A Light in the Dark

According to Albert Einstein, the most important question facing humanity is, “Is the universe a friendly place?”

Do you believe the universe is abundant, generative, safe, and nurturing? Or do you believe the universe is characterized by scarcity, conflict, selfishness, and danger? The portrait you choose, he argued, shapes the entire arc of your life.

            Beneath this inquiry is the bedrock truth that we do not see the world as it is – we see the world as we are. Our preconceptions shade everything we see. When Hamlet said to Rosencrantz, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” he was affirming the fact that none of us has the objective perspective we think we do. Pure objectivity is impossible. We see the world through a grid of presumptions, some of them self-wrought, most of them built into the structures of consciousness by cultural conditioning.

            But let’s look at the fuller scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet for an even subtler idea. The jaded Danish king is talking with his trusty sidekicks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and as he often does, he pours his guts out to his two confidants.      

Hamlet asks his friends, “What brought you here to this prison?”

            “Prison?” asked Rosencrantz.

            “Prison, my lord?” asked Guildenstern.

            “Denmark’s a prison,” said Hamlet.

            “Then the world is one,” said Rosencrantz.

            “A goodly one,” Hamlet replied, “in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one of the worst.”

            “We think not so, my lord,” said Rosencrantz.

            “Why, then, ‘tis none to you,” Hamlet replied, “for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.”

            Shakespeare’s famous line “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” is often misunderstood as an affirmation of moral relativism. But it is not an ethical proclamation. It is a purely a cognitive one. Our preconceptions shape our truth more than any real-world evidence. To Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Denmark is perfectly lovely. For Hamlet it’s hell. How can one phenomenon, Denmark, elicit two such different responses?

            One could ask the same question about so many things – Christmas, Trump, Nickelback. Why do some people love these things, while others don’t?

            The answer lies in human evolution. Over tens of thousands of years our brains have developed coping mechanisms for the bewildering array of stimuli each moment brings. These cognitive shortcuts are, at first anyway, enormously helpful. We wouldn’t be able to think at all without our biases.

            As we view the world, each new experience is quickly processed through the memory database and categorized. We don’t truly understand this new thing – we simply shove it into a conceptual box of seemingly similar things. This “fast thinking” as some psychologists call it is quick, dirty, and effective. But there’s a downside. Our hasty generalizations blind us to the subtleties and realities of this new experience.

            In junior high I was intimidated by a bully named Jesse Sanchez. He wore jeans and perfectly pressed white T-shirts with creases in the sleeves. His black hair was slicked back with what appeared to be Vaseline. He and his sidekick would lurk in the boy’s bathroom and mug other kids for their lunch money. He was a terrifying presence – I didn’t understand him. His very existence filled me with dread. Life took on the quality of a nightmare. How, I wondered, could people be so irrationally cruel? 

            Despite the fact that I had had countless positive interactions with Latinx friends and classmates all through my schooling years, this one experience was so overwhelming that for many years after I carried with me the bias that Chicanos were terrifying. It wasn’t rational – it was visceral. It was fast-thinking. Whenever I saw a guy who looked anything like him I was triggered, and suddenly I was that terrified 7^th grader again. I still clench up a bit whenever I enter public restrooms. And that was 50 years ago.

            The only cure for the disease of unconscious bias is slow thinking, the deliberate decision to be humble, question your assumptions, and come up out of your fear into the bright sunshine of the real world. I understand it all so differently now. Jesse Sanchez was a victim too. He struggled under systemic racism and a dominant culture that every day diminished his value and his humanity. His resentment against white kids like me had a cause. Maybe there was cruelty at home. Maybe he was tormented by bullies too. Maybe the very system that privileged me modeled for him cruelty, indifference, and the infliction of pain. I slowly came to understand the deeper truth: wounded people wound, and complex human behavior has complex, multidimensional causes. The story was so much richer than a cartoonish dichotomy of victim and villain.

            No matter who you are, no matter how free you think you are, you see the world through unconscious biases. Denying them only makes them stronger. The path to freedom, knowledge, and forgiveness begins with humility and self-awareness. And as we wake up, the whole world awakens.

            When Einstein asked the question, Is the universe a friendly place? he was saying something really important: that our starting points, our cognitive frame, our guiding principles, give birth to everything else. Reality is not a single, monolithic thing – it’s many things at once. And how you choose to see it shapes the quality and character of your life. If we believe the universe is a dark and miserable place then we live in perpetual fear and use our considerable creativity to construct systems and weapons that perpetuate misery. If we believe the universe is light-filled and beautiful, then we live in perpetual faith and use our considerable creativity to construct systems that institutionalize compassion. The fate of the world literally depends on how we perceive it.

            No matter how dark it gets, light a candle. A single flame destroys the darkness. Be the flame, and witness how your light emboldens others to light their flames too. Soon the world is awash with light. Never listen to the people who say it can’t be done. Align your hearts with the people who doing it.

            Deep down Jesse Sanchez and I are the same. We want the same things. But his was a world of scarcity and conflict. In his mind, the only way to get power was to take it from those who had it. We were both victims of a system neither of us created, and of our own cognitive distortions. To him I was the enemy, and he mine. Both of us were wrong. Neither of us then knew that we were, deep down, a light in the dark. We just didn’t know how to be.

The Fear of Courage

Fear is not a weakness. Nor is it a childish indulgence. Fear plays an essential role in the unfolding of our lives. Fear keeps us from touching fire, swallowing razor blades, and kissing rattlesnakes. Fear in and of itself is not the problem. It’s the misapplication of fear that causes all the damage.

For the ancient Greeks courage was the most important of virtues, for without it, none of the other virtues are possible. How can we be compassionate without the courage to love? How can we be strong without the courage to push past the limits of our endurance? And how can we be smart without the courage to admit ignorance and press onward into new areas of learning and mastery?

            But courage is frightening. It asks us to risk everything.

I think we’re afraid of courage because courage asks us to abandon the supports we have worked so hard to construct. Courage asks us to sacrifice our safety and comfort. To be brave is to venture out beyond the reach of our protections, into an unknown field where none of the old rules apply and everything we know is irrelevant. To be courageous is to be vulnerable.

Courage begins with the willingness to let go. Courage and renunciation are two sides of one coin. Not only do we have to let go of our old support systems, we also have to let go of the idea that we are not enough. To be courageous we have to come to understand that there are qualities and strengths within us that have not yet been realized. Renouncing our old, limited, and limiting self-definition goes hand in hand with courage.

Courage is also an affirmation of the goodness of the universe. Fear, on the other hand, is often a misguided overreach of the ego feebly asserting its so-called power in an attempt to control everything. The fearful mind believes that we are not enough, and the universe is not enough either. Courage, on the other hand, means letting go of control and trusting that if the means are pure, the ends will take care of themselves. We must learn to use our egos, and not let our egos use us.

This then is the metaphysical foundation of courage – the view that all is one and that our lives are sacred expressions of the formless ground of being beyond all thoughts and forms. Debilitating fear is only possible when we have forgotten our original relationship with the divine. Again and again Jesus counsels his students to “fear not,” because anxiety and fear sever our delicate tether to the eternal. Coming out of fearfulness and into courage opens the portals to higher consciousness.

In the world’s hero journey tales the hero must face the monster again and again to be tested, and even more importantly, to have everything about them that is underdeveloped and inauthentic stripped away by the ferocity of the ordeal. While we may not literally be fighting monsters, the underlying truth remains. There are obstacles between us and the life we were born to live. Without cultivating the courage to face them, we rob ourselves and the wounded world of the healing elixir our transformation would bring both to our own lives and the lives of innumerable others, for when we heal ourselves we take an enormous step toward healing our families and communities. Instead of running away from fear, we should be running toward it. As Joseph Campbell wrote, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” Without courage we will never know who we really are. Only courage unlocks our sacred potential, latent within us and, for now, hidden behind a fog of fear. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the willingness to act in spite of the fear – to feel the fear and do it anyway.  

[This piece first appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the March/April edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The Nature of Fear

Fear is good. It keeps us alive. It keeps us from falling off cliffs, touching fire and kissing rattlesnakes. But fear is also our greatest liability. It keeps us from taking the risks necessary to develop our unrealized potential. If we let it, fear has the power to keep us from becoming who we really are. Fear is a thief that steals our joy.

The daily work of every thinking man and woman is to practice careful discernment in the assessment of their fear. A life of pointless risk-taking is dangerous and foolish while a life devoted to the avoidance of all risk is doomed to frustration, stagnation and incompletion.  Fear is neither good nor evil; it is a message from our psyche that must be read with great care. Cultivating the skill to interpret fear accurately is an essential task in the creation of the well-lived and fully-realized life. When fear arises, ask yourself these seven questions.

1. If I do this frightening thing, will it bring real quality and beauty into my life?

2. If I do this frightening thing, will it move me further toward the fullest expression of my innate potentialities?

3. Am I respecting my health and life, and the health and life of others?

4. Is this fear really just a misguided attempt to protect my fragile and limiting self-image?

5. Is this apprehension and anxiety simply the death-throes of my outmoded ways of acting, thinking and being in the world?

6. If I took these risks and let go of my old ways of acting, thinking and being in the world, would I be closer to my highest good?

7. Is the larger purpose of my life the realization of my highest good as opposed to being comfortable?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, your fear is telling you something important. You should probably listen. It’s difficult to reach your highest potential if you are maimed or dead, and it’s difficult to manifest your fullest happiness if your actions harm others. But if you can answer yes to even one of these questions, then you should override your fear and take action. And by the way, if you can answer yes to even one of these questions, you are implicitly answering yes to all of them.

Helpful research from the field of psychology shows that our thinking is stuck in two important and debilitating ways. The first is negative thinking. We tend to exaggerate the scale and frequency of negative situations and minimize or overlook positive situations or circumstances. Through tens of thousands of years of evolution, human consciousness has grown highly adept at scanning the horizon, both literally and figuratively, for problems and potential disasters. The individual who most rapidly perceives the impending problem – the crouching Saber toothed tiger, the lethally poisonous snake, the toxic forest mushroom – has a far better chance of survival and passing on his genes. Natural selection rewards caution.

If negative thinking isn’t successfully challenged, the mistaken notion that fearful living equals wisdom takes hold, hindering the necessary risk required in any process of growth or advancement.

The second prevalent mode of consciousness that seems to have grown beyond the bounds of its usefulness is confirmation bias. We exaggerate evidence that supports our preconceived positions and ignore or denigrate evidence that challenges our preconceived positions. The positive aspect of confirmation bias is that in enables us to bond tightly with an in-group that shares our perspective, a dynamic that helps us form close families and tribes. The negative aspect of confirmation bias is that it locks us into a worldview in which accurate and wide-ranging critical thinking is no longer possible. Our fears become dogma – unquestionable truths closed to inquiry and investigation.  

When you put negative thinking and confirmation bias together, you have a serious problem. All manner of evils begin to take shape – racism, xenophobia, nationalism, bigotry, arrogance, and ethnocentrism. In other words, fear becomes the idol before which all must kneel. To move beyond fear means to correct the imbalance and empirical inaccuracy of negative thinking and confirmation bias. An honest assessment of the environment shows that the universe is not a hostile, dangerous field of impending disasters. Yes there are dangers, but the fact remains that we are supported and nourished continually by an uninterrupted flow of abundance. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the light and beauty and love of the world and its myriad creatures hold us aloft in an unbreakable web of being. This isn’t some hippie dream. It’s a measurable fact.

And when we begin to awaken from the illusion of individual and tribal superiority, our natural humility is restored and we begin to recognize that our ideologies and arguments are not universally authoritative – there are other, equally valid ways of understanding the complexities before us and there are other, equally viable ways of organizing society, determining justice and supporting what is best in us. In other words, we move from fearful self-obsession to loving-kindness. A broad and generous smile replaces the narrow, guarded squint through which we had been viewing the world.

And when we begin to view the world differently, the world changes. As the Talmud reminds us, “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”

Breaking free of the debilitating effects of fear is an inside job.

Maybe the first step is to recognize that uncertainty is a necessary precondition for all growth and emergence. How could a seed know what lay above the surface of the soil? Yet it pushes upward anyway. How could a mother know what lay ahead for her and her baby? But she gives birth anyway. How could a guitar player know if this solo is going to be great or an awkward failure? But he throws himself into it with finesse, skill and abandon anyway, trusting the truth that there is no beauty without risk. Becoming comfortable with uncertainty is an essential component of any creative process, especially the creation of a magnificent life.

It was early in the year 1933. America was in the abyss of the Great Depression and genuine hardship was tearing apart the fabric of this once great nation. In the opening lines of his first inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke the immortal words, “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Ten million Americans heard his voice crackling through their radios, and many more read his words in the next morning’s paper. His simple truth struck a chord and sparked a shift in consciousness. The radical notion that fear itself was the enemy – not external conditions no matter how dire – was a message that brought hope into a hopeless world. How powerful it is to consider the possibility that fear, an important ally when carefully and critically managed, can become the most crippling hindrance.