by David Richo
—Ngulchu Thogme Zangpo, Bodhisattva Practices
A NEW WORLD
A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war…. Various methods through the ages have been attempted to devise an international process to prevent or settle disputes between nations. From the very start, workable methods were found insofar as individual citizens were concerned, but the mechanics of an instrumentality of larger international scope have never been successful. Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blots out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.
—General Douglas MacArthur, radio broadcast from the USS Missouri after the surrender of Japan, officially ending World War II (September 2, 1945)
We come into the world not as blank slates but with some settings, some natural instincts, already plugged into our psyches. This human gene pool certainly has breathtakingly positive qualities. For instance, we can find a redemptive value in suffering. We can love one another unconditionally. We can stand up for our rights and the rights of others with courageous bravado. We can find ways to make peace. We can care about ourselves, one another, and the planet. We can be just, and even generous. These are examples of our sterling assets and potentials as human beings, resources we share in the world around us.
Yet, all is not sweetness and light. We remind ourselves that we also have it in us to fall prey to hate or to join a lynch mob. This shows us that there is more inside us than Buddha nature or Christ consciousness. We can’t overlook our enduring potential for aggressiveness, what we described earlier as the shadow side of healthy anger. Knowing we have this inclination keeps us on guard over ourselves and encourages us to practice showing gentle love in all our dealings. This is our only defense against the inner and oncoming dark.
Indeed, this gene pool of ours has some serious birth defects. We have a collective shadow side, a penchant toward harming, hurting, engaging in or standing by and allowing evil. This negative shadow energy in us has included, and still includes, war, torture, genocide, hate crimes, revenge, oppression, slavery, greed, abuse of the earth, and myriad forms of violence. In the face of these harsh examples of aggression we can choose goodness and join those who stand up for what is just and beneficial. On the other hand, we sometimes join the evil forces or even persecute those who stand for goodness.
On a collective basis some negative-shadow built-in inclinations are fixed in the structures of our psyche as our human heritage from our ancient ancestors. The settings have evolved over the millennia so that more sophisticated societies can survive. Yet, they remain primitive and fear-based on many levels—for example, in confronting conflict. Let’s focus on two of these proclivities toward aggression that are present almost universally in individuals, groups, and societies:
Maintaining order by the threat of punishment: In a society, order tends to break down if there are no sanctions in place to maintain it. Most of us seem to need the threat of punishment as a motivation to follow all the rules of society. We also carry over the collective practice of punishment and retaliation into our personal relationships. This is scary since it is how humans may become feral.
Forming in-groups and being xenophobic: We know we are evolving toward more connectedness. People do indeed keep forming close bonds within society, but they do so mostly in their own in-groupings—rather than with an embrace of the whole of humanity. We unite with those who are like us or who like what we like. We are intensely loyal to “our own” and tend to disparage or even harm those who are different from us. We join those who think and act as we do; we fear and exclude those who do not.
Spiritual leaders have come along to show us another option, universal love. We need such teachers because otherwise we would have no program to follow but the two fear-based patterns of societal evolution. Thus, when our conscious purpose in evolution is about awakening to our Buddha nature or the Christ within, both the inclinations above can be transformed. We then become deeply humane, not simply human. With a spiritual orientation, we have the option of evolving from the primitive style of punishment and xenophobia to advancing as a society of universal love and caring connection: The negative inclinations are in us and fear brings them out. The positive inclinations are also in us and enlightened awareness brings them out.
With unconditional connectedness as the model of evolution, we emerge as an awakened humanity, one committed to a world of fellowship. We then seek to rehabilitate those who go awry, not retaliate against them. We want the style of reconciliation, not retribution. We feel universal loyalty to a global humanity, not only to our insider group. We look for ways to bring everyone in, not ways to keep some out. Our motivation to be like the caring saints and heroes we admire has superseded our motivation to stay in the perennial primitive pattern. We are then a truly evolved humanity, not simply a herd satisfied with survival no matter who gets hurt.
With nothing going for us humans beyond what survival-based evolution has built into us, there is not much hope for a better world. Yet, since we also have access to grace—assistance beyond ego—we can awaken our growth-based evolutionary impulses. Then optimal connectedness flourishes. It will take a commitment to live the teachings of Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, for that unity to become visible in our world today. Now we see why:
When the direction of evolution is persistence in existence, its goal is the survival of those who are fittest for physical and mental maturation—only some of us. This produces the world we have now.
When the direction of evolution is caring connection, its goal is the survival of those who are fittest for physical, mental, and spiritual maturation—all of us. This can produce a world of justice, peace, and love.
Hope for us and our planet is based on the evolutionary nature of all that is. All is tensed toward growth, has a developmental direction. We build our hope when we enter into the arc of this growth. Such entry is having an evolutionary spirituality. We are not doing spiritual practices to gain merit for ourselves or to be more enlightened than others. Our entire program of spiritual awareness and practice is in the style of loving-kindness, equally oriented to everyone as to ourselves and to those we love personally. We are doing what evolution does: move in ever-widening circles to include all beings and our planet in connectedness and collaboration. We each have a life goal in our relationships, careers, and fulfillment of longings. We all have the same goal in our evolutionary purpose, co-creating a world of justice, peace, and love.
Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mystical of cosmic forces. Love is the primal and universal psychic energy. Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Spirit of the Earth
SIX
THE FEAR TRIGGER
Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
—Frank Herbert, Dune
Triggers often arouse fear in us. Fear is a central obstacle to building and accessing our inner resources. Some fears trick us into believing that we have no inner resources. We can understand why most of us are at the mercy of many, too many, fears. We inherited fear from our ancient ancestors. Only our forebears who had fears survived. For example, people with a fear of snakes liv
ed on; those who were curious died out. Thus, the natural human aversion to snakes is imprinted in us descendants for survival’s sake. We will always have such primitive fears, the ones we inherited from our Cro-Magnon ancestors. They reside in our amygdala, the primitive reptilian part of our brain that holds fears from ancient times and from childhood too. In our example, we inherited a realistic fear and caution about what can be truly dangerous. It is also true that the ancestors who had courage in the face of fear, while being cautious too, survived and thrived. We have inherited that balance.
We want to keep our realistic fears. Yet, we also have unfounded fears: We imagine a threat where there is none, forecasting or dreading an outcome that will never happen, being scared of things that are not really so daunting. Our goal is not to get rid of fears like these. Our goal is simply not to act on them. We do not have to let them stop us from living in accord with our deepest needs, values, and wishes. We do not have to let them push us into actions that are self-diminishing or self-limiting. When we are strong in this way, we have accessed the courage that is as deeply in us as fear. Believing we are indeed courageous builds self-trust, a central inner resource in the face of any triggering fear.
Unfounded fears thrive on the richness of our imagination. We drum up thoughts that depict the serious consequences that might happen to us because of some triggering event. Most of us are quite adept at imagining the worst in ever more outrageous ways. It is sad to notice how much of our wonderful inner resource, imagination, goes into fueling our fears. So much of that creativity could be invested instead in exciting ideas and extraordinary innovations. Working on letting go of fear is therefore a path to accessing new ways of dressing up our routine lives with newfound courage and kaleidoscopic variety.
When fear dominates us, it short-circuits the full experience of who we are. Fear revokes our freedom to be ourselves. Thus, to fear is to doubt our own power, to stunt it, to crimp our full human stature. We sometimes fear having power, and that disempowers us even further. We believe we have no inner resources—that is, are at the mercy of triggers. Most fear is terror that our carefully constructed and continually refortified citadel of control over our feelings will fall. What we really fear are the uncontrollable bodily sensations and reactions that will accompany release from fear—and from trauma too.
When we have focused on being in control of people, feelings, and events we set ourselves up for worry when things happen beyond our control. That worry is the price we pay for all the years of energy we put into making sure we were in control. The alternative attitude is surrender of control. It will be a “yes” to two simple but unwelcome givens: First, we accept the fact that we won’t always be able to control outcomes, so it is wise to invest some energy into devising a program for that eventuality—deciding, for instance, “Let the chips fall where they may. I will grieve if I don’t like the way they fall and then make the best of the way they fell.” Secondly, we can trust that whatever happens offers us an opportunity to love more and fear less. Our program then is simply gratitude.
BOTH DESIRES AND FEARS
Relationships evoke desires. The many kinds of desire fall essentially into two categories. A single-level desire is about the object only: “I need a flashlight for my camping trip. I want only that, and I will be satisfied when I have it.” Our desire is straightforward and satisfiable. A multi-level desire is about more than the stated object: “I need a late-night snack when I am alone and lonely. I am wanting more than what I think I need and then I am not satisfied anyway.” (That would not happen with the desire for a flashlight!) Our desire is complicated and unsatisfiable.
With a multi-level desire, we can immediately ask, What are we seeking and what are we avoiding? Feeling these two at once is also the thing that underlies addiction. We are seeking some form of satisfaction while also avoiding something; we feel desire and fear simultaneously. This is why addiction is so confounding. It mixes fear and desire and thus stymies us.
Let’s say we have an addictive desire for sex. It is obsessive and compulsive and has many levels of meaning in our lives. Our healthy ambition is for more than physical satisfaction. We may actually be looking for one or more of the five As—attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, allowing—our original needs in early life, and the components of love throughout life. For example, we long for fatherly love, a holding presence with the five As, a sense of safety and security. We want a “stay with” experience, which we did not get from Dad. We now look for that kind of love, but through sex rather than in ongoing committed intimacy. When we find it we feel dopamine, the hormone of reward, coursing through us, and that fuels the addictive cycle.
However, our addiction is also about avoidance: we fear the intimate connection that might give us true need fulfillment. We prefer dopamine to oxytocin. We combine fear and desire and sexualize our deep and ancient longing rather than trust that we can find it in a relationship. In addition, we might be attracted only to the one who is available for this game of hide-and-seek, the one who has the same agenda we have. He or she is the one very ready to play it all out with us. We dependents and codependents easily find each other.
We thus use sex to get what we seek and avoid what we fear. How? We choose exciting sexual activity instead of contented sexual connection—giving us what we seek but with no need to avoid. We seek adrenaline and excess dopamine, not oxytocin.
Neural plasticity is good news regarding positive change. But when it comes to the release of dopamine, that same plasticity can make us less flexible, less apt to find new ways to think and act. Dopamine is related to reward, pleasure, a sometimes false sense of control and confidence. When we seek it addictively, we foreclose on our chances to move beyond what it offers and get on with life in a more well-rounded way. We are caught in a circular feedback system that freezes our options.
In this example, desire for fatherly or motherly love can also lead us to search for an older man or woman as a partner. We think, “This person I am attracted to will either give me what I seek or reject me, as Dad (or Mom) did or did not.” Or we could want a younger man or woman. Then we ourselves become the affectionate father or mother figure: “I show this person what I want rather than get it. Now I get it by giving it.” Why seek younger rather than older? It might be because the transaction feels safer with someone younger.
Seeing all this in our behavior, our challenge is to have unconditional compassion for ourselves and others. We might also go deeper into our predicament and ask this question: Do I fear fatherly or motherly love too?
Finally, acceptance and rejection can be triggers of empowerment or disempowerment of our ego. We feel powerful when we are accepted by someone, which can lead to ego inflation. We feel our power diminished when we are rejected, the experience that can deflate our ego. Now we can understand why rejection harpoons us so hard while acceptance feels so good. In a way, having power is having an identity; without it we are no one. How ironic that letting go of being someone is enlightenment in Buddhism but a frightening loss in the ego’s world.
WHEN CLOSENESS IS SCARY
Why is intimacy so scary? It may be because it invites us into fearless vulnerability, fearless surrender of ego, fearless trust even when the evidence is sketchy, fearless letting go of control, fearless willingness to be seen through and through all the way to the bottom of ourselves. We are challenged to reveal all the parts we would prefer to keep hidden and place them in full-frontal view.
Interrelatedness, deep connection, has a comforting ring to it. Yet, it evokes ambivalent feelings in us. Most of us desire closeness and fear it at the same time. We hear of this from William Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey”:
More like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.
In intimate relationships it is normal that there be some ambivalence both about clo
seness and commitment. Thus, we look for loopholes; we fudge here and there. Unconditionality is certainly not possible all the time, only in moments. We may never find the full fearlessness that closeness and commitment ask of us. But we would not want to use this realization to rationalize our fears. We can instead engage in some practices that move us along: We can show more and more transparency in our relationship. We can admit our fears. We can support each other in getting past them. We can open to a little more closeness and a little deeper commitment daily. As the first step toward full relating, we can even give up trying to be perfect.
We find it scary to trust others—although trust is an essential ingredient of loving—because the possibility of betrayal frightens us. Our fear of trusting is also a fear of vulnerability. This can prevent us from accessing the love we long for. How sad that trust, which best expresses who we are—people in connection—can so keenly frighten us at the same time. Our ego is looking out for number one, believing its own interests are all that matter. We then miss the point. We fail to realize that such a fear-based attitude undermines the possibility of achieving the thing that can truly make us whole and happy. When we fear closeness, we become experts at distancing:
I don’t show my vulnerability.
That would make me more lovable.
Then closeness would happen.
That is scary.
So my safety consists in not being vulnerable.
I have come full circle back to a closed heart.
In this strange quandary, of wanting and needing what we are also fearing and avoiding, it is understandable that closeness becomes a trigger. The fear might sound like this: “In this relationship, you are demanding what I have feared all my life to give.”