Fear! You can hand over your fear to Wod. It is not yours alone to bear, your unique and disastrous burden. Fear is lack of trust in Wod, and lack of trust in World. It is a symptom of ego, of believing you have to do everything yourself. How frightening a notion to entertain! How heavy and dreadful. Let’s not burden ourselves unnecessarily.
Fear often manifests for me in hesitation. Hesitate to phone someone. Hesitate to express my understanding without loading it first with childish “attitude.” Resistance to doing many tasks – stems from fear. Laziness and resentment are both also driven by fear. Resistance to being present, to negotiating complexity or interpersonal ambiguity – all rooted in fear, which is to say, impiety against Mystery and the Tree and the Well.
“Feel the fear but do it anyway” does not break out of the ego as a basic framework (a cage, if you will). This notion counsels that we accept the ego…but then force aside its resistance. But I just cannot sustainably or reliably win that. Even if I could, I could never relax, feel confident or secure. That was a big part of what fed/feeds anxiety in me: the knowledge that I am not enough to meet the challenges of life by myself.
Formerly I imagined that I needed to make myself equal to the challenge of life. I thought if I could just be hard enough on myself then I would force myself into the person I wanted to be. This did not work.
Then I thought that if I just obliterated my ego then what remained of me would become a vessel for the divine. Superhuman power would swiftly follow and thus I could become equal to the challenge of life (and equal to my ever skyrocketing standards). This also did not work.
The first approach failed because you cannot get something from nothing. Trying to force myself to be font and foundation of my own existence was futile, foolish, and impossible. It guaranteed failure in vicious cycles; I learned to think that if I punished myself more then maybe I’d get somewhere. Astride a horse carcass, I whipped and flayed with exponential urgency. I could not see my whip was only cutting my own flesh.
The second approach was better, I admit. But I became righteous and inflated by my knowledge of the need to embrace Mystery and the simultaneous oneness and difference of all things. I easily became complacent; my ego found ways to claim credit for achievements that my moments of reverence and surrender were responsible for. Eventually I realised that despite my supposedly advanced spirituality, supposed humility (in distinction to humiliation), supposed wisdom and dedication – I still suffered, flailed, became entangled in my own poison. I had finally found truth, but then proceeded to abuse it. Consequently: self punishment, suffering, self pity, pessimism. As before.
My new way I am only beginning to approach, to trace out and understand. It remains as yet a sketch and projection of possibility. Yet it seems to be the best option so far. It is to trust in the Divine and in my patron Wod (id est Mercurius). If I truly trust then I abandon my grandiose expectations of perfection, adolescent/egoistic wish fulfilment, self-obsession (other-obliviousness), overweening hypocrisy. If I truly trust then I hand over my fear. Not try to dominate it through force of will. Not try to obliterate it as part of the ego.
No. Just hand it over. Fear is an expression of lack of trust. So I will trust and accept that whatever happens is meant to be. Even if I don’t like it. Guess what? That’s real ego shedding. Being willing to be a flawed, finite mortal if that is my patron’s will (which it manifestly is, for I am human). I cannot defeat fear, but I can be willing to hand it away. If I trust my patron then I must hand over my fear. And thus transcend the binary madhouse of courage and cowardice altogether.
Fingers crossed.
Brilliant and deeply reflective essay. It makes me think of Heidegger in “Being and Time”, where he writes that existence is Dasein in the form of Mitdasein: that we are always with the other, with another Dasein. When ego, as unfulfilled self, dominates everything, Mitdasein degenerates into what Sartre famously said, “Hell is the other.” But Sartre and his ilk, as rationalistic leftists, rejected the mystery of being and lost themselves in the process and became the damned. Yes, the gods do damn humans who choose to have their spirits rot with their corpses: at best they become hungry ghosts who hanker after what they can never have in the disembodied state.
It is wise to take easy on oneself sometimes. I have been doing that myself and am finding it being able to cope better with adversities, which continue to manifest in one form or another in my life.
You are right that dualism, as reification of duality among multiplicities, is the source of madness which is now becoming extremely pronounced in both advanced and developing economies as they teeter on the edge of the abyss of illusory being once again.