Dissecting Fear

Dissecting Fear - Sam Keen
rough notes

My goal is to get you to have "high class fears."
Magnitude of the fears you are willing to confront is the magnitude of experience you are able to have.

9 dumbest words about love: Love means never having to say you are sorry.
9 word aphrodisiac:

8 dumbest words about fear: We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Paradox in the US - of all nations except maybe Denmark or Norway, we are the most secure of all nations. The only war on our own soil has been our own, isolated by two oceans, society of affluence. The great American dream is now the gated community. You know you've arrived when you have an enclave of safety. We LIVE with an expectation of safety, security and the idea that we have nothing to fear, or whatever there is to fear will be taken care of. The implicit assumption is that we are not like other people - we are not meant to suffer. Many nations live in danger zones, fear - people in Bangladesh have concrete, high-level fears: not having enough food, not being able to take care of sick children.

Phobologia - science of dealing with fear
Phobophobia - fear of fear

We fear fear, so we seek out enclaves and control -- this means living in immense denial. 9/11 has changed the American psyche in ways so we haven't comprehended. It has shattered that myth that we are safe. We knew how to control fear -- we knew where danger was and what to do about it -- nuclear standoff. The American psyche shifted from fear/fearlessness to anxiety. Anxiety is when you know there is a threat, but you don't know exactly where it's coming from or what it is, or even when it will happen. Anxieties feed phobias -- you start assigning fears to specific things as an outlet for the anxiety. So we have no wisdom in dealing with danger because we don't know what the danger is.

What happens at the airport is ritual conduct to create the illusion of safety. We can't take a 4oz bottle of shampoo on a plane, but millions of containers cross our borders every year.

Colonial wars don't work anymore - you can't keep the native people of a country down, partially because we don't mind selling them the arms to fight us with.

High-class fears: create a realistic threat index. #1 on the threat index - global warming. It is most apt to harm life. Pandemics - not if, but when. Overpopulation (feeds ecological and resource problems).  You should be more afraid of going to the hospital than being a victim of terrorism.

Did Buddha go on his quest because he was fearless? No -- he had realized that suffering wasn't an option that happened to other people. He believed there was only one place to start the journey - the first noble truth that we will at some time fall into suffering.

Heroic journey - starts when you receive a call for a new adventure. The call we are facing today isn't so much a personal one, but a corporal one. How do we heal the body politic? A few things are needed:

1. Courage. In most fears, we are not alone, and courage is easier to have with others, with company. You can't cast out fear without others - "love casts out fear."

We are approaching a revolution that we don't even see - the revolution of people around the world no longer waiting for governments to fix things - the NGO revolution. 250,000 NGOs have been documented, but there are probably several million. They don't organize like traditional structures - they're cellular.  The "geeks" have found out that community can be created easily.

Grass grows through concrete - you cannot create a system so strong that nothing can get through.

10 Rules of the Road
How do we cultivate courage and wisdom?

1. Be a fool. You already are one. Confess it. Confess that it isn't just George Bush responsible, but you and me and the foolishness of our society. The folly is that we all, at a deep level, voted for war in Iraq because it's about oil and money. George Bush said the American way of life is not negotiable. This is the first major war we've fought with no expectation of sacrifice from the people. Admit that it is not us vs. them.
2. Grieve. Mourn. There's a lot of depression associated with denial - Freud said depression comes out of an unwillingness to mourn. Stop resisting and denying.
3. Repent of your political arrogance. Move from paranoia, narcissism and nationalism. Thou shalt not be an American.
4. Redefine your identity. The only thing wrong with individualism is you aren't one. The scientific truth is that we're all linked more than not. "All philosophy should begin with the words "with" or "we." Find the "we" - find your community.
5. Get to know your commonwealth. Who is there? Travel widely in your own neighborhood. Travel the world.
6. Embrace the cosmos - live in wonder. Wonder is the 6th sense. Be grounded in the cosmos, not the body politic.
7. Get angry. Get busy. Get injustice. Learn about the sources of exploitation. Identify evil. Figure out what your gifts are to deal with problems (find your location), identify where you will take a stand and what you do.
8. Reclaim your senses. The Buddha didn't tell us the second noble truth. Life is to be enjoyed. Open your eyes and let the earth renew you.
9. Practice silence. Technological thought goes from word to word to word with no silence. Meditative thought goes from thought/word to silence.
10. Be careful of too much virtuous living. Don't stay plugged in too much. Do one thing at a time. Live chironically (sp?).
11. Love. Perfect love casts out fear. How do I deal with impediments to love? How do I permit myself to love? Find empathy ->compasion->identification->love.

Where I disagree: "we are in danger of becoming a people with no experiences, only virtual contact." Not going to happen. There is a great misunderstanding of how young people use the internet, of what it means to them (and to those of us who use it in similar ways but don't necessarily qualify as "young."). There's this idea that virtual connections are experience free and I can verify that is not the case. People said the same things about many other technologies