Understanding Fear

A discourse by Guruji Sri Amritananda Natha
May 2006, at Devipuram

All fear, once again, is caused by not knowing what the future holds. It’s the fear of the unknown. And basically, it’s a part of your programming as a human being. For most of human history, fear was necessary part of the life process itself. In the early days of civilization, people were living in the forests, jungles, savannahs – there was no light at night; no amenities. So every little noise that one heard had to be immediately interpreted and understood: “Should I be afraid of it? Should I face it? Should I run away? How should I react to it?” Fight or flight; that kind of instinct was necessary. And basically it’s a process of naming – the mind seeks to name what it perceives, and if it cannot find a name then its level of alertness spikes.

What happens at a biochemical level is that catecholamines are released into the bloodstream, abruptly raising your energy to levels ten or 20 times higher than normal. Suddenly you’re hit with a rush of energy strong enough to let you battle a tiger if necessary. The catecholamines are released during that brief moment before reasoning, understanding and labeling kick in. It’s a superpower charge that lasts only ten seconds at the most and then dies down.

At that point, the mind takes another route; it begins reasoning and labeling: “Okay, that sound is the hiss of a snake; I should be afraid of it.” Once that thought arises, it’s no longer a general rush of catecholamines pumping into your bloodstream; it’s specifically a dose of adrenalin. The adrenalin prepares your system for a longer, sustained energy release of 20 minutes or so. Unlike the catecholamines, it can’t deliver 20 times your normal energy – the adrenalin gives you much less; maybe 1.1 times normal. Then, after a little while, if your system keeps getting the same kind of impulse over and over, it releases additional shots of adrenalin. And as the adrenalin level in your bloodstream builds, there comes a point where the threshold is exceeded. At that moment, fear takes over.

So it’s a three-step process: First, at the pre-recognition stage, there is no fear. Next, at the post-recognition/pre-reason threshold, there is unknown fear. And finally, at the moment our mind crosses that threshold from the subconscious to the conscious level, there is known fear. If you want to learn more about these concepts, you can read the book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. Psychiatry explores fear quite deeply.

But let me put it to you very simply: It’s Krishna you’re afraid of. It’s Kali you’re afraid of. The unknowable; the unseen; death; the abyss into which you must one day fall, and from which you believe you can never return. The vastness of Space, the loss of your identity – that is what you fear.

And that fear is with you from the moment of your birth, when you emerge from your mother’s womb. Before birth, the umbilical cord connected you to your mother. Through it, blood streamed from your mother into to you; through it, your mother breathed for you, with oxygen mixed into your blood. There’s no need to breathe as you drift in the amniotic
fluid; it’s so nice and smooth inside. But then you grow and grow, and things quickly change – soon you’re fighting for a little space.

Then one day, you begin to fall, slipping downward. You’re being squeezed; your entire body is under stress. Suddenly, something hard and cold clasps your head and you don’t even have the language to express the fear. And that fear only increases once you emerge from the birth canal, your warm liquid environment abruptly replaced by an air environment. The umbilical cord is cut, and with it your oxygen supply. You’re fighting for breath. Your lungs are filled with liquid, so the nurse holds your feet and gives you a slap. You cry out as your lungs fill with air.

So you’re crying for life from the very moment of your birth. It is the deepest trauma your system ever knew, and you’re afraid of repeating the process: “Am I going to die again?” That’s your unknown fear and you have no language to express it. Before a child is socialized and educated, its only language is laughing and crying – binary emotion. You’re happy, you’re sad. You’re hungry, you’re full. You don’t know what you want. Then suddenly something pokes into your mouth and you start sucking; an instinctive reflex. You taste some sweet liquid and suddenly you’re happy and you smile. So the breast is a child’s first interaction with its mother after the womb – is it any wonder there are so many breast fixations on the male side?

From the womb to the breast and on into the world beyond, our individual lives – and consequently, our individual karmic dispositions – are profoundly driven by the myriad environments we pass through on our journey. If you want to change the aggregate values of the environments you inhabit, you’ve basically got to start a new society and then educate its individual members into these new values. In the meantime, you have a choice: You can either merge with your environment and help drive its flow, or else be swept up in it and let it drive you.