Nothing … But Fear Itself

By Jim Hagarty

I cannot fear a present moment. It is an impossibility. And the present moment is all I have.

I can feel fear IN the present moment, but it will not be fear OF the present moment. It can only be fear of a future moment, felt in the present moment. A future moment that I know will arrive or one that I only think will occur.

A man stands before me with a loaded gun pointed in my direction. I fear the gun in that present moment, but my fear is not of that moment. All there is, in that present moment, is me, the man, and the gun. My fear is of moments in the (very near) future that might come or might not.

“Will he fire the gun? What will happen to me if he does?”

Fear can only exist in the future. But the future does not exist. No one has ever experienced the future, only the present. I can only live in the present because there is no future for me to go to. When it arrives, it is the present.

The future is an idea, a concept. It is where all our hopes and dreams and wishes reside. We experience all those wonderful things in the present moment but like the future, they are only ideas, they are not real.

And neither is fear.

Regret and heartache reside in the past, but they too are only ideas. They also do not exist because there is no past. There are only hundreds of thousands of moments that we have lived in a time before this very present moment. They are gone.

But just as we cannot experience a future moment, we also can’t re-experience a moment we have already experienced. We can do that only in our imagination which is also where our fears are sheltered.

The society we live in is obsessed with the past and the future and we are encouraged to think about those two non-existing neverlands. We snap pictures to better hang on to the past. We install home security systems to prevent a disaster in the future. We wallow in guilt and remorse over past events. We swallow pills and follow medical orders out of fear of future illness.

Nature gave us the ability to look forward and back, so there is a purpose to those capacities for projection.

But when sorrow or paralyzing fears attack, the mind has wandered to the past or the future. These can be dangerous territories to venture into sometimes.

A baby is happy. He knows no past, he knows no future. He cannot wait even one minute for what he wants because he cannot imagine a future. There is a bliss in that. But as we grow up, we are able to look a little farther ahead. What does the baby want? He wants to be loved. What do his elders want? Nothing more than what a baby wants. But the baby is loved because it exists. An adult seeks to be loved for what he does with his existence.

The only enemies we have in our lives are our very own thoughts. They can make us smile and laugh, they can raise us up to high achievements, they can lead us into depraved acts. They can kill us.

We underestimate the awesome power of our thoughts. They seem random to us. Alien, sometimes. They seem to float in and out of our brain, invited at times, unwelcome at others.

We believe others can control our thoughts. They can make us mad. They can make us glad. But others have no control whatsoever over them. It might seem automatic that if you strike me, my thoughts will turn negative and descend quickly into a chaos of anger. No one expects an average person to suffer an indignity from without and not react with an intensity of anger within. But many of our reactions are learned. We absorb them from our elders and from our culture.

But if the capacity for negative emotions was bred into us at birth, and therefore natural, it must be good and must have a purpose. Anger is often the motivator for self-preservation and for self-improvement.

Fear too, has its purposes. We don’t walk freely into traffic, we don’t go too near the edges of cliffs.

But unreasonable fear has only destructive prospects for us. If reasonable fear is the prescribed medication, then unreasonable fear is the overdose.

There are those who believe we are always the masters of our own domains, that we can choose every thought we want to think, reject all those we do not. This is an appealing point of view, but a simplistic one. Powerful cultural forces influence thoughts and they are difficult to combat. Physical well-being is another factor. Certain diseases can disturb the mind. An elevated blood-sugar level, over a prolonged time, can result in depression as can the presence of Parkinson’s disease. Chemical imbalances in the brain affect thought.

Great strides are being made in the struggle to control negative thought. There is more understanding of the problem than in the past. Better treatments. More hope than ever.

But whether or a not a man can ever learn to exercise complete control over his thought life, there is no doubt it is possible to attack and eradicate fear, even if only momentarily; to dissipate the blues; to encourage hope and serenity.

Three main methods are in play in our modern age.

1. Distraction and Displacement. This is what all entertainment is about. Rather than trying to think our way out of a hellhole of anxiety and dread, we seek to ignore it, for a while at least, while filling our heads with merry thoughts. This also explains all hobbies. And a meaningful work life.

2. Philosophical Development. The fearful and terror-stricken are unable to envision a bigger picture. They are immersed in an emotional quicksand, they see no way out. He who develops philosophical ideas, is able to step outside of himself and to see himself in some degree of context. Being able to do that, he begins to administer care to himself like he would a sick child.

3. Spiritual Awareness. Related to philosophical development. Moving away from the idea of oneself as the centre of the universe towards an understanding of larger concepts of life and death. Self-absorption decreases in the wake of spiritual development.

4. Education. It is harder to fear a dark space when it is seen at another time in the light of day. Knowledge is not the key to everything. The very well-educated can suffer just as deeply as the unschooled for whom, it is said, “ignorance is bliss.” If ignorance exists in nature, then it must have its purpose, but ignorance is fear’s playground. As ignorance dissipates, the playground shrinks.

Unreasonable fear lurks in the background of all human misery. None of us can engage in a higher personal mission in our lives than to ensure we have dominion over it.

It is a war worth fighting.

Every minute, every hour, every day.