Fear and desire are the most powerful of all ego trips. When you're afraid or desiring you're thinking only of yourself. When you're afraid you think of nothing but escape from the stimulus of fear and conversely, when you desire you think only of getting what you want. Fear is repellant and causes you to push away. Desire posesses you and makes you grap for things. These two faces of egoism sit at the bottom of the ethical hierarchy and on the highest level is the spiritual realization of unity where there is nothing to fear, and nothing to desire because you're in a state of sublime sufficiency. The term "selfless" has been used to connote such a state of accord, but it's more accurate to say that "self" spreads out, participates in and encompasses the general life-force. You don't become selfless when you overcome fear and desire as much as your small self blends into the flux of life. You become Self with a capital "S," inclusive of any object that can potentially cause fear or make you desire.

Fear ranges in intensity across the negative energy spectrum beginning with uneasiness or apprehension at the bottom of the scale, ramping up to stress, anxiety, annoyance and depression, and escalating all the way to panic or paranoia at the upper end of the gamut.

When you panic, your brain is obviously in emergency mode, and you can only react from your personal habits for dealing with crisis whether you're in a real crisis or not. The problem is that ego is so immature that it can't make fine distrinctions between a life-threatening situation and one that's merely embarassing, so emotion from any part of the fear spectrum will generally suppress all life systems even thought its functions are directed toward staying alive.

Fear establishes a dualistic mental state in order to dislocate the self (subject) from everything else (object). Fear confirms the individual self's primacy in opposition to, or in competition with everything else. It does so to preserve our survival but limits our perspective to egoic demands and restricts our actions to either fighting or running away.

"...Move within, but don't move the way fear makes you move."--Jelaluddin Rumi.
Copyright 2004 by Jack Livingston