Our concerns about ebola, about terrorism, about climate change, about humanitys self-destructiveness...all may well be reflections of the greatest, yet least recognized dis-ease that has infected humanity to date: FEAR. Fear is a dis-ease of the mind. It is highly communicable and spreads through emotional contact. When a person succumbs to this dis-ease of the mind, the mind loses its capacity to think rationally. Fear takes over the physical body and unleashes chemicals that trigger a mental collapse; the person regresses to animalistic fight/flight/freeze behaviors in reaction to whatever the imagined trigger is. The dis-ease of fear causes terrible mental suffering within our species. When a persons suffering becomes so great that they cant stand living with this disease any longer, they may act out by blindly attacking others or by committing suicide. Only if they are lucky enough, or self-aware enough, to recognize their own illness, will they focus their attention on finding a cure for it. A cure does exist for this communicable dis-ease. The cure involves recognizing that one is being bombarded by germs of fear that implant themselves in our brains and expand into full-blown terrors. When we recognize how the disease is transmitted we can CHOOSE not to allow the germs of this disease to implant themselves in us. This disease appears to be like herpes; it hides deep in the mind and then emerges whenever the mind is weakened in some way—by stress or by some unexpected event. I have found a way to manage this disease within myself, using two-stage process. First, I withdrew completely from society in order to detach myself from the social cues that triggered my regular flare-ups of this disease. I used that time to ruthlessly explore my own mental triggers and to weed out as many of the infectious ideas that had taken up residence in my own mind as I was able to find. It took a long time, and the slightest trigger still held the power to set off within me a terrible relapse into uncontrollable fear. Yet I persisted, and today I am happy to report that most of the triggers have been safely deactivated. I still stumble upon deep triggers from time to time, but now I have good tools to eradicate them. Next, I began to slowly re-expose myself to our dis-eased society. By doing so I am learning to strengthen my immunity to this herd disease. I am also sharing my realizations and my calm, peaceful way of responding to these reactive triggers with others, in the hope that they will realize that they too are infected, and can overcome this disease with focused intention. This may well be the greatest challenge humanity faces—learning how to overcome the dis-ease of mental fear, so that the mind can be directed toward useful, life-affirming pursuits rather than discharging its energy in pursuit of shadows under the bed and closet monsters.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 15:59:45 +0000
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