fear
Posted by William F. DeVault | Filed under Journal
I had a dream last night, in which I was sitting in an old cabin, a fire ablaze in the fireplace, the smell of cherry and pine filling the air. An old man who looked a lot like me, and sounded a lot like me, was laying by the fire and he said, offhandedly,
I have known more than one person who is so afraid of starving to death that they would eat garbage until they died of malnutrition.
And I thought to myself that this is just another manifestation of fear in this world.
Buddha taught that the essence of all suffering is desire and that we must learn to live above desire. I disagree, with all due respect to the Enlightened One. Fear is the cause of all suffering.
It is fear compounded with arrogance that makes evil. It is fear that leads us to stifle our hearts, our souls, our lives, out of a cold and clutching sense that our lives are beyond us and that we will not measure up to anything greater than a slightly eccentric mediocrity.
Fear is the root of all suffering. I am afraid of many things (despite Saint Thomas’ insistence) but most of all is I am afraid of being afraid, afraid of the sense of hopelessness, of despair, of inadequacy, that comes from being afraid.
When I was a young man I was fairly athletic. I recall once being at my Aunt Bernice’s farm and, having taken a short cut back to the house, needing to ford a small tributary of the creek that ran through her back yard. It was, at most, four feet across. I had jumped three, even four, times that width in Physical Education class, on a run. Even from a standing start, four feet was a distance to laugh at for me.
But I was afraid of landing in the water, which was cold and the creek bottom was slippery. So I stood there, tensing and uncoiling, tensing and uncoiling, until I launched myself…about 2-1/2 feet, landing just beyond the midway point with a splash.
I was so afraid of failure that I wouldn’t allow myself to succeed at something well within my reach.
Fear is the great disabler. Fear will drive us to die of malnutrition, not just of the flesh, but of the mind, the soul, the heart.
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