the primal cause of fear

What is the primal cause of fear?

This is a question I’ve posed myself so many times during the past decade, yet each time the question appeared in another form. When I look at my situation, there doesn’t seem to be an easy answer to it. The little pieces of a distant answer often don’t come by chance, but arrive at me by going through just another dark and heavy door made out of the piled up crippling memories of old. The key to these doors usually remains hidden up to the last moment, revealing itself only when all hope seems nearly gone.

Instead of steadily and meticulously delving into the soul I was given, I (that is, my ego) tend to avoid these tough questions and rather flee from the scene into all kinds of more or less nonsensical activities (my favourite one is wasting a whole evening on watching stupid, meaningless movies). A world of inner fantasies often opens up to compensate the outer shortcomings. Fear to open myself up towards the inner and outer world. Fear to make a step into the Great Unknown because the fear to loose everything is still greater than the hope to win everything. “Trust is the key to growth”, Saint John of the Cross would have said, yet I rather seem to prefer the certainty of a fear that to risk would mean to fall into the Abyss, than the uncertainty of a trust, a faith and a hope that everything will eventually be alright. Although genuine proof is offered to me during every single moment of every single day (and all of it by free! If thát doesn’t make one humble, I don’t know what does..), it still remains difficult to transform the uncertainty of a fragile faith into the intuitive certainty of a deep Knowing.

I truly am standing at the edge of an Abyss, wondering what I should do. The Great Unknown awaits me on the other side, and to be honest it looks quite hostile from my position, with volcanoes spitting devastating pyroclastic flows and giant monsters roaming arid deserts of stone and dust. How I cannot stop crying! A desert of twisted darkness, wild and chaotic, naked and revealing keeps confronting me every second of my life with the inescapable fact that its darkness is largely because I feared to look at it, because I feared to answer the continuous knocks on my door. The only thing useful I can really do at this edge is exactly the thing I fear most: to make a step off the cliff, thereby trusting the Great Mystery that this step is not a step into an Eternal Darkness, but the first cobblestone of a narrow bridge yet to be made, a first authentic, humble gesture towards an Unknown which begs me to take up my responsibility towards its very existence, yet a gesture which at the same time strikes at the heart of the existential crisis of my stubborn ego mind.

This existential crisis reminds me of a dream I had not so long ago. In it, I was standing in a large, dark bedroom on the first floor of my grandfather’s house. There were about ten beds, and on each of them one person was lying on top of the blankets. All of them wore white masks on their faces. So I went to one of them and took off the mask, only to find another white mask beneath it. After about five or six more layers of white masks I finally got to the last one. Yet underneath it I found….. only darkness. No face, not even a cushion. Nothing except an utter darkness. This seems to be the innate structure of my ego mind: masks upon masks upon masks upon a dark emptiness which is too terrifying to directly experience without having a deep, vivid trust and hope, throbbing at the heart of one’s soul (the one direct experience I had a few years ago was terrifyingly crushing indeed, because I hadn’t previously built any decent hammock to break my fall).

Yet that’s exactly where I am right now: the edge of that same Abyss with the last mask almost torn apart now. Insanity clutches the hands of wisdom even tighter. The last door of this decades long struggle seems lying ahead, right there in that darkness. But a step must first be made, a risk must first be taken, a bridge must first be made. I’ve done almost everything I can possibly do on my own, but now I have to go beyond and trust a Greater One, a Deeper One, an Unknown One. Loose everything or win everything. In my innermost core, am I fear or am I hope?

Perhaps I truly am that small baby which has just been thrown upon an unknown beach in an unknown land by an immensely vast and deep ocean, crying and moaning as he’s blindfolded by his own fears, his own disbelief in the value of his desperate cries for help.

Perhaps help is already on his way.

Perhaps help has never really left him..