LTU 5 Emotional Freedom

[Shannon]

The introduction of FRM is only the second time in nearly 6 years I've been sceptical of these subliminals. What am I without fear, how do I survive?  - when I've raised this before it's been brushed off in a sort of 'that's obviously stupid and illogical' tone. But the anxiety I've maintained has been there because of the real threat of exclusion, and isolation and whilst not death - it's not an uncommon abstraction of death.  

The other fear that I would have to deal with is meaninglessness and that all suffering in this world is for nothing - confronting that fear honestly has led me into a spiral of avoidance behaviour. Smoking, eating carbs and all the obvious avoidance behaviour. I've been wandering around pretty annoyed and resentful - even at IML, feeling like I've wasted my time and money.


I wasn't sure how to deal with this and there was no one I could turn to, so I buried myself in books to find answers. If it's all meaningless, If there is not even a 'me', then what am I trying to do here. What's the point of me writing a report for work, straining to get a raise, being anxious about meetings and social engagements, feeling low status, and enduring other tragedies.

What I found was the a few paragraphs from a few books which brought into focus thoughts i'd had for years but nnever really grasped.

Shannon asked a while back 'what are you without your mind', and I would say that I don't conceptualise life without my mind per se but at my best, outside of my mind, 'I' am potential and a space for things to come into the world, - and my mind is the tool 'I' use to crystallise those things.

You are exhibiting a fear of being free from fear.  You express fear that without fear, there is no meaning.  There is a threat to your survival.

The fact is, fear is a liar.  It is am emotional response that is by its very nature irrational and illogical.  It does not make sense, but can blend itself with logic to varying degrees to make itself seem to make sense and be necessary.  

For example, I have an uncle who has a Master's degree in counselling psychology.  He smokes.

Now aside from it's inherent normalization in our society (world, really), smoking makes no logical sense.  You are inhaling smoke.  You know that smoking is addictive.  You know it will lead to a panopoly of health issues.  You know that you are losing your lung function over time because of it.  You know that you are highly likely to suffer inability to breathe even with oxygen, to spend all your time at the hospital in the end, to get lung cancer and/or emphysema, and to ultimately die early because of it.

Who in their right mind would smoke, knowing all that, if they were thinking rationally?

Nobody.  Smoking is a behavior driven by emotions, and specifically, fear.  It is irrational and illogical.  It is blatantly, if very slowly, self destructive.

Like my mother before him, all his life he has smoked primarily to allay the fear he started off with of not fitting in, and later (as with most smokers), to allay the fear that he was unable to quit.  He also smokes to give a big "fuck you" to anyone who suggests he quit, because it's his way of "maintaining control".  

Does not smoking mean you won't fit in?  No, it means that those who smoke will have to accept that you don't smoke, or you have to hang out with people who don't smoke.

Does smoking allay the fear that you can't quit smoking?  No, it actually makes it worse by reinforcing it.

Does smoking give you control when you smoke in response to people suggesting you should quit?  No, it simply expresses an immature response to a fear of not being in control, when clearly, you are in fact in control. (While furthering the issue, to boot.)

So all this happens out of fear, and as you can see, not a damned bit of it makes sense.

So let's look at your fear of being at risk of death without fear.

You have two primary hemispheres of your brain.  The left and the right.

One of those hemispheres is predominantly logical and rational.  One is predominantly emotional and intuitive.

We have both because they are mutually exclusive states of awareness.  Otherwise, we would not need physical separation of the hemispheres to allow each to have a specific dominance in one or the other.

You can function primarily out of the emotionally dominant side, or primarily out of the logically dominant side.  If fear rules your life, it is likely that you are focusing primarily out of the emotionally dominant side.

You can approach a life threatening situation with pure emotion, pure logic, or some combination of the two.  Let's consider standing on a steel I-beam 50 stories up on a skyscraper under construction as our example.  Slip, and you fall to your death.

Do you have any more chance of dying if you operate out of one polarity than out of the other?  The emotional side would trigger fear of falling, and you would probably begin shaking uncontrollably, lowering your muscle control and increasing your ability to slip.  To compensate, you might lay flat on the I-beam and hold on for dear life, thus immobilizing you and perpetuating the threat situation.  This could very well lead to the necessity for rescue from a helicopter, which would then end up suspending you from a cable hundreds of feet in the air without anything but a web harness.  The risk of death is actually enhanced by this response.

On the other hand, you find yourself in the same situation but focusing through your logical awareness entirely.  You feel no fear, but you know you are at risk of death.  What would you do in this situation?  Because you feel no fear, you would think logically.  The logical thing to do is to lower your center of gravity so you are less likely to fall off the beam.  Then you might put your arms out to either side to maximize your control of your balance.  Finally, you would carefully step to the closest point of safety.

Logic wins.

Now let's consider the situation from a different point of view: Let's say you're in that same building, but you are in a place of safety.  Do you walk out on the I-beam and put yourself at risk of death?

If you are focusing through your emotions, fear would prevent that.  If you are focusing through your logic, logic would prevent that.  After all, either way, you are rightly aware of the real risk of death.  If death is not your goal, then either will serve equally well.

The fact is, logic serves the same function, just from a different direction.  It is every bit as good as fear for keeping you safe, if not better, because it does not induce the irrationality and the uncontrolled reactions.

Fear is the mechanism that animals use to keep themselves safe and alive.  Humans, having a more advanced brain, have fear and logic to use.  We can use both or we can choose one or the other.  But since they are mutually exclusive states, and one is irrational, one tends to get out of control when it is triggered: fear.

Fear is not just a mechanism that can keep you alive, it can actually cause your death as well.  Not just because it is instinctual and irrational, but because it can and frequently does become blinding to reality.

Fear holds us back unnecessarily, threatens us while claiming to keep us safe and drives us to do things that are self destructive, self limiting and self delusional.  Fear is a liar.  Fear is the enemy of growth and progress.

Logic, on the other hand, serves to observe the facts and assess what is and is not a good path forward.  The path chosen will always be as good as the data considered and the person's capacity for logical thinking.  It is mutually exclusive to fear, and thus provides a better avenue to achieving your goals, growing, succeeding, finding solutions and generally making yourself happy.  You cannot truly be happy and afraid at the same time.  The part of your awareness experiencing fear will never experience happiness simultaneously.

What many of you who claim that fear will keep you safe where logic will lead to your death fail to understand is that being free of fear is not equal to thinking logically.  Being free of fear while thinking emotionally is a certain path to winning the Darwin Award.  But being free of fear while using your logical brain is a certain path to logically achieving the goals you hold instead.  Case in point:

Cletus lives in a trailer on a hill, and Cletus owns a case of beer, a shotgun, a folding lawn chair and $50.00.

Cletus decides to entertain himself one day by buying a bag of latex balloons, some twine and a tank of helium.  He is going to fill all of those balloons and tie them to the chair and then sit in it, enjoy his beers and float around for a while before using his shotgun to pop the balloons one at a time and then land.

So Cletus stakes the chair down, and begins filling those balloons and tying them to the chair.  Whn he has a good 75 of them overhead, the chair is straining against the pull and he decides it's time.  So he loads two shells in his trusty double barrel shotgun, sits down, puts his case of beer and his shotgun on his lap and cracks open a beer while pulling the stakes out of the ground.  He floats off, to his great delight, and soon is high in the sky, awed at the view, and happily drinking his beers.

Now he realizes there are a few problems.  First, the wind is blowing him in the direction where he will end up out over the ocean if he doesn't land soon.  Second, it's getting strangely difficult to breathe.  Third, it's cold up here!  And last but not least, he realizes that he is now at risk for being sucked into the jet engine of a passing jetliner.  Better get down, he decides.

So he pulls out his trusty shotgun and aims it at one of the balloons, pulls the trigger and - fully half of his baloons turn to dust.  He begins to free fall out of the sky, and even after jettisoning his beer and his gun, hits the ground at terminal velocity, causing his pelvis to become mud within his body and pushing his spine through his brain and the top of his skull before becoming a meat pancake.  Cletus has won the Darwin Award.

Now if Cletus was afraid of dying, would he have done this?  Maybe not.  But maybe he was afraid of dying, and just never thought his idea would kill him?  It is most likely that Cletus, here, was not afraid of dying, and that is most likely because he never thought his actions would kill him.  So it is clear that not being afraid of death can lead to death.  But let's look at what is likely to have happened if he was afraid of dying in this situation vs what would have happened if he had been using logic to assess the threat.

In the case that he was afraid of dying, he could still have ended up in the exact same situation for the exact same reason, if his fear of death was not correlated with death resulting from his choice of actions.  If he did have awareness of the possibility of death, he might have refused to actually do it, and thus fear would have kept him alive.  Or he might have decided that maybe a shotgun was too much, he needed his trusty BB gun instead.  But unless he was careful to only shoot balloons that allowed his BB to only puncture that one balloon, and he was patient about coming down (it's hard to judge altitude when you are high up and moving slowly up or down), it is likely still that he would have shot too many balloons, and may have still risked death or bodily harm as a result.

Fear only wins here if he does not go up at all.

Now let's look at logic.  If he was thinking logically, he would have to have realized that he needed a BB gun and a careful aim to prevent his falling out of the sky or coming down too fast.  He would likely have considered the whole thing before he tried it, and thought about what was likely to have happened in response to each stage.  And even if he got it wrong, he is much less likely to have actually gone through with it without knowing exactly how to do the whole operation successfully.  This means that there are two dominant sub-probabilities: 

1. He realizes the risk is high and chooses to enjoy the imagined flight only, or
2. He plans carefully how he is going to accomplish his goals, and maybe even does some experimental low altitude test flights first, which lead him to adjust things (or stop).

His likelihood of death here is low.

Now when someone is free of fear, it clearly does not mean they possess the intelligence they need to think.  This is why animals rely on fear to keep them alive: they lack the intelligence that most humans have.  Intelligence is a much better tool for keeping us alive than fear, and this is easily demonstrated by observing a plot of the human population of the planet along with a plot of the average intelligence of the human species.  As we become more intelligent, we survive in greater and greater numbers because we have better planning ability, better awareness of time, better ability to understand the world around us, and better ability to build the tools and machines that allow us to survive more and more, from farming tools to weapons.

Fear wants you to believe that it is keeping you alive because otherwise you may turn it off and outgrow it.  You may hand the steering wheel to your logical side and start relying on your intelligence for your ability to stay alive.  And because fear is irrational, it does not understand logic and therefore does not trust it.

Now let's get to the "meaning of life" search you are conducting.  How does fear give your life meaning?  It doesn't.  Neither does logic.  That's because only symbols can have meaning.  Life has a purpose, but not a meaning.  The endless search for the "meaning of life" is endless because it is a red herring, a logical fallacy that "life has meaning".  People confuse meaning with purpose and value.

If I spend my life trying to make the world a better place, does my life have "meaning" as a result?  No, but it does take on importance and value that satisfies me as to the worth of trying, and dealing with all the hardships in the way.  And if I make it my purpose to make the world a better place before I die, my life still does not "have meaning".  It isn't a symbol.  Letters are symbols, and they have meaning.  They mean to represent the sounds that they represent.  The words they are used to form also have meaning.  They are also symbols, and they have whatever meaning that the word they represent is defined as.  The word "red" means "the color we perceive when the light hitting our eye has a specific wavelength that corresponds to the color red".  But what is the purpose of red?  There is no intrinsic purpose, it's just a color.

So life is what you make it.  It has what value you give it.  And perhaps we do arrive on this planet with a purpose.  I happen to believe that we come here to learn from making mistakes.  That our primary purpose is to learn and grow through experiencing life here on earth.  And that as long as you are in the process of making progress to furthering that goal, you are fulfilling your primary purpose.

So really, your concern about life having no meaning of you don't have fear makes no sense.  It is as illogical as the fear that is striving to stay alive by convincing you of the irrational ideas that without it, your life would have no meaning and you would be at risk of death.  

Your life has purpose regardless, even if you have to be the one to give it that purpose (since we have no way to prove that you come here for the purpose of learning).  Nothing stops you from choosing a purpose and focusing on that.  And as you can see, you really only need fear to help you stay alive if you are exceptionally low on the intelligence scale for a human, or have animal level intelligence.

Fear is a liar.