- Two lectures about Fear as a Fuel for Awareness by Alokanand Díaz.
- In Person version: 3h 20m.
- Online version: 2 hours.
- Integrated video and audio player.
- Downloadable audio files and slides in PDF.
- An External Transformation
¨Fear can be the manifestation of spontaneous awareness in the face of obvious danger, or it can also be the blind reaction of an ignorant human being that overreacts with alarm and potential violence to an ordinary circumstance.
Despite the simplicity of the formula, the relationship between fear and awareness is not as obvious as one might think until you include the issues of health and ultimately survival in a world that is full of dangers. The combination of fear as a fuel that transforms awareness into a healthy way to survive already points at something much more concrete that at one level or another we can all relate to. This alone reveals the uttermost importance that fear as a fuel has had on the development of awareness in our species, very specifically focused on the field of sophisticated strategic thinking.
This, however, does not seem to have contributed to the development of the capacity of human beings to live a life where the achieved awareness allows them to simply be in the present and enjoy their fearlessness with satisfaction and a sense of personal success, at least until some new real danger spontaneously raises the alarms. The reason for this failure is that the sophistication in the human awareness that develops from one generation to the next is always being homogenized and does not serve the individual human being to differentiate beyond his or her inherent need to survive in the material world with others. This is what keeps the level of human awareness in the world at the lowest level possible, in which survival keeps our species operating at a deeply primitive level when it comes to issues such as the potential for individual human differentiation.
In order to differentiate as an individual you need to transform the awareness you have of yourself and of the interactions that you have with the world around you, and that is simply not possible if you do not learn how to confront and master your own personal fears and transform the way they have always shaped your homogenized way of thinking. In practical terms, this is a process in which the experimenter reeducates his own mind as the experiment unfolds on a moment by moment basis. Fear is meant to be healthy by nature, because it is there to warn us by raising the alarm the moment we perceive some danger that is moving in our direction. When danger is there, fear is our best friend because it tells us exactly how we can best deal with it in order to neutralize and/or overcome it.
The problem with fear is when the dangers are imaginary and something we try to manage with our rational mind. I have suffered from imaginary fears and insecurities for a long time, and know the futility of trying to use the mind to overcome them. Not only is fear the color of my transferred motivation, but being someone with two defined channels in each of the three centers for potential awareness, I truly know the dark side of fear, and how it invariably leads to violent distortions of the human spirit and power if one does not know how to manage fear by creatively by confronting it spontaneously in real time as situations emerge.
This is my proposal for this 3 hour lecture, where I will introduce fear first as a general theme that is the fuel for many different kinds of awareness, and in the second part I will focus on the specific seven existential fears of the body that are present in the Center of the Spleen, since they are the ones that can make a transcendent difference when properly integrated in the life, because they have the power to transform the perception we have of ourselves and the way we move with others in this life.
Alokanand Díaz