What are the results of your spiritual journey?
in Spirituality ·
Steven Cruz3 said:So what’s your move when you get scared? You just rationalize the emotion away as "tunnel vision," decide you're done being afraid, and suddenly—poof—you see the big picture??
In reality, all you did was rationalize an emotion. By refusing to let it play out past that clutter of thoughts, you just shoved it deeper into your subconscious, down into that primal, animalistic side.
Look, it's not just some thought; there’s a much deeper, more purposeful emotion sitting right under the surface.
Fear is a built-in evolutionary mechanism—it's how humans survive predators and stay aware of danger and our own vulnerabilities. Suppressing that awareness is basically lying to yourself and working against your own nature. It can even lead to serious personality disorders. Take psychopaths, for example—they don't feel fear like the rest of us. They might be geniuses at mental manipulation, sure, but that definitely doesn't make them enlightened.
I’ve also seen older folks who seem fearless, but they explained it differently: they’ve already lived through every nightmare imaginable. Once they realized they survived it all, the fear just evaporated. That’s actual wisdom earned through experience, and I respect that. But these trendy New Age recipes? They don't hold water for me—especially when they take on this moralizing, preachy tone about how you "should" or "shouldn't" feel things.
Moralizing isn't the same thing as facing something to gain understanding. Moralizing carries this pressure to suppress things because they're "bad," and wherever there's pressure, there's no true self-discovery.
It’s pretty paradoxical—people criticize a cluttered mind, yet that very clutter is what suppresses the natural parts of a human being. It pushes down the emotions and instincts we've had for thousands of years, perfectly in tune with our biology. To me, that isn't "wise" and it isn't "spiritual." I see spirituality as integration, not castration.
No. I lean into the fear, break it down, and dissipate it.
Everyone keeps repeating that fear is essential for survival—blah blah blah—so I don't need to hear that.
If you look at it closely, fear actually shows up once the life-threatening situation passes. In the moment of actual danger, the body reacts biologically, and only shortly after that does the mind kick in and start playing movies of what happened.
I’d argue that fear is more of a burden. Just imagine the animal kingdom living in constant fear... a rabbit too afraid to leave its burrow because an eagle might grab it, or an ant staying inside its hill because a human might step on it...
And let's not even get started on all the other fears that have nothing to do with survival...
Anthony Cook8 said:You don't need to feel terror when standing by a window to keep yourself from jumping...
You don't need to feel fear of fire when you're standing near a fireplace to keep you from reaching into the flames...
And you don't need to walk down a street in a state of panic, terrified a car will hit you, just to be able to observe your surroundings and react in time...
If a car comes, and you see it, you move. It's not like we should be walking down the sidewalk playing a movie in our heads like, "Oh no, what if a car hits me?" or "What if this happens?"—which is exactly what people do needlessly in their relationships...
Often, I can't even identify the specific subconscious belief causing that physical knot in my stomach (you know, that "I *must* know" feeling). I can't pinpoint it because it's buried too deep, but it's not the knot itself that causes the trouble. It comes and goes; it dissolves when you stop feeding it attention or when you gain enough insight to let it go. The real problem stems from the secondary thought—that extra layer of narrative we add onto the physical sensation of grief or pain...
The thought that what's happening is catastrophic, that it will last forever, or that something terrible is coming. That's when the suffering truly begins. A moment that should have been fleeting turns into something that drags on and on... until we finally decide we've had enough, until we let go, or until we construct a situation that finally forces us to release it.
Exactly. You just have to know how to release that tension.