Dose anyone suffer with anxiety and panic like me this all started with the COVID-19 I’m still struggling to get well getting out alone is not easy I’ve been on different medication over 2years I would love to do all the things again like walking crafts going on a bus to town all these things I panic with been at home alone been in shops it never ends. I blame Boris Johnson. The mental Heath are struggling to support those that need help to get there lives back. what do you think?. – Carol C.
Hi, I agree. I won't go into my political stance or beliefs but I'm struggling to get back to how life was before the whole lock down. Everything for some reason just feels different. I hope you find your normal again. – Sami S.
Till my first panic attack, I was nice and happy boy.Drinking, smoking, going out, and in perfect health, then everything get change. Now no drinking, no smoking, only doctors and medications that made me sick. One day I was on the street enjoying, and in a moment hit my nose by accident and little blood bleak. And a one simple think passed by my head. Im dying. I baaaam. My first panic attack. Short of bread, tight in chest, the world started to circle, I was nearly fold down. From this moment to now, doctors and medications. I understand how you feelling and wish from my heart to win this battle. And then tell me :) . If you know some manly or mixed groups, I want to join :) My English is not so good, sorry if many mistakes in the words. Thanks :) – Spas M
Introduction
I copied the above quotes from an online neighbourhood forum. Carol C. initiated the thread with her plea for help, the other two quotes are replies that most closely echo Carol’s fears, though there were tens of other comments in a similar tone, too many to deal with here.
For someone like me who advocates love, the fear voiced in their words is, to say the least, a challenge. This is an attempt to address it.
What chance love?
I hope it is obvious from the above that fear is not a sustainable solution for navigating society’s challenges; a life lived in fear is neither healthy nor joyous, where joy is the fruit of health. Ego – “consciousness in the service of fear” – is gifted at seducing us into distractions that so often become addictions aggressively defended, gifted at enmeshing us in tangled webs of self deception, of seeing bounty in playing the role of oppressor or victim, and so on, all to keep us safe from and unmolested by dangers lurking Out There only fear can guard against.
Ego’s perpetual refrain might be phrased as: Life is deadly, fear your most loyal ally. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread!
This is the reflexive-instinctive substratum state power mines in its systemic need to (fearfully) control its subjects, so as to keep day-to-day life on an even keel and itself in power. Similar mechanisms of control are used by multinational corporations and organisations. Fear is the go-to choice for stressed-out rulers and ruled alike when facing the difficult challenges of keeping an entire people on the same page, or simply making ends meet. But freed to run its course, fear leads to corruption, decadence, misery, endless power struggles, grotesque inequalities, and so on.
Love, by contrast, is very difficult to attain; it requires a lifelong commitment to ruthless self-honesty, courage, compassion, humility, ego dissolution, while avoiding collapse into escapism and victimhood. How many individuals are ready to take on this task before their world falls apart? How many peoples, nations, corporations? It is rare indeed that individuals commit to love before devastating corrective feedback forces their hand, and yet more unusual that entire nations do so. In fact I’m not aware of the latter having ever happened.
It seems covid19 has distilled this age-old and very human dilemma into painful focus for wave upon wave of people, including Carol. The coming fallout from the disastrous Russia-Ukraine war will represent another distillation of this choice, and further intensify fear, already at fever pitch throughout entire societies.
And yet, were I to run this foundational fear-love choice past any of the three people quoted above as an invitation to a healthier way of being, how could I be sure I was not unintentionally luring them onto a road they are not ready to travel?
Whom should we blame for our messes, who should make things right for Carol? What I see beneath Carol’s fear, and beneath that of others like her, is the system that promotes and sustains it. But in truth I believe blame misses the point; only Carol can walk her unique path to health, and by walking it, create it. For all of us within a broader system that promotes and sustains such fears, however, staying true to the only path beyond often seems impossible. Indeed, most succumb to the devil they know, at best seeking help from professionals and drugs that almost never address the root of the problem. This is too familiar a lament. The work that needs to be done is too hard, too exhausting, too against the grain of The Way Things Are.
In other words, the only way out seems so hard it hardly bears mentioning; it is almost cruel to suggest it, however gently. Is a commitment to becoming love a bridge too far for frail humanity?
I feel the intense need in Carol’s words and am instantly on the other side of reality, heart and mind. How can power be so cruel, so implacably violent yet remain oblivious to its impact, grind relentlessly on as if its measures were Ultimate Good? I find no satisfactory answer, see explanations referencing sociopathy and psychopathy as cartoonish, skeletal, misleading. I watch power’s effects unfold but have a minimally detailed sense of its root cause as generalised fear teamed with ego’s comfy allures. Stunned again and again by events, I am now like a light neither off nor on, my switch stuck between two binary poles, waiting for something to make sense. I suspect many feel the same way.
Love is clearly the only way, but almost nobody dares learn what this really entails. I take stock of my own situation, of what I am and feel, and come up wanting, even though I can find no flaw in the foundations of what I flatter myself I know. I want to do something effective, anything at all, but watch on dumbly as one event seeps into the next, on and on and on.
The powers of mass manipulation humanity has acquired in pursuit of state power, of status, stability, safety, are far beyond its wisdom. We do not deserve them, and yet we have them. We wield them relentlessly, wanting to know no better. We are The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and our world has run amok.
How cruel is love?
The cruel, stubborn thought that will not fade away is that things must be this way, that I must accept – does “accept” mean love? – the horrors we have unleashed. These horrors – something whispers to me – are the only way we can learn. Without free will there can be no learning. With free will anything can happen. To accept free will and humanity as they are is to accept horror, evil banality, the most profound corruption and perversion, long dull lives of quiet desperation … all of it. The state of the human world is necessarily and always the truest reflection, indeed embodiment, of how we are as a species.
The third quote at the top of this article is from a non-native speaker obviously struggling to find his way. He is culturally at sea here, out of place, perhaps delivered here by processes beyond his control: the ebbs and flows of history. Carol is no doubt working class, did not receive an education beyond, I guess, age 16, is of a nervous disposition and has slipped into a confused state of crippling fear. Her view of the world is shared by Sami S. There are, I’m confident, millions more like them across the UK, and elsewhere in the world. And I sense their number is growing. They are all real human beings living real human lives the broader system cannot care about. They are ‘useless eaters’ from the system’s point of view: history’s detritus. I see myself as one of them by virtue of not fitting in, of not agreeing with the system’s base value system.
History is cruel and there is no stopping it. Systems become established, enjoy some period of success, lose their way, then collapse at some speed and are replaced. When civilisational systems emerge, and when they thrive, and when they fade away, some percentage of the human beings that constitute them ‘fail’, while others ‘succeed’. How can it be any other way?
Does it follow from this, then, that love is cruel? Yes. No. Both.
Do you really understand ‘failure’? Can you value Carol’s suffering and aching loneliness for what it is, for the rich experience of futility it delivers, its contribution to the maturation of her wisdom as soul, and thus to humanity’s wisdom generally? If we are to choose love knowingly, willingly, we need to explore and exhaust the potential of every other way of being as well.
In the Grail legend, Parsifal easily finds the Grail (wisdom/love), but does not value it. This is the fool’s early success, beginner’s luck. Undeserving, he loses the Grail and drifts into multiple experiences of failure, of suffering. These are the trials we must complete to truly earn love, to be capable of being a vessel for its expression through us. Only after we have travelled all paths that are not love, are we are ready to find and appreciate the Grail. This seems to be how reality works, fundamentally.
Must we accept evil, then? Yes. No. Both.
Yes, in that to squash free will out of existence in pursuit of utopia would create far more evil than it attempts to defeat.
No, in the sense that evil leads to terrible suffering, and the only path towards a healthy relationship with suffering is the one that appears before us as we dedicate ourselves knowingly and willingly to love. The wisdom of accepting that we do not control all outcomes, all decisions, all emotional reactions Out There does not preclude encouraging love in ourselves and others, as our means allow. ‘Failing’ to be The Shining One who defeats evil for all time is no failure at all, no cause for self-doubt, self-hate, feelings of impotence, no reason to slip back into fear.
Love is as cruel as we want it to be. While we yield to ego, to fear’s easy seductions, love seems idealistic, foolhardy, reckless, even terrifying. When we give ourselves in humble service to love, we learn through very difficult challenges that the rewards and outcomes of our service are fruits whose goodness is beyond our wisdom to know (for some unknowable length of time). This is a very difficult lesson to learn and its pains are directly proportional to the power of our fear, our determination to cling to what we think we know, to old comforts, ideologies, habits of thought and emotion.
It follows, then – if I am right in this –, that my own pain in the face of the world’s horrors is just that. I have yet to learn how to let be that which I cannot change so as to remain calm and effective for those things I can. No doubt most of us experience some version of this challenge. It is a very human state of being to be stuck in; nothing could be more ordinary.
Conclusion
Perhaps love is too much to ask. Perhaps this is true, but also false. Perhaps love’s daunting, unsurmountable challenge, rooted in its unconditionality, is precisely why we finally choose to walk willingly towards it, and delight in how it evolves within us as we learn.
God/love is the sole ‘perspective’ – state of being – from which we, while humans, can get a tiny sense of how it might be possible there is nothing to forgive, there are no enemies, nothing to fear. Human successes in this spiritual endeavour are fleeting; it is a state of being that cannot be sustained for very long in our realm, the realm of opposites.
Love has no opposite. God has no opposite. From the human perspective, then, there is a cruelty to our situation, not only from the real pain our (necessary?) suffering creates, but also from the teasing potential each of us has to evolve into our maturity, grow closer to love while somehow never quite making it. Perhaps attainment of this state of being really is impossible in this realm. If true, this is precisely why we need guidance and faith, and, equally importantly, patience with ourselves and each other.
To the degree that there is evil, or even an entity we call Satan, that entity or quality of being is not God’s opposite. Ego/Satan wants desperately, compulsively to demonstrate it is indeed God’s opposite – and therefore equal – and so with luck prove that the real God is Ego/Satan. But God/love is beyond this dualistic hubris, this oppositional state of being. Ego is therefore barking up the wrong tree, fighting a futile war, a war whose battles can all be ‘won’ yet deliver ‘total defeat’ when all is said and done. And yet the battles are real and humanity carries their burden, reaps the mounting harvest of fear, that quality of being ego serves.
Humanity is necessarily embedded in, is perhaps a function of, dualism, but perhaps precisely in order to earn the quality of wisdom needed to progress beyond it, to evolve into whatever follows. Some argue this scales to a cyclical collective process, and talk of ages progressing one to the next until collapse back down to the beginning of the next cycle, with each iteration delivering vital lessons. Why this must be so will remain mysterious until we shed our bodies and reside fully in the non-physical, the non-dualistic, but I think it safe to say our incarnations on earth are not pointless; if they were, I’m sure incarnation in the physical realm would not happen. Something about what we go through on earth as physical beings positively affects the quality of how God/love evolves, it being eternal and ever changing in its fundamental changelessness. This paradox can only resolve for us when we are once more fully soul or spirit no longer thickly veiled by our humanity, when we can again know All That Is fully open to its splendid riches.
As humans, then, we need faith to have a chance of ‘accepting’, however briefly, what history delivers – history, that is, as the experienced manifestation of human evolution, an evolution irremediably shaped by the realm of opposites which is its sacred host.
