The Anatomy of Fear

Just like many other spiritual people and Psychologists, I always find myself desperately searching for spiritual formulas that can cut through the haze of spiritual teaching, something that can simplify things, expose fallacies and re-focus my attention to what really counts. I believe I have made some progress towards understanding the anatomy of fear: ideals, taboos, fantasies/expectations and fears.

Ideals

These are the "shoulds", the standards that people set for themselves and others. Ideals are used as challenges and platitudes, such as, "The Bible says that we should love one another, if you loved other people you would do this or that." The Bible is a veritable source-book of ideals - Christians often quote Bible verses as a universal, one-size-fits-all set of ideals to aspire to.

Ideals can move a person away from love by coaxing them to do things out of fear. There is often a sense of failure amongst Christians if they do not attain, or at least aspire towards, the standard, accepted ideals that have been set for all Christians.

Ideals are used to coax people to take action through the threat of guilt, shame and rejection. With ideals there is encouragement through striving towards a perceived reward, such as a blessing from God for following Biblical rules.

Taboos

These are the things we have been conditioned to avoid based on what other people tell us. Taboos are established when someone tells us, "Don't do that! That's really bad. If you do that then this or that might happen!"

To an extent, taboos seem to serve us well. We have been told that being bitten by a rattlesnake is painful and that we might die - so people will do everything to avoid one when they see it or when they hear that distinctive rattle. But taboos only serve as a safeguard for people with a fearful disposition. Taboos become part-and-parcel of rule keeping, which does not bring freedom and empowerment.

Churches attempt to control the congregation through the application of taboos. But the truth is that just making a taboo out of something cannot change a person's disposition from fear to love - assuming that love also includes confidence, common sense, self-discipline and so forth.

Christianity seems to thrive on taboos, especially in the area of sex. Taboos involve a great deal of rejection - as evidenced in the churches stance towards homosexuals.

The truth is that taboos only serve to contribute towards a person's sense of fear and moves them further away from love. With taboos there is encouragement through avoidance of a perceived punishment, such as a curse from God for doing something that the Bible forbids.

Fantasies/Expectations

Fantasies seem to be an aspect of the various self-defence mechanisms that the human mind creates when under duress. Fantasies seem to be a substitute for hope when there is no hope. The abused child uses fantasies, like the little girl who dreams that she is a fairy-tale princess in order to escape the abuses of her life, in her own mind.

I do believe in hope, which is an expectation of good. But hope is more often then not a vague sense that everything is going to be okay. Hope is conveyed in the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:25-34. I particualrly like the message about “the birds of the air” in Matthew 6:26 and not worrying about tommorow in Matthew 6:34. Hope has confidence in God and I would also add in self (to some extent) and in life (others and circumstances – seen and unseen). Hope does not need to have all the answers, but just happily goes with the flow of life.

When a neurotic becomes a Christian he inevitably hands God a "to-do list" of things that he expects God to provide him with. There is a place for genuine dreams and aspirations, but it seems that the neurotic confuses these with baseless fantasies. With fantasies there is a belief that if you had that thing - it would make you happy. This of course is not true because a person's happiness does not depend on a person, place or thing. Happiness is a state of being which only oneness with God and cooperation with Him can bring.

Apart from stark fantasies and the God aspect - many people still hold onto expectations, like the little boy who says that he is going to be a policeman when he grows up, but probably ends-up doing something entirely different. Christians often hold onto expectations in relation to God, such as, "God would never let that happen to me", or that favourite amongst the Ecclesiastical elite, "I'm against abortion and war - and so is God!"

Just like opinions, expectations become negative and harmful the more emphatic we are, to the point of being stubborn, and the more stress they induce in us.

Fears

I suppose fears are similar to expectations in that they are things that you expect to happen to some extent. But whilst expectations are for something good to happen, fears are an expectation of something bad happening.

Fears are the "what if" syndrome, "What if it starts raining today? What if she doesn't call me? What if I fail?" A lot of the time the sense of dreading something going wrong is worse than the actual thing happening. In fact, there can be a sense of relief sometimes when something bad does happen so that we no longer have to dread it. People often attribute seemingly related events to their fears, such as food and fuel price rises meaning that they won't be able to pay all their bills. Sometimes, our fears can be completely baseless.

Conclusion

So if we bear in mind the anatomy of fear, we can see straight away what is happening in churches across the world. If we begin to see fear in relation to these four categories - we can quickly identify spiritual abuses and move away from them. This also gives us an insight into what love is: perhaps love is simply the identification of where fear is manifesting in our lives? Fear exists only in our mind and if we can see it for what it is - it should help it to dissipate of its own accord.