Fear

Or: Emerging thoughts from an unconscious contemplation.

A friend of mine is having problems with his wife's ex-husband. Why are so many apparently evil acts, my friend asked rhetorically, committed by humans on other humans? Where does this kind of evil come from?

I'm afraid I answered his rhetoric. It isn't any help to the situation, perhaps, but it suddenly struck me that I was pointing out things that I clearly know all about but which I am just as guilty of ignoring.

This was (slightly edited) my response. And the comments they contain may be, perhaps, my next instructions - to myself.

Hateful actions are a defence response and defence is inspired by fear of attack. What makes this form of fear most horrendous is when others are drawn into the fear and forced to live through it with them by the frightened person's manipulations and disruptions. This is particularly malevolent when the original fear has nothing whatever to do with those being affected.

So, what generates fear?

In almost every case it is generated by dwelling on contemplations of the future, the potential of what is to come and the dangers that lurk in that particularly imponderable Undiscovered Country (Shakespeare - or possibly Kirk).

Most people have an unhealthy preoccupation with the future. When this is allied with a perception of an unfulfilled or distressed past, it impacts heavily on present actions.

Example: X has been unemployed and had to eat his dog once to stay alive. Now, X is in work at an abattoir and every day he turns up to work he is reminded of his dog. He ought to quit, but he fears finding himself unemployed again and a recurrence of tragic events. He fears staying in work because he can tell that his mind is coming loose at the hinges. What is the solution?

I've no idea. But consider this: if X can identify with all those actions that led to him eating his dog, and if he can reconcile with each of them, then there is a good chance that they will no longer impinge negatively on his present quite as forcefully. After all, he is not an evil person - certainly not in his own mind. He acted out of despair and fear. He must mourn his dog, of course, but he must also honour it. It kept him alive.

Even so, working in an abattoir isn't going to help his state of mind, however much he recovers from the original trauma. Yet he fears unemployment and the repeat-pattern of dog-slaughter. Now he must reconcile with his future and come to an appreciation, an utter understanding at a sub-atomic level, that the future is unwritten and patterns only repeat if you acknowledge and accept that they must repeat. And of course this is patently untrue. Nothing in the future must happen. You may, for example, take steps towards one future and arrive in another without knowing how or why.

The important thing, obviously, is the steps themselves and your response at any given moment to the stimuli they contain. If one of those steps seems comfortably familiar and if that is an echo of the steps that led to you eating your dog, you must be aware enough to recognise it and acknowledge it in order to avoid it, to step around it into the unfamiliar, unpatterned unknown. In this way, the past can be discouraged from impressing on your present repeats of those actions that may, indeed, lead you to the future you fear.

It is, ultimately, all about Now and how you deal with the moment you are experiencing Now. The future is what you allow it to become. It need never echo the past again without your willing participation. Provided you make the effort to accept the past as it has already unfolded - after all, what choice do you have? You can never change it.

In short sentences for the easily distracted :

The Past is over and done, the Future will be whatever it will be, everything depends on how you behave in your Present.

You can wake up now. I've stopped.