By Jennie Marlow
Question: Help me with the word fear. For me, the word has come to mean awe. Or a verb, an arrow pointing me to the unknown, a place of resistance sometimes, and a trusting that an opening will occur.
Fear is a painful emotion caused by our perception that something bad is about to happen or will happen at sometime in the future. The word comes down to us via Latin and Greek, from the Latin root meaning “peril or danger” and the Greek root meaning “to experience or to go through” something. Our modern definition of the word appears to be a fairly recent development in its semantic history. In Old English, fear was a noun meaning “danger” or “a sudden, terrible event.” It did not acquire its meaning of “being afraid” until the 13th century, when it became a verb.
Brain scientists like Jill Bolte Taylor, author of the book, My Stroke of Insight, tell us that the Mind is a story teller. The story-teller portion of our left brain tries to make sense of what it does not know by weaving an elaborate story around small slivers of truth. Once these stories are fabricated, it is often quite difficult for us to distinguish between the facts and what our Minds make up about those facts. When we believe in what we make up, this is what Spotted Eagle calls a projection.
Some projections are fear-based and others, fantasy-based. A fear-based projection predicts a pessimistic future outcome based upon past painful events. As you point out, resistance to what is in our now-moment starts the process of projection.
Anthropologist, Richard Leakey, in his book, The People of the Lake, tells us that the human imagination evolved to help our early Stone Age ancestors anticipate real and present survival threats on ancient African savannahs. Our imagination’s ability to sense that something is not safe can be quite useful to us when we are fully present in the now-moment. For example, if we are crossing the street, and a speeding vehicle is bearing down on us, our imagination can see where this is heading and alert us to the necessity of getting quickly out of the way. You’ll notice, when this happens, we don’t really have to think about it. The imagination tells us that there is a real and present danger, and without telling any stories, we simply act to remove ourselves from a dangerous situation.
Where the imagination gets us into trouble is when it leaves the present moment. When the imagination analyzes the past, it cannot help but weave a story-line around the facts and embellish the truth with all sorts of fictions. It then takes the story and uses it to predict a future outcome. Spotted Eagle teaches us that uncertainty in the now moment, when it is resisted, triggers the Mind to project its story onto the future, and this is what stimulates our fear. If we notice that our fear is sourced in our emotional reaction to an uncertainty present in the now-moment, it is pretty clear that the fear comes from an uncertainty we resist. Spotted Eagle teaches us that uncertainty is real, and it is part of every now-moment. To remain present, our best course is to identify the specific uncertainty we are resisting and work to simply accept that the future is uncertain, without making up any sort of story about it, and without projecting that story onto the future.
Contributed by Jennie Marlow
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