A View Out Into The Periphery

Fearless in the 21st Century

by Zenster

What does it mean to be fearless?

Does it mean that no loud sound or sudden surprise will elicit a physiological response? Does it mean that you can never be startled by something unexpected?

Not in my book.

However, what it means is that there is no person, place, or thing that you fear. Chronic fear is a stowaway from the imagined future that gets regularly invited into the now.

Fear, though, also warrants similes relating to breathing in that we can think of it as an involuntary thing of course because we don’t experience ourselves having to consciously breath every minute of every day. We sleep and our breathing continues… but simultaneously we generally know very well how to manage our breath at least in the basics of ‘inhale’ and ‘exhale’ whenever we consciously choose to… Some people study and practice and master breathing and continue to expand their mastery with every passing day… but the point was that to be fearless, in my book, is simply to not participate in the verb of ‘fearing’ something.

Now, it will alienate a great many readers, I would imagine, to propose that fear is like a choice when you whittle it all the way down and that we are, to an extent, responsible for understanding fear to the point of dismantling it completely… Many lives may be needed to achieve this, but once you do, it is the only way of living that makes sense.

So, with unbearable compassion one must then witness a world full of fearful loved ones who know not what they do.

Living every day afraid, if not horrified, of spiders or guns or heights or, most prevalently and perennially, pain, loss, and death.

To be unafraid of our mortality but to see virtually everyone else terrified of it is brutal on the heart-stirngs, but no one single gong can awaken everyone at once and individually, every flowerseed takes its own time to grow and bloom and seed again…

My grandfather once consoled my cousin who was being teased at a young age for being a ‘weed’ after someone said she was ‘growing like a weed’. She was in tears from the teasing and he simply told her, “A weed is just a flower in the wrong place.”

Dandelions are tremendously beneficial plants and are commonly appreciated in the right settings, but the finely crafted and manicured lawns of suburbia and gardens and parks of the rest of our nation's communities aren’t often where they are appreciated… When they grow in cracks in the sidewalk and along the fenceline, they are seen as a blemish and so they are ‘weeds’… A stalk of corn in a bean field is a weed and vice versa.

Pain, Loss, and Death are just part of the whole. But by fearing them, you are likely missing out on more life than you realize.

In any case, my totally unsolicited advice here: First and foremost, please do your best to become and remain unafraid… and under all circumstances: don’t panic.

And ask yourself why you fear a thing in the first place and what it truly is and what you truly are and no matter what belief system you employ to get there, one simply must get to the reality of this universe (in the classical sense of ‘all that exists’) in order to be free of its 3-ring circus sideshow of suffering and loss.

Be not afraid of loss, for your fear is only from misunderstanding.

There is truly nothing to fear, not even fear itself.

But death is the really odd one, for me, because here we are very convincingly sold this idea that everything alive will die given enough time and yet there most of us go right on living in fear of death...Damn. If it all adds up to an inevitability than what good is it to be afraid anyways?

The argument in retort always is about fear being a survival tool - that without fear, we wouldn’t last as long.

This is where we will make our first incision, class… One can avoid falling off a cliff without being afraid of heights. One can avoid the biting burn of a flame without being afraid of fire. Reckless and fearless are not the same.

Fear is actually very often a mitigating factor when it comes to survival. People are often less graceful or poised or focused when they are in the grips of fear and especially 'panic', which loads like a spring over the course of time in the presence of sustained fears.

I have yet to hear a survivor story that included the phrase, “…if I hadn’t have panicked, I wouldn’t be alive today.” or "Gee, I'm sure glad I panicked in that situation."

Nope.

Panic contributes to the challenge of whatever danger one is facing. Fearful people can avoid actively panicking – but it is only through courage.

A fearless person no longer has need for courage and rather, will surely follow their inner-Tao all the rest of their days.

So, please be courageous enough to seek fearlessness in a moral and karmic fashion. It will be worth it.