Fear and the unknown

 

A Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity discussion topic

Copyright 2006 by K. Ferlic,   All Rights Reserved

 
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All of us has had experiences of pain, hurt, disappointments, unfilled expectations, doubt, fears, betrayals, controls on our freedom and a myriad of other things we dislike about life and don’t want to experience again. But the future is unknown. We really don’t know what the next moment is going to give us. Because we don’t know what the future holds, our past tends to haunt the present. Hence, we fear that the unknown of life will give us more of the same unpleasantness. We fear the unknown and are anxious about what an unknown has to offer.

To avoid the anxiety that can come with the unknown, we retreat to a habit of the mind that gives us a warm fuzzy feeling about the future that allows us to think we have life under control. In doing so, we continue to recreate the past and fail to fully embrace the possibilities of the future. This is the illusion of control.

When we live in our habits. We think we are controlling the unknown of the future. Yet, any creative endeavor by its very nature has to take us into the unknown. We can fully expect that we will experience fear. Yet, only when we face our fear and look to the past as to why our particular fear arises (as opposed to any other fear) will we be able to move through it and face the anxiety of the unknown and the chaos of the creation process. In doing so, we step into our true creative power.

One problem we face is that any response pattern of the mind and mental habit that we use to escape to avoid anxiety of the unknown or give rise to our fears is that they are extremely strong and quick. Also many of these habits go back to very early in life to a time before you developed a conscious mind and could become consciously aware of the habits that you formed. It is not like we can go back and consciously retrieve a memory as to why we are responding the way we do. Often we just have a vague feeling and don’t really know why we feel the way we do.

If we sometimes feel we are stuck in habits of our childhood, we are completely correct. But most of the habits go back to the first 2 or 3 years of life if not earlier before many of have conscious memories of this life. Remember, we are talking about a specific set of habits concerning how you learned to respond to the anxiety of the unknown and uncertainty of life. Being in life more than two or three years is more than sufficient time to develop such habits. We only need to think about how many times we have to do something as an adult before we develop the habit and remember that a young child is open to readily mold itself to whatever experience it has because it has less interference of the past.

What this means is that to address our fears we will have to go back and explore our past. We will have to make the subconscious conscious where possible. When that is not possible because the memories lie within our being rather than our mind, then we will have to work with our feelings and in a realm where mind is ill equipped to help us. It is here the internal compass is most useful. Calibrating our internal compass to know what serves us and gives us a fullness of being and a feeling full of life, we can use our internal compass to guide us where we only have feeling with which to work. We can use our internal compass to guide us to the freedom of our own being and honor our intuitive guidance as to exactly what we need to do to enter that place of freedom.

No one can do this for us. Since we enter the unknown must of fear doing the journey alone and we think another can guide us better than ourselves. However, nothing can be farther from the truth. We are unique infinitely creative beings and our creative spirit is confided in a cage of our own making. We are the only one’s who have the key. We may use the lessons learned of others and capitalize on their advice, wisdom and experience. However, only we can free our own being.

Related topics
A cage of one’s own making
How consciousness defines itself
Anxiety of creation/anxiety of the unknown
“Curing” the anxiety of the unknown
Dealing with fear
Topics on addiction

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