All Fear Is Fear of Life
Life Shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
~ Anais Nin
Reading time: 30 seconds
In 7th-grade, Catholic school, I ran a school-wide survey on FEAR for a science project. Guess what turned out to be the greatest fear amongst my 7-14 year-old classmates?
Death.
Isn’t that fascinating?
It amazes me even more today than it probably did then, before I was aware of how much fear runs our lives. (It also fascinates me that I was even drawn to conduct such a survey as a little person. Goes to show you how - even as kids - we are pretty clear about who we are!)
Why would Catholic kids—who ostensibly believe they are saved and going to this amazing place in the sky called heaven—be afraid of dying? Here’s my quick Psych 101 theory: it wasn’t their fear. Not really. They had inherited their parent‘s fears, their society’s fears, their priest’s fears. In other words: none of us are born afraid of death. It is programmed into us.
Plus, let’s not forget that all lovely notions of heaven come tinged with fears of hell. Just as there is no sun without moon, up without down, right without left, there can’t be a heaven without the contrasting notion of a hell, right? Sure, as kids, we believed the SkyMan loved us (and, yes, he was a man + white + had a beard + lived on a throne in the sky). But we also knew there was a real possibility of not making the heaven cut and, boom, H-E-double chopsticks! Who wouldn't be afraid of an eternity of Freddy Krueger or the Exorcist chick—or whatever an 80s kid's worst nightmare was? Maybe the fears were subconscious but survey showed: they were there.
Fast forward to adulthood: many of us have moved on from our childhood beliefs (or so we think), but the "little me" seeking SkyMan approval isn't a core belief that disappears easily. It often goes underground, manifesting unconsciously in all sorts of ways: fear of taking risks, fear of being oneself, fear of not being liked, fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of expressing emotion, fear of messy life stuff, fear of rejection, fear of losing control, fear of anything that might screw up the chances of "getting in," fitting in, and being approved of/loved. All fear is a fear of death which, ultimately, is a fear of embracing life, of embracing everything that comes with being fully human, including all those unwanted emotions (that are usually pointing to unfaced past pain).
If you can muster up the courage to get conscious—to dig underneath fears and psychological/religious conditioning—eventually it becomes mind-blowingly obvious that you ARE what you're looking for. You are the entire universe, aka God/Life/Love, pretending to be human. You are the heaven, the peace, the freedom, the trust, the love, you seek. You don't need to do anything, up-level anything, or fix anything about yourself to earn what you already are.
LOOK & see for yourself,
KB
