Either we are destined to be in the state of separation or we can wake up and see that separation is an illusion. It’s a matter of consciousness, not spirit. “Spirit” is a convenient tag for higher consciousness or expanded consciousness. The important thing, the real thing, is to wake up.

Only when you wake up, realize that you are not separate, and suddenly know the difference between reality and illusion does fear go away–indeed, all suffering goes away, since suffering was created by the state of separation too. Fear and suffering are lingering psychological reactions to feeling alone and threatened by our existence. If being human was an existential threat, we are doomed. But that’s the illusion. Being human is a state of infinite potential because existence contains infinite possibilities. Waking up to the infinite cures fear and suffering. There’s more to say about how to reach the state of waking up, but the bottom line is that fear is born of separation. Once a person discovers this truth and begins to take it to heart, the end of fear becomes possible.

Learning from Wall: Realize Your Fear