Origins of fears - ghosts of the past

A Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity discussion topic

Copyright 2008 by K. Ferlic,   All Rights Reserved

One obvious question is "Where do our fears originate?." The answer to this question is the origins of all our fears is our past experiences. Fears are of events that have already happened earlier in this life or even from lifetimes long past. They lie within what we think and believe, the experiences we have had and the habits we have created. As such, they can be seen and experienced as a multi-headed beast that seems to have more than one origin. Although the fear may have arisen in response to a particular situation, there is a combination of things which come together to give rise to that fear.

Ghosts of the past

What needs to be understood, since creativity takes us into the unknown, we have no idea of exactly what we will experience. Whatever we think we will experience is only a projection from the past. As such, any and all fears are ghosts of the past.

The way the process works is that we experience a new situation that somehow reminds us of the past where we were harmed or terrified by a trauma that we experienced. Although the situation we are currently experiencing is not the experience of the past, we project the past experience into it. There is nothing wrong with this for it is a way of protecting ourselves but we must learn to work with the fear and address the real hazards on which it was based and, more importantly, the real hazard the we face in life rather than masking the real hazard by the past fear. If we blindly listen to the fear and don’t address the hazard, the fear will rule our life. Again, this is acceptable and there is no judgment on allowing fear to rule our life but we do need to understand how it is, or is not, limiting our freedom of movement, and more importantly how it is, or is not, impacting our creative ability to create the experiences of our choice. Of course, what we will come to find is there will be always some situations that our only choice is to do a hazards analysis, mitigate the hazard as possible and then accept the risks and the fears if we want to have any hope of creating what we desire.

What may be difficult to initially understand is that fear of losing our wealth, fear of losing any other material holding (including people), and/or fear of losing our body is only the result of being dissociated from our creative spirit, mentally separated from our creative living process, or out of alignment with the flow of their creative life energy however you wish to view the separation. Any fear, in turn, limits the free expression of our creative spirit by denying the experiences it needs to fully understand who and what it is, which was why we were hear on earth in the first place.

When consciousness forms itself into matter, its awareness localizes in the form and has a tendency to identify more with matter than its original state of being of unboundedness and freedom. Rather consciousness becomes bound because it believes it is matter or it is physical rather than believing it is having a physical experience. It believes it is the body and fears losing the body for then it too shall die when in reality, the body is only a vehicle. These beliefs cause us to become separate.

Additionally, many teachings and beliefs about the physical world to which individuals are exposed reinforced this identification with the physical reality by claiming there was no preexistence or that the spiritual realm is separate from the physical. Yet to know that our essence is free and unbounded is something that must be experienced. It cannot be known through the mind for consciousness has intentionally limited its awareness in order to have the physical experiences. Otherwise the human physical experience would not be possible. Once a certain level of awareness is reached, a human physical experience is no longer possible and it is this fact that lies at the basis of what transcending the physical experience of many esoteric traditions is all about.

But it is not about escaping the human experience. Rather it is about outgrowing it as we would outgrow our childhood cloth. That is, our awareness expands such that it can no longer be contained by the physical experience.

In many ways you can say, the first real karma is fear for having a fears forces our energy into a direction and an attachment that as some point in time we will have to retrieve that energy and deal with the attachment if you are going to consolidate our creative ability and creative power to create the creation of our choice. It needs to be noted here that to run away from something is just as big an attachment as running toward something.

The fact fears are only a project from the past is not necessarily bad but it is not necessarily good either. The question is are the hazards we perceive a ghost from the past and possibly based on fears and bad experiences of the past that have nothing to do with the current situation or are the hazards real and the truth of what is based on the best mind can characterize as a real hazard based on the past. Any fears that arise are simply a projection of the past and may or may not have anything to do with the reality we experience. As was said, all fears, whatever they are arise from are experiences of the past whether they arise from something personally experiences, something that we have witnessed or we have been told or read about. Although fears are based on real hazards, real hazards can be readily addressed. But to address fears one will have to go inward and address where the fear actually comes from and why the fear exists.

In most cases fears that arise is a creative endeavor are about facing ghosts of the past. Fear tends to be based on a lack of understanding for if we understand, that understanding would allow us to remove the fear. Fears and dealing with fears will be unique to us and the types and kinds of experiences we have had in life. Then of course the fear we project may be based on a hazard we perceive as real is only the best mind can characterize from the past and will not necessarily be accurate. But to see if it is accurate and correct, we must step out of mind and become a detached witness. We can look at what may be characterized by the past as a hazard but we need to become aware of how we are projecting the past. It is about learning how to dance in and out of mind to see the truth of what is as opposed to fears and hurts of the past. The question is, "How does one separate the true hazard that may arise from a creative effort from the ghost of the past and from the fears projected from the past?"

Because we have forgotten and/or have not addressed our fears we carry them with us and project these fears into the future. Most fears lie dormant until a life event reminds us of the fear and then they surface in a conscious or nonconscious way to causing of to face an unexpected obstacle from within our being. We are challenged to either face the fear or move in some other direction in our life. But what we fear is actually finished. All we have to do is remember, to awake to the past. But if we did that, we wouldn’t have the fear. It is because we don’t awaken ourselves to process and the memories that caused this fear in the first place.

Although fears are unique to the individual, there are generic aspects to the creativity perspective that tend to be the occasion for fears of the past to surface. There are several aspects that give rise to, or rather surface, fear when we embrace a creative endeavor. These generic aspects may or may not causes issues to arise that compound the fears we gained because of the events in our life. The generic fears which typically arise are discussed in the topic "Key fears." Obviously what fears arise in our personal creative endeavors will be unique to us and what we desire to create.

In the resurfacing of some of these fears, especially the early fears, it must be understood that some of these fears are remembered as feeling and have no readily discernable conscious parts. For example, as a child before we became consciously aware and understood the world we experience we encountered situations that caused us to fear. No matter how much we try, we probably would have great difficulty consciously describing the experience yet we would be very aware of the feelings a similar situation would cause to arise that we identify as a fear. Fears are not always something that can be talked about. Some of the will have to be processed through an experience which allows the feelings to arise and then working through the experience and what the feeling represent.

Fear is a multi-headed beast

There are many different ways that fears can rule our lives. From a creativity perspective, dealing with fear is much like dealing with the multi-headed Hydra of Greek Mythology. It has many heads and if you cut one off, another will grow back. The only way we can kill it is to get to it at its heart - the source of its life -the root of the fear. However to get close enough to it to strike the heart, we have to get through the one or more of its heads. But more often than not, the heads become a distraction never allow us to penetrate the heart of the beast. Unless we can put our finger on the exact experience as to what causes the injury, harm, or discomfort that gave rise to our fear, creatively we will be dealing with a Hydra. All the associated influences or factors that existed within the experience we had may cause that fear to arise in the future although none of them have anything to do with the real hazard we faced in the past

What needs to be understood is there are events which give rise to our fear. However, everyone who faces a similar situation does not develop a fear. Fear arises from more than the experience itself. There are beliefs, thinking patterns, past experiences, response patterns to life and the like which all contribute to fears. Dealing with the experience which gave rise to the fear does not necessarily address the real cause of the fear.

Fears and separation from wholeness

Our emotions and the energy within our passion are essential to our creative power and are essential for us to thrust out into the world to manifest what we desire. When we have fears, we construct walls around ourselves with these fears whenever we feel emotionally threatened. In many ways these walls of fears can be seen as protecting us. We construct them for fear being hurt, rejected, ostracized. We construct them whenever we are threatened and vulnerable. We wall ourselves off so that we do not feel and our emotions are suppressed. But this all becomes a prison and a cage of our own making. These walls, built to protect, become habits and ways of being and cause us to wall ourselves in and to deny our own creative ability. Most importantly, they cause us to deny that we ourselves have built these walls that prevent our own creativity from getting out.

Sometimes we reject a person, people or an experience who we think is threatening, or will be threatening, to us before the individuals can reject us or the experience cause us discomfort. We "beat them to the punch" blindly not being open to the fact that we are responding to a past that no longer exists and we never give the present an opportunity to present itself for what it really is. In the end, our walls hurt us more than any other person or experience could. Our walls block off and close our hearts for they shutdown our emotions, our passion and our ability to feel. They make our condition worse and move us into greater and greater separation. For when we deny our emotions and our passion we are denying the creative life energy that supplies them. That in turn, deny our own being.

When we are walled off we fragment ourselves and our creative energy. When we are separated from our emotions, and feelings, we can not reach the source of our suffering, nor understand our underlying fears and exactly how we are vulnerable such that we need the fears to protect ourselves. We cannot understand the real roots of our problems and if we cannot understand the root, we cannot heal nor can we be whole. When we become separate within ourselves, we separate ourselves from others. We develop a "we" and "them" mentality. The others are not like us. We believe we cannot understand them because they are different. If we can’t understand them then we can’t trust them. They are dangerous and to be feared.

Separating ourselves, as is separating others into "us" and "them," are ultimately acts of violence. They are violent in the sense that any act of separation is a tripping or tearing apart of a whole. Seeing ourselves other than whole and focusing on the differences between people rather than our commonality is violent. Such internal separation inevitably leads to more concrete forms of violence, sooner or later, in one form or another, because separation breeds fear. In separation, all is not equal.

In separation we don’t respect all parts of ourselves equally as we would in seeing them in the wholeness of our being so we can abuse ourselves for parts of ourselves are not worthy of our attention and love. Similarly, because of our ego, we see someone, or something, different than ourselves and often less than ourselves. It is therefore seen as acceptable to treat these "lesser beings" in a way we ourselves would not what to be treated. Or we see them as somehow greater than ourselves and/or more powerful than ourselves, they become something that should be feared and we frequently turn our power over to them. The bottom line is that when we see differences we begin to fear the "other."

In fearing the "other" we project our self-hatred, our failures, and our faults onto them. We blame them for our problems rather than looking within ourselves. We attempt to solve our problems by "fixing" them, or requiring them, to become fixed rather than look at ourselves. Sometimes our actions even become forceful if not with a touch of violence at making them do it our way. But violence is much more than just inflicting physical injury on another. It can be spiritual, mental and/or emotional. Any time we force another to deny the truth of their being and deny them the opportunity to live their creative living process we are violent. Many of these forms of violence where we cause another to deny their truth or to live other than their truth can be more damaging than the physical violence. It can be very subtle.

Habits of the Past

Learning to effectively overcome many of the key habits and response patterns that we have accumulated over a lifetime to suppress who we are and living our heart is really about learning to sustain the flame of creative passion within the heart. To sustain the flame of creative passion, it is necessary to start becoming aware of the habits we have developed that permit us to live our lives contained by particular fears. In many ways, some of these habits are designed around our fears, so that as we address our fears, we need to change the habit of how we approach life.

Continuing to use a habit that was partially built to contain some aspect of our life in order to live with a fear will do one of two things. First, continuing the habit will open the door for the fear to reenter our life. It must be remembered that we become what we think about and, if a habit causes us to consciously or subconsciously think about a fear, that fear will re-enter our life. Second, if we are strong enough to prevent the fear from re-entering, then probably the habit itself, or at least that portion of the habit dealing with the fear, will become hollow and spiritless and will do little for us other than consume our time that could be better used elsewhere.

In addressing habits which contain fears, we need to understand how imbedded these fears may be in how we live our lives. Our mind makes decisions and lives in, and for, what it already knows. It does poorly with the unknown. It will try and extrapolate the past and it places expectations on how it thinks the future should look. The subconscious runs on what it knows and, unless directed otherwise by the conscious mind, will create actions from past beliefs and experiences and, obviously, it will rely on habits rather than create a new response pattern to a new situation. Whatever the mind and subconscious knows is what gets projected. If the mind and/or subconscious is familiar with pain, sorrow, suffering, trials and hardships, then it expects to experience and will continue to experience more of the same. With a conscious choice by the mind, the present moment becomes lost in the projection from the past and the heart becomes suppressed with fear of the past. So it is essential that we come to understand how much of our life and our habits may be based on fear. It may appear that our past actions are completely acceptable and based only on what is necessary. But if those actions were designed such that a fear is avoided or not effectively addressed, then those actions are imbedded with the fear and, if the actions continue into the future, those actions will take fear with them.

Similarly, our patterns of thought and what we think about create in the physical plane. Remember: intention leads to thoughts, which lead to words, leading to deeds (or experiences). One of the dangers that we have in our pattern of thought and what we think about is, if we allow ourselves to laps back into these old patterns, we begin to re-energize old ways of being and we begin to re-experience and relive that which we thought we overcame. We must become aware of what we think about and must continually ferret out our thought process and habits searching for the causative factors where we try to fix blame or look to some outside source for our issue. By placing our focus and attention on these patterns, we are re-energizing old ways of living and beginning to re-create those events in our life and the fears surrounding those events surface. If we don’t face the fears, we fall back into the habits of the past re-energizing them. If, however, we deal with the fear we are then capable of changing the pattern for we have removed the cause of the pattern. Besides, since we are comfortable with the pattern, we fall into it faster and allow the old form to manifest faster than if we had not already formed the pattern.

These old thought patterns and habits become like outlaws in the mind. As with an outlaw who intimately knows the remote terrains to hide from authorities, our outlaw memories and habits know were to hide and how to strike at opportune moments. If we wonder why we periodically fall back into old practices and old ways of thinking, it just means one of our outlaws has taken over and it is recommended we pounce on it as soon as we recognize its presence and get rid of it. Each time an outlaw memory takes over, it takes away some of our personal power in order to strengthen itself and weakening our overall resolve and strength of will.

Related topics
Dealing with fear

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