Crisis: Get Past the Fear
Whether your crisis is personal, local, national or global, your first normal, even healthy reaction is fear. You are stimulated into paying attention. Then after your limbic brain stimulates us, your pre-frontal cortex can kick in with executive decision making. Here is where fear can trap you into irrational and dangerous decisions, or compassion can help you rise above your more primitive instincts. Lots of attention these days is going to our president and his irrational, even dishonest behavior. And his dangerous lack of direction. The situation is raising red flags and a sense of alarm, let alone bewilderment from many corners. Now that we are paying attention, compassion can help us make sense of whatever is next for us.
That includes compassion for the president. Compassion tells me that everybody is doing the best they can with what they have. Compassion also tells me there are consequences for every action we take. So, choosing for discernment rather than judgement, we can notice whether there are negative consequences or positive ones on account of every one of our own actions, and the actions of all the others in our world, rather than judging any action as good or bad. And discerning how to get past our fears and keep going. “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” When Richard M. Langworth clarifies that this famous quote was not from Winston Churchill, he also points out the rest of the story: cling to the truth.
Crises always put us to the test. The truth is that this is a test, it is just a test. It is a test of each one of us on our individual paths, a test of our moral fibre as a nation, and a test for us as a species, inhabiting a planet that is very vulnerable right now. Getting past the fear is always the remedy. Courage is fear that has said it’s prayers. Whether you are agnostic, atheist, religious or spiritual, courage is what propels you to positive action. Oliver Wendell Holmes noted: “Courage is about doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared. Have the courage to act instead of react." And courage can propel you past your own limitations. Most importantly, you can get past your monkey mind to your heart and to your soul. After all, the root word for the word courage translates from heart.
Your monkey mind is binding you to a limited sense of your infinite truth. Your heart and your soul are waiting for you to explore, with mature discernment, more of your true nature. False evidence appearing real is an acronym of fear. The false evidence is that you are simply your body and your mind and your emotions. The truth is that you are much more than that. Your heart and your soul are important parts of your conscious awareness. This is not a belief system. The Science of the Soul is a phrase that may seem contradictory to the western mind. The eastern worldview has understood the truth of that phrase for millenia. The bridge between the worldviews of the east and the west is being built, one direct experience at a time. That direct experience is totally available to you. It is waiting for you to open to the direct experience of your soul, in cooperation with your monkey mind, once you step beyond the limitations of the beliefs you have inherited.
Resolution of the crises facing us today is a process that will ultimately take us back to what my friend Albert was wise enough to share: "No problem can be solved by the same kind of thinking that created it.” Fears are dissolved in the ocean of the soul. They serve us to wake us up to real and potential threats in our world. Their dissolution requires getting past our limited way of thinking.
“According to President of the Royal Society, Lord Rees,…Some aspects of reality – a unified theory of physics or a full understanding of consciousness – might elude us simply because they’re beyond human brains, just as surely as Einstein’s ideas would baffle a chimpanzee.”… “BBC science presenter Dr Brian Cox, who was awarded an OBE yesterday, said: ‘The idea that certain things are beyond us is quite a bleak one and history does show that we can eventually overcome the most difficult of problems.’”
I will side with Dr. Cox.
