It’s not that we should ‘do something about fear’ so as to show that we’re not afraid of it (or – if we can – vanquish it entirely) but rather that the helpful thing to do is to do nothing about it, nothing at all. Anything we were to do to try to overcome the fear would be ‘fear in disguise’!

This doesn’t sound too good to our western ears, of course; it actually sounds like a shameful abdication of responsibility and the worst possible response. It would be preferable to do anything in our view rather than just sitting there without any effort being made to oppose the fear. Purposeful activity is our ‘go to’, in other words. The truth is however that when it’s fear we’re talking about then using purposeful activity as a remedy is mere theatre – it’s how we escape from fear, not how we stand up to it. Fear is the ‘hidden motivator’, in this case.

No matter what we do when we’re trying to ‘manage our fear’, we’re trying to escape, and because we’re trying to escape this means that our attempt to do something about the fear is the fear. It’s fear in disguise. This ought to be obvious but the fact is that – collectively – we never do see it. Our ‘mass-mindedness’ has made us blind to the psychological truth that ‘fleeing from fear is fear’. How can fleeing from fear not to be fear? What else would it be? It certainly isn’t a manifestation of our courage. What would be a manifestation of our courage would of course be if we didn’t flee.

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t flee from danger – if the human race had adopted a policy of ‘not fleeing from danger’ then we would have become extinct along, long time ago! The sort of fear we’re talking about isn’t the fear of a valid physical danger however but fear of the psychological sort, which comes down to ‘not wanting to face up to things’, or ‘not wanting to see difficult things about ourselves or the world around us’. We could also refer to this as neurotic fear (or simply as neurosis). Sigmund Freud makes the point that neurotic avoidance is directly analogous to the physiological reflex of pain avoidance in that we engage in this automatically, before we even register that it’s happening. It goes without saying that there is no adaptive value to this – ‘avoiding awareness’ is not something that is ever going to have a good outcome for us…

Physical pain is a warning that we’re pretty much compelled to heed, and so this reflex is to our benefit (for the most part, at least). When we react by reflex to psychological pain (which is the same thing as fear as far as its aversive nature is concerned) then this is the very opposite of freedom; we’re talking about ‘hiding our heads in the sand’ here, we’re talking about the well-known psychological strategy of denial and denial – as we all know perfectly well – never does anyone any good. What happens as a result of our neurotic avoidance (as a result of our running away from fear) is that our world shrinks and keeps on shrinking. It keeps on shrinking and we keep on not noticing that it’s shrinking; if we notice that our world is shrinking then it wouldn’t be shrinking, after all (which is the same as saying that when we are aware that we are in the grip of fear, then we aren’t).

When we’re in the state of fear then everything we do is that fear, as Krishnamurti says. Whatever we might tell ourselves to the contrary, the motivation behind our purposeful activity (when we are in the state of fear) is fear. If we say that we are ‘fighting our fear’, that we’re ‘struggling to overcome it’, that we’re ‘taking positive action’ (or whatever else we might say) then this sounds a lot better than simply coming out with it and admitting that we are fleeing from fear as far to the possibly can, but really – of course – we’re just fooling ourselves. What else is our motivation for fighting the fear, trying to overcome the fear, if not that same fear itself? We just want the fear to go away and if we can’t get it to go away by fleeing from it then we’ll try to get it to go away by fighting it. The motivation is the same in both cases – in the psychological sphere, fighting and fleeing are the same thing. Fleeing from fear doesn’t work because the fleeing is itself the fear, and fighting against it doesn’t work either for the very same reason! If the thing I am doing to overcome the fear is the fear then how is this ever going to get me anywhere? If the thing I am doing to solve the problem is the problem then I’m better off not trying to solve it!

Whatever it is that we’re doing when we’re in the state of fear is the fear, but we don’t see this to be the case. We see it as being as ‘something else’, something that has nothing to do with the fear (something that ‘stands on its own two feet’, so to speak) and this is the ‘theatrical performance’ that we were talking about earlier. By taking the theatre seriously, by taking it at face value, we distract ourselves from seeing that we’re afraid, we distract ourselves from seeing that we are existing in the state of fear and so we get to think we’re not afraid. Everybody gets afraid sometimes, of course, and so saying that ‘people are sometimes afraid’ is hardly to come across as being in any way controversial; what is controversial however is the observation that the state of fear is our ‘default’ and that the everyday unconscious state of being is a state that is governed by fear. We don’t see that this is the case because that’s how fear works, as we’ve been saying; we don’t see that we are being ‘secretly driven by fear in our everyday lives’ and we don’t want to see it either! We want to believe that everything is ‘as it should be’; we want to believe that we are ‘the masters of our own house’ and that is why we buy into the cheap theatre of our non-stop, affirmative purposeful activity.

When it comes to our understanding of psychological matters, this profound lack of awareness wrong-foots us right from the start – it means that our way of working with mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression is always going to backfire on us. We’re looking at everything backwards and this means that our efforts to free ourselves from neurotic suffering are only going to embroil us in it all the more. It’s our back-to-front way of understanding things that causes us to talk in terms of ‘battling anxiety’ and ‘fighting against depression’ and so on and so forth; our language is fundamentally aggressive, and we all tend to see this as a good thing. When we talk about ‘positive thinking’ or ‘positive psychology’ it’s the same thing – we’re pushing back against something, and this is the definition of ‘aggression’. When we talk about ‘positive living’ (or positive anything) then what’s going on is that we’re ‘pushing back against the negative’ which – again – sounds highly commendable to everyone concerned. It’s our solemn duty to push ‘back against the negative’, after all…

This stuff only sounds good because of our extreme cultural ‘one-sidedness’, however. ‘One-sidedness’ – in this context – means not being able to see that ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ are the two sides of the same thing, so that ‘fanning the flames of positivity’ only means that we’re going to get a bigger backlash then we would have got otherwise (if we didn’t ‘fan the flames’ so enthusiastically). Aggression is never a helpful ingredient in psychological therapy since all that happens is we ‘get more of the very thing that we’re putting so much effort into pushing away’! Choosing the right way to see things (or do things) is another example of counter-productive aggression; all rational therapies have at their core the idea that we can (and ought to) exercise choice in our mental functioning, and thereby choose the functional over the dysfunctional (which will put us back on ‘the right track’ again). This sounds like a helpful thing but – again – it absolutely isn’t. It isn’t helpful because we’re trying to be in control and control in the psychological sphere is always driven by fear. Psychologically speaking, control equals fear.

This isn’t too hard to understand – if we were able to stop what we’re doing (or trying to do) and actually reflect on matters. Clearly, the courageous thing is not to ‘fuss about choosing the right response’ – that is a fear-driven activity and it can’t ever be otherwise. Our desire to ‘choose the right option’ is a manifestation of our fear of choosing the wrong one. Whatever we choose is always going to be ‘artificial’ and the artificial is never a good thing when it’s our mental health we’re talking about. No amount of choosing (no amount of posturing) is going to enable us to exit the painful mental state we’re in – all that is going to do is make everything a hundred times worse. Our neurotic suffering is the result of us ‘resisting what’s going on in our heads’, not the result of us ‘being too passive and failing to make the right choices’! We have got it 180° wrong – we couldn’t get it more wrong if we tried! In the inner world, courage isn’t about doing anything, but being equally willing to face any possibility that arises, which – as Chogyam Trungpa says – is symbolised by the image of the Ashokan Lion, which has a head facing in every direction. In Buddhism, this attitude of panoramic openness is known as ‘the virtue of equanimity’.

In our culture, which is – as we have said – based upon ‘one-sidedness’, what we value is the power to achieve one outcome and deny the other, which is the exact reverse of equanimity. Equanimity isn’t ‘the easy answer’, however. Reacting is easy (it happens all by itself); not reacting – on the other hand – takes a lifetime to cultivate and there are no handy shortcuts. Just as there is no trick to being patient, or kind, there is no trick to developing even-mindedness. This – like any genuine virtue – can’t be forced (or manoeuvred) and that’s a problem for us since forcing and manoeuvring are all we know. Even if we were to want to have this virtue, even if we were to resolve to ‘make equanimity into a goal’ we would still be misunderstanding the nature of the self-contradiction that we’re caught up in; to have a goal of ‘being even-minded’ is itself a manifestation of an uneven (or ‘biassed’) outlook, so how are we going to get around this one? Another thing we do is that we try to use even mindedness (or the practise of ‘cultivating equanimity’) as a tool, as a method. In the ‘world of mental health’ we place an awful lot of stock in tools and methods – we bank on them very heavily – but how could we possibly imagine that equanimity can be used as a tool? The state of equanimity needs no tools, it is only the biassed (or fearful) state of mind requires tools…




Image credit – wired.com