A tangled web of fear?
At the root of every thoughts, feeling and emotions is either fear or love, they are the twin sources of chaos and order, that sparks the fire of consciousness, they are the flame and that which is consumed, never meeting and impossible to separate, all that which is consciousness is caught between the two. Love is burnt and fear is fed, fire renews and is the mother of all change, love remains to grow back again, eternal and peaceful. We are pulled in-between, wanting better and to keep what we have, love on it's own freezes us safely in the arms of our present moment, fear seeks change and greater resources to protect us, it recognises uncertainty and wishes to build our strength for tougher moments ahead. It is only with understanding and compassion for the person we are now that we can free ourselves from the past, that we can untangle the web of fear and love that we have built since our birth, on the long journey from the darkness of our non-knowing, we have been tangled by ourselves and what we inherited from our parents and culture.
We never get to have an empty canvas upon which to paint our character, who we want to be, instead we get to layer more colour on a tiny section of the frame without any real reference to what the bigger picture might be. We learn, have experiences, moments of understanding, we remember things from our past, new worries occur to us, this is all happening in real time, new threads are spun, fired out, attaching in random fashions, there might only be two kinds of threads love and fear, but they clash, shout at different frequencies, resonant and sings out in chords that drown each other out. It is on this unstable base that we have to try and free ourselves from this trap of our own making, and it does not matter that it started to tangle when we were born, this web is still the one that we are trapped in.
It only with the clarity of listening that we get to cut through to reality, what it is really like when you are free, when you are no longer tangled up like a puppet on string. When you listen to your mind it quickly becomes clear that you are not in control of what you are thinking about, even trying is an exercise in realizing that there is no central hub of control in there, thoughts just pop up, try asking the question what would I like to think about? Ideas pop up, but where did they come from, are they actually things you want to think about, or where they worries, memories, they are certainly random, but they probably come from a bag of things that you were thinking about yesterday. Test yourself, and ask what new thing would I like to think about, there is at least a billion things that you have never thought about, have you thought about what a chilli pickle tastes like when you are a blue tuna, no of course not, there is no reason to, and your mind would never have had that thought because it is nonsense.
The mind actually hates new things, it likes to have the same thoughts everyday, to chew them over, debate and there are driving thoughts that force you to change, act or learn, they are there for action, and it will continue bullying you forever if you let it. It repeats and reacts to the repetition with it's own learnt patterns, it follows the groves of yesterday, you worry about not getting enough sleep, which leads to worrying about your skin, that leads to worrying about getting old, old alone, that no one loves you, that you have failed, these are groves that you have made, these patterns repeat and underneath each one is fear and love.
Give up the illusion of control, your thoughts are not yours, they are the clothing that you have put on, you gained these thoughts from the history of your actions and reaction of others. They can be pasted down the generations, maybe your grandfather had no money and decided that the rich only had it because they are bad, so money because the root of all evil, he told her mother and then she told you, and now you are walking around with the idea that money is evil and causes problems, so as soon as you get money, you get rid of it by spending it, so you never have any money, which causes problems, and that confirms that money is evil, so you never think about it, it is just a confirmed fear that never get challenged.
This is where listening comes in, you stop accepting every thought as being yours, you just listen, notice your mother's voice, and even that can be enough to slow your thoughts down, not reacting to every thought gives you the start to make a change, and is itself a change, the act of observation changes the action of the subject. It is the most direct action you can take to change the habits of a lifetime, and compared to giving up smoking it is infinitely harder, at least with smoking you recognise that it is a bad habit, you can see that you are doing it, thoughts on the other hand feel like a part of you, they seem natural, just how it is, and whilst thinking is a natural thing, there is nothing spontaneous about the individual thoughts, they are habits given to you, and the conscious mind is a tool, nothing more and certainly not you.
No one looks at the world and thinks it is flat or round, it just is, until someone gains a notion of what the world is, whether that is from the bible or science, once someone has a sense of how the world is, they spread the idea like a common cold, ideas are infectious, especially when the idea does not impact your life directly, a pilot who did not believe in the curvature of the world would end up ninety miles north of New York if they were flying from London, whereas it does not matter to a farmer even if it affects the weather. What fear and love does to the original idea is change your initial framing of your thoughts, a person who was afraid of the bible being wrong, will do everything they can to defend it, in contrast some with a love of God would see the bible as an imperfect human interpretation of that love, and history changes due to the lens of the character of the first interpreter, and for most of the history of humankind we have overwhelmingly been fearful.
And once fear is involved there are sides and interests, we divide and conquer with fear, we unite in love, fear creates the idea of those who took advantage and those who are taken advantage of, then when you mix in competing ideas, you have sides that generates the self-justifying fear of losing and anger that will lead to violence. Unless you can intervene with love, love is being able to see another point of view and have compassion for it, it is understanding that we do not know everything, that we are probably wrong, that we can have individual thoughts that are different, and it is with this same love that we must treat ourselves, and everyone one of us are a confusing mix of both fear and love, pulling and pushing us.
It does not matter whether it is easier to love other people or yourself, start somewhere and then let it spread, as by helping yourself to be more joyful and free, you help you be a better friend to someone else, and it is by loving others that we see what love is like, how it effects and change them. Then there is no denying that love is real, that it matters, when we have presence with love we sink into our experience, we are present and witnessing rather than stuck in our thoughts. This freedom allows us to think and feel clearly without fear getting in the way, that fear pulls us in and we revolve around it, returning to it, to pick at the unhealed scabs that tries to hold that fear. It only in the act of sitting with this energy, letting it come, letting it be and letting it go, that it can flow through you rather than trapping it, it is an act of love to release it, to let it be free, to run and play, and then let it return to the void.
This process will release even more fear, feeling and thoughts, that were trapped underneath, the only way is through, you have to keep on holding your heart opens, and like a bath draining, the less water that is left, the louder it sounds. The last sound of fear is a scream, when a baby is born it screams as it releases it's fear for the first time, it might not be social to scream out loud as an adult, but you can certainly scream on the inside, you can let your soul, body, mind shout as loud as you like, and then you can enjoy the peace and freedom that comes afterwards. The dark night of the soul is the final scream of untangling the knot of love and fear that has taken a lifetime to tie together, but once the individual thread are free of each other, you get to start again with fresh yarn, and you get to knit your experience into something beautiful with push of fear and the pull of love, you can create a web that resonances with love.
