Americans have begun to live with a fear we never before had to face. Our security had never been shattered: we had never been on the wrong end of modern industrial war, or — in this case — terror. We have a new symbol for fear.

I lived near Chicago then, and, standing in front of Unity Temple, I could look straight down Lake Street and see the Sears Tower. For months, fully half the workforce that usually filled its 103 floors refused to go there, insisting on working at home instead.

It's an age of fear, and beneath the surface, everywhere, there's a raw edge of fear.

We have witnessed things human eyes should not have to see. On that Tuesday morning two Septembers ago I photographed what I saw on my TV screen — that's what you see on the bulletin — but no photograph, only our imagination, can begin to capture what it was to be on one of those planes, to face the fire, to fall a hundred stories.

We have been brought face to face with an alarming movement in Islam that draws from the worst in the Koran and Islamic tradition and finds the seeds of terror, just as the worst in the Judaeo-Christian Bible and tradition can be turned into Crusades, witch-trials, theocracy, and repression. Either way, the results are horrific.

We have learned terms like Wahhabism, Islamism, al-Qaeda: — movements dedicated to the proposition that religion and state must be one — in this case Islam and state — and that all the world must be cleansed of Western ideas and made to obey a very extreme form of Islamic sharia law.

To quote one of its contemporary leaders, Ali Benhadj,

"If a faith, a belief, is not watered and irrigated with blood, it does not grow. Principles are reinforced by sacrifices, suicide operations and martyrdom for Allah. Faith is propagated by counting up deaths every day, by adding up massacres and charnel-houses."¹

But the idea is an old one. In the eighteenth century a kind of Islamic revivalist named Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab taught a fundamentalist-Puritan brand of Islam, severe and punitive, and surely based in fear, that called for beatings, stonings, and amputation as punishment for straying from Sharia law. Wahhab struck an alliance with a corrupt emir, an alliance that combined religious fanaticism with military ruthlessness. It still provides a rationalisation for the worst human impulses, with horrific consequences.

Wahhabism lives on in the corrupt and fanatical heart of Saudi Arabia. The dream of a fanatical Islamic state took on a new force with the popular twentieth-century teachings of Sayyid Qutb [KUH-tahb], who called for martyrdom to overcome the tide of materialism, modernity, and — well, anything short of obedience to the religious Sharia law.² This, too, is founded on fear.

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Tragically, our own government is not very good at grasping why it is that the masses of the world's disinherited are so predisposed to respond to such things. September 11, 2001 should have shattered our naive complacency about the that. But, unable to comprehend the terror that struck us and even less able to do anything about it, our government played to a public that was scared to death, and struck something — Iraq — and then announced that it was a war on terror, a preëmptive strike at the heart of terrorism, but it is quite clear that Iraq had no involvement in the religious fanaticism that had dispatched the doomed airliners to New York and Washington — and that threatens us still.

The real reasons for that war have yet to be disclosed, and the invisible power that shattered that September morning will only find new recruits; and the resentment and rage that supplies the martyrs has only been intensified, and Americans are more afraid today than they were two years ago.

Consider, too, the very young, and scared, and exhausted soldiers who turn trigger-happy and, this past week, added nine of the new Iraqi police to the lenthening list of those they've shot and killed or wounded. There's the fear, too, felt by a multitude of families today — at least one among this congregation — for the safety of loved ones in the front lines of the war that never really ended.

We ought to be very worried about this alliance of religious fanaticism with military ruthlessness. We ought to be very worried about it right here in our midst. It provides handy rationalisations for our worst impulses, with horrific results.

Violence sown begets more violence; fear, more fear. This Septermber 11 was the thirtieth anniversary of the overthrow, by Nixon's CIA, directed by Henry Kissinger, of the progressive, democratic government of Chile, and the imposition of a friendly dictator, a master of fear, and thousands we herded into the stadiums, never to be seen again. With every new detail I learn about these things, I am shaken again, unnerved a little more.

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We know that the whole global community, even the whole ecology of life on earth — are in jeopardy, threatened with catastrophic war, irreversible poisoning of nature: — it is a hinge time in history when all the previous forms of war and all the previous ways of conceptualizing states and nations and peoples are coming unhinged, to be replaced by — what? What is happening to our supposed common social contract, assumptions about civil liberties and democracy?

But — you may not have leisure to worry about that just now — because your job and livelihood might disappear, or — nothing new in the human experience but no less scarey — an upcoming visit to the doctor, the risk of failure at some difficult enterprise — and we're scared.

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Fear is about how we face life.

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Fear is an aspect of our existence that we share with many other creatures. It's wired right into the archaic brain that birds and reptiles have — and we, too, still have in the center of our heads, and it's in that primitive, thimble-sized command center where fear starts. Eventually the signals get to our cortex, where we do our thinking, but not right away.

In a few thousandths of a second, fear travels below the threshold of awareness. It doesn't become conscious until later because it takes full seconds for the simplest thought to develop once it gets to our higher thinking capacities.³

That means that we experience fear in a conscious way only after we have first processed it in an unconscious emotional memory-bank. That memory-bank, which operates outside the range of consciousness, is part of that ancient primitive brain, and it learns and memorizes each fearful stimulus with tremendous speed and tenacity. One terrifying experience records a memory that lasts a lifetime. We commit to emotional memory many fearful situations, never aware of what it is later on that triggers the racing heart and quick pulse.

If you have a panic attack, you don't even know what triggered it. What triggered it was that non-conscious memory-bank of fearful stimuli, things you've seen or heard but you don't have any conscious memory of it.

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Fear and anxiety are a hard-wired alarm system in the brain in search of genuine life-threatening dangers. You encountered no mastodon on your way here today, but the day's news, or the boss at work, will do.

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And fear distorts the mind. Montaigne said, in something Franklin Roosevelt must have read, "The thing I fear most is fear."⁴ Fear attracts fear; emotions are magnets for like emotions; they suck them right in. Fear produces other mind-distorting affects, like greed, jealousy, impatience, suspicion, selfishness, rigidity, and certainly, paralysis.

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Now, consider human imagination. Maybe other animals actually have more of that primitive, instinctual fear than we have — but they don't have imagination. But they can't imagine a future, and we can. They don't have the capacity to worry in advance; we do. We understand that there is a future. We have anticipatory fear.

And so most of our fear is a product of thought, a product of the mind. William Butler Yeats gives us the graphic phrase, "the ravens of unresting thought / Flying, crying, to and fro / Cruel claw and hungry throat." And our fearful thought-processes, when our imagination conjures scenes of dread, he describes as a "bitter glass," into which we "gaze," a "bitter glass" which "the demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass."

Our thoughts, our imagination, are fed from the past, and the only thing our experience can teach us is the past. Memories of past hurts and unsatisfied hungers become scenarios and conclusions about the future.

Our perceptions are distorted and we're paralyzed; we are no longer alive to the present moment.

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Do we not want to face life without fear?

But we cannot wish fear away; it returns uninvited. So we must learn to live in a way that transcends those ravens of unceasing thought — and meet this moment without past and without future. The past — because our memories, the way we constructed them and now manipulate them, make the past false. And the future is unknown to us; we can see only the future that our imagination draws.

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And with human imagination comes another power, the power to see in different ways; beyond the things that settle down in front of us, beyond the things we experienced in the past.

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You'd almost think we had nothing to fear but fear itself. But maybe we shouldn't even fear fear itself. Maybe we should welcome our fear. Because when we experience fear, we hesitate, and when we hesitate, we question ourselves, question the situation, and require answers. Hesitation may lead to paralysis, being frozen in fear, but it can also lead to conscious action:

you hesitate;
you take a breath;
you ask, Is this a border I want to cross?

And if it is, in that space opened up by fear, you take responsibility for the action. You test your resolve that your destiny is to be no passive fact but an active factor and you act.

There is a kind of fear — perhaps most of our fear is of this kind — that is a boundary-experience. Growing people who push their own boundaries will always experience fear. Let it alert you to the presence of a boundary. Let it signal you to hesitate, acknowledge the boundary and the risks, and embrace the act.

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There are some facts about human fear:⁵

One, your fear will never go away as long as you continue to confront new boundaries of life and grow.

Two, one of the best ways to transcend fear, move beyond that boundary, is to cross it, to go out and do what you are afraid to do and survive it.

Three, living with the fear you feel at a boundary you will not cross is harder than crossing it.

Four, mistakes are how we learn, and failure can mean nothing besides not trying.

And Five, life is the interaction between the material given and what we do with it. We cannot start anywhere other than where we are; the first boundaries we must cross are here where we are.

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Fear has held a conspicuous place within religious traditions.

My own religious conditioning, therefore, taught a different approach to fear than what I am talking about today. To be honest, those patterns kick in, quite automatically, a lot more often than I would like.

They work like this. That feeling of fear at the boundary of some new experience — can come with another, nasty effect that runs toward narrowness of soul. The message I learned in that religious upbringing was that fear is a signal that you're about to enter forbidden territory and you better turn back. A divine burglar alarm. In the book of Genesis it is the cherubim and the sword whirling and flashing to guard the way to the garden of innocence. It is the impoverishment of our spiritual life. It is the heart of timidity, though it can turn very nasty.

At New York University, the researcher Joseph LeDoux studied rats and found that, in their brains, once certain cells have been coupled together by the perception of some danger, the cells continue to fire in unison even after the animal stops doing the dangerous behavior. That is because fear had soldered the circuitry of those animal brains into a permanent state of vigilance just waiting for the trigger. Fear is forever unless you redirect your own circuitry. Unless you become conscious of the cycles of fear in your mind and redirect your own circuitry. And that is the gift of conscious human self-reflection and conscious human imagination.

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Held differently, responded to intentionally — fear can be a different kind of companion, no longer one that confines and constricts.

Our human imagination can learn to hold fear differently and to respond to it in a more enlightened way. When I was very young, my human imagination got carefully trained to construct out of the experience of fear a chain-link fence of restricted living. That same human imagination must, experience by experience, boundary by boundary, retrain itself to see, in place of an electrified fence, a gate to new worlds. Or perhaps, new births.

"This," wrote the Jungian analyst Frances Wickes, "is what we are called upon to do: to accept the experience that will bring to birth a latent potential — a child who will dare the leap into the unknown, destroying our contented security; a child who places upon us new responsibility, who may even lead us into the darkness of the unconscious in search of other unborn or lost potentials of the self."⁶

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When we are afraid, we might be, in a sense, superstitious. And that is because sometimes we trust strange and mysterious forces more than we trust the energies of nature that flow through us and that we are.

So what if I don't tremble before the doctrine of Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment-day, — what good does it do me if I don't feel my own sense of being and power and place? what good does it me me if I quake at the opinion of others, or at the threat of assault, or poverty, or change and the unknown future? "If I quake," Emerson asked, "what matters it what I quake at?"

What we need — must flow from deep inner wells in ourselves, wells that sometimes seem to flow from Beyond. We surprise ourselves and meet life with a confident strength. Maybe you've had that experience in Meditation. I don't mean prayer in the traditional sense, talking to somebody out there, asking for this or that. I mean a present communion with the Life from which our lives flow, that flows from beyond and within the mind, and all things.

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And you know, there is the power of a community that believes in you and believes in the powers that are in you.

So let us watch how we speak about each other. There have been moments when I have realized that I just discounted the powers that are in someone, and immediately a signal has gone off: it doesn't set right; I'm missing something —I've worn again the old blinders that blind us to the divine in each other.

Give each other courage. It is our calling as a community to do that; to support our living at the boundaries and pushing them. And all boundaries involve fear.

Fear is about how we face life. In the face of all the wild elements of nature and life, every great life testifies that there is something more.

In the human mind and spirit there is power, the flow of the divine wind, the same force that drives the hurricane.

I do not mean to say that there are no real dangers out there. There will be more terror, I am sure, and more disease, and more sorrow. But far more tragic than losing your life is to find at the end of many years that you have not begun to live.

In the face of a great evil that filled its opponents and its victims alike with fear, Emerson delivered his address on the Fugitive Slave Law in 1854, and declared, in one sweeping phrase:

The world exists, as I understand it, to teach the science of liberty, which begins with liberty from fear.

And he said,

Whatever lames or paralyzes you, draw in with it the divinity, in some form. When a god wishes to ride, any chip or pebble will bud and shoot out winged feet, and serve him for a horse.

Feel the fear as the presence of a boundary, and more than that, as the presence of the gods, who await in the storm to give you wings.

¹ Paul Berman. Terror and Liberalism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 119-120.

² Tariq Ali. The Clash of Fundamentalism: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. London: Verso, 2002, 2003, pp. 73ff.

³ Stephen S. Hall. "Fear Itself." New York Times Magazine, Feb. 28, 1999, 42ff.

⁴ Michel de Montaigne. Essais (1588), Book I, 18, "De la peur'.

⁵ Suggested by Susan Jeffers. Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987.

⁶ Frances G. Wickes. The Inner World of Choice. The C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco; published in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.

Meditate

Sometimes — we tremble.

We come seeking reassurance
The assurance in others' eyes that all will be well
The purpose that make the anguish worthwhile

But we acknowledge, for we must : —

Sometimes we tremble.

For these are dangerous times, and the stays that buttress our lives sometimes seem so very, very fragile

And we must acknowledge:
Sometimes we tremble.

In this darkness:
a gentle light lights our night
gentle and strong it glows
at the core of us
for we are descended from creation's fire
we are made of the stuff of stars
our minds and flesh and life and movements are alive with
the Life of all
the Sun's being is our own

Even as we tremble
let we stand
assured of our place to stand
strong with the strength of all life
Let every heart be strong
In this silence.

Readings

9/11 memorial poem: No One Came Home

When will we understand what terrorists
never believe, that we are all
precious in our loving, all tender
in our flesh and webbed together?

That no one should be torn
out of the fabric of friends and family,
the sweet and sour work of loving,
burnt anonymously, carelessly

because of nothing they ever did
because of hatred they never knew
because of nobody they ever touched
or left untouched, turned suddenly

to dust on a perfect September
morning bright as a new apple
when nothing they did would
ever again make any difference.

Doris Lessing

Colonised Planet 5: Shikasta, words from the other side of the Century of Destruction.

I came down into this town scared witless. At the very least I thought I would have to persuade them I was harmless. But that didn't happen. The town has a central square and a fountain. . . . There were people standing about the square, and as I got into it, full of apprehension, it was the strangest thing, but I was accepted at once. No one expected me to be harmful. Can you imagine what that was like? . . .

When I walked down into this town, I was taking it absolutely for granted, but absolutely, that there were going to be different factions and the armies and the police and I would have to watch my step and be careful what I said. Do you realise how we have all had to do that? . . .

When awful things happen, even to the extent we have all just seen, then our minds don't take them in. There is a gap between people saying hello, having a glass of water, and then bombs falling or laser beams scorching the world to cinders. That is why no one seemed able to prevent the dreadfulness. They couldn't take it in.

I have understood that the vague blank look is from the past. It is not what we are now. . . . All that is over, it is finished, it is dead. How did we live then? How did we bear it? We were all stumbling about in a thick dark, a thick ugly hot darkness, full of enemies and dangers, we were blind in a heavy hot weight of suspicion and doubt and fear.

Poor people of the past, poor poor people, so many of them, for long thousands of years, fumbling and stumbling and longing for something different but not knowing what had happened to them or what they longed for.

And this will go on for us, as if we were being slowly lifted and filled and washed by a soft singing wind that clears our sad muddled minds and holds us safe and heals us and feeds us with lessons we never imagined.

Krishnamurti

from The Book of Life and Meeting Life

Is it possible for the mind to empty itself totally of fear? Fear of any kind breeds illusion; it makes the mind dull, shallow. Where there is fear there is obviously no freedom, and without freedom there is no love at all. And most of us have some form of fear; fear of darkness, fear of public opinion, fear of snakes, fear of physical pain, fear of old age, fear of death. . . .

We can see what fear does to each one of us. It makes one tell lies; it corrupts one in various ways; it makes the mind empty, shallow. There are dark corners in the mind which can never be investigated and exposed as long as one is afraid. Physical self-protection, the instinctive urge to keep away from the venomous snake, to draw back from the precipice, to avoid falling under the tramcar, . . . is sane, normal, healthy. But I am asking about the psychological self-protectiveness which makes one afraid of disease, of death, of an enemy. . . . —"Freedom from Fear"

Can we, as human beings, living in this world, change ourselves? That is really the question — radically, psychologically transform ourselves, not eventually. For a serious [person], a really religious [person], there is no tomorrow. This is rather a hard saying, that there is no tomorrow; there is only the rich worship of today. Can we live this life wholly, and actually, daily, transform our relationship with each other? That is the real issue,  . . . for the world is us. Please see this: the world is you and you are the world. This is an obvious, terrible fact, a challenge that must be met completely . . . If we don't feel our responsibility, which means being utterly responsible for ourselves, for what we do, what we think, how we behave, then it becomes rather hopeless, . . . knowing that we cannot individually, separately, solve this problem of terrorism. . . .

So can we, not admitting time, that is, tomorrow, the future, live in such a way that today is all-important? . . .

—[From "Time, Action, and Fear," ML 190, from Bulletin 26, 1975:]