Fear is the Foundation of my Castle...

"Castles in the Air"

Photograph by Sweetmango

Yesterday I wrote something to someone I love. It was a kind of incomplete sentence and after I wrote it I realised that beyond its literal meaning there lay hidden a truth for myself. So, what I wrote was along these lines, that sometimes our deepest desires, our dreams are in fact distortions of our greatest fears. Ok, so I have tidied that up a bit and in reality it was originally written regarding an actual dream, a dream that occurred during sleeping, but, here is the thing, it was later on during a meditation that I started to see the true meaning of what I had written.

I love that our fears and dreams are so intricately woven together that in some instances in our lives they are transmutable, inseparable.

You see, we have this in built mechanism within ourselves that helps us survive fear. Back in our hunter gatherer days it was all about the 'fight or flight' response, but that is no longer really needed in the present day, it was a survival mechanism of our very very very distant ancestors.

Now, obviously there are instances where fight or flight still exists, I am not saying that the actual reactive response of fight or flight has gone the way of the dinosaurs, what I am referring to is personal fears as opposed to external fears, although as I write that line I challenge its validity, really what I write applies to almost all fears.

Those circumstances where fight or flight really does present itself, those circumstances are also based solely on fear. Not just the fear that the person on the receiving end of an attack feels but also the aggressor. The aggression, the anger that they are directing at an innocent has all come about because of their own fears, so in those instances fear is an immediate and present danger in the lives of both the attacker and the attacked. Therefore in a perfect world, if the attacker, before attacking, looked at themselves in the manner I am about to discuss then we would have far less abuse, be it verbal, emotional or physical. If this was to happen then we would all see that ALL aggression is based upon a deep underlying fear that resides within us and that this fear is really the mirror that reflects what it is that we are missing in our lives, it reflects our deepest desire, our longing for what we have not yet received or experienced in our life.

Just as a side note here, I would also like to point out that all longing, all desire all of our dreams are all, each and every single one of them a distortion of love....but that is a whole other blog post :)

So, it has been a long time since we lived in caves and had to run from dinosaurs. Now we have a new weapon we are developing, evolving in order to do battle with our fears....we take these fears and very sneakily, very subtly and quietly we turn them into dreams, goals and desires. We do it so quietly that we are usually completely unaware of this process going on and that is, I believe, because it has been an evolutionary process to some extent.

In order for us to survive in the modern day world it is not the weapons of rock and iron that are required or so much the fleetness of foot, it is the ability to adapt quickly in daily lives, to recognise a fear grab it with both hands, smell it, touch it, look into its eyes, listen to it and then using every tool at our disposal mold this dark heavy fear into something light and beautiful and golden ... we turn it into a desire. We take one thing that hunts us, haunts us and we create an image a vision of the complete opposite and then we go about laying plans and goals to manifest this dream into our lives.

Now, the real trick, the sign of the master, is that when the vision of the dream slips as it is sometimes prone to do and the fear sitting behind that vision, feeding it, suddenly rears its ugly head, it is then that we have to really 'fight', for it is then that we have to look at the fear, the ugly thing that lurks in our hearts and perches on our shoulders whispering negative and nasty dialogue into our ears, it is then that we have to see it for what it really is...... it is incentive....ahhh yes... incentive my friends that is all that fear is. It is the thing that if used properly will keep driving us toward our goals, our desires and our dreams. Fear is not a gate, a pit, a high wall, a deep chasm fear is incentive, the driving force behind what we do, what we achieve.

Embrace fear for it is actually your wildest dreams dressed up in the rags of longing.