[Greetings, friends, from Austin! Two things came together to inspire this week’s essay. The first is that I am nearly four weeks into hosting a small class of people interested in writing a book. Once the 12-week course is finished, I will share the workbook with whoever wants it (for free)… let me know if that’s you, and I’ll put you on the list to receive a copy!
One of the people in the group is
. He’s a fantastic writer who’s chosen to tackle the topic of Fear—what it is, how it affects us, and how we can use it to our advantage. It’s going to be an excellent book. After talking through his outline, I got thinking about last week’s essay “On the Value of Imagination”—particularly, on the dark side of Imagination. For what is fear but the use of our imagination against us?1Imagination can be our best friend or our worst enemy, depending on how it’s used. It can imagine monsters where there are none, or it can take us places beyond our wildest dreams. These are twin sides of the same coin. And yet another reason why we must pay attention to and train it. We must grow familiar with it to discern when its projections are of the Enemy and when they are of the Ally.
The second source of inspiration for today’s essay comes from attending a portion of the Leadership and Rhetoric retreat hosted by
. Much of the retreat is centered on helping participants hone their oration skills, which necessarily involves confronting what many cite as a fundamental fear: the fear of public speaking. Throughout the weekend, there was a fair bit of giving speeches in front of peers. Sometimes, these speeches were given spontaneously, like when we each wrote random (and ridiculous) topics down on a notecard, shuffled them, and then dished them back out as prompts. As part of two separate exercises, I was given “Gulf of America…a good idea” and “Who really did 9/11?” and then had to stand before a group of strangers to riff on those topics with no preparation. It was, for all intents and purposes, rhetorical improv. I don’t generally consider myself to fear public speaking, but I watched as my “fear of not measuring up” showed up in a new way. Of course, I delivered the speeches, with some wins and some losses, and emerged not only okay but the better for it.All of this got me thinking about the dark side of imagination. How fear often hides beneath the surface, making subtle suggestions about what to do and not do. How sometimes fear speaks clearly but sometimes becomes an anonymous bully in the background gnawing at our potential. How if “Earth” is under the dominion of the “Enemy” (to speak in the language of Lewis and The Ransom Trilogy), we must always be alert to its corrupting influence on our imagination.
Last week, we spoke about the light side of sacred Imagination. This week, we will look at what sits in the shadow side of imagination, fear—our greatest task and challenge. It is to fear, the mind-killer, that we devote the rest of today’s essay.]
“And if fear wins a majority of the votes, incline in the other direction anyhow, and cease to harass your soul…”
Seneca
Early in Dante’s Inferno, Virgil sees Dante (the pilgrim) try to refuse the call to adventure and urges him on:
Your spirit has been bruised by cowardice,
Which many a time so weighs a man’s heart down
it turns him from a glorious enterprise—
as shadows fool the horse that shies away.2
In this scene, Dante (the pilgrim) thinks himself unworthy and incapable… fearful of what lies ahead, questioning his ability to complete the journey. The language Dante (the poet) uses through Virgil gives us a picture of what fear does. It tricks the head like the shadows fool the horse. It weighs down the wings of the heart. It bruises the soul. It turns us back from what might otherwise have been a glorious enterprise.
So often, especially in modern life, the tyrants that torment us exist only in our imagination. Shadows fooling we who shy away. Far gone are the days of our ancestors when we slept exposed to our predators. To summarize Mark Twain: we suffer many ills in life, most of which never happen.
We never speak our thoughts in our jobs or relationships because we anticipate an unfavorable reaction. We opt out of adventures and enterprises because the voice of Resistance convinces us that future failure is assured and our efforts are futile. We self-sabotage, leaving places and people because we “know how things will turn out” before giving it a chance. We get in the habit of anticipating ills and giving them the final vote.
When we yield to these imagined threats without testing them, we validate these fears, and our worries become self-fulfilling prophecies. If we’re not careful, we can spend our entire lives making decisions based on things that will never happen to us… letting fear defeat us before we’ve even started.
Sometimes, it’s the fear of failing at something we care deeply about. So we never try. Or the fear of the fallout after a tough conversation with someone we love. So we avoid it. It’s the fear of rejection if we put ourselves out there and take a chance. So we never take it. Until the things we avoid become the lines that box us in.
With each avoidance, fear takes control of our lives. It starts to dictate what we do and don’t do. Where we go or don’t go. To quote Robin Sharma: “[t]he fears we don’t face become our limits.” Fear fragments our potential and disintegrates our being, leaving our spirit as scattered shards. This is why Jung wrote: “where your fear is, there is your task.” Because it points us to where we must go to reclaim the lost pieces of our being.
Seneca speaks to this tyranny of imaginary fears in his Letters to Lucilius:
There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality… What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.
Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.3
How should we approach our fears, knowing that many are imagined? Seneca gives us a few questions to ask ourselves and then offers a prescription:
Is there any evil involved, or is it a matter merely of ill report, rather than an evil?” Put the question voluntarily to yourself: “Am I tormented without sufficient reason, am I morose, and do I convert what is not an evil into what is an evil?”
You may retort with the question: “How am I to know whether my sufferings are real or imaginary?” Here is the rule for such matters: we are tormented either by things present, or by things to come, or by both. As to things present, the decision is easy. Suppose that your person enjoys freedom and health, and that you do not suffer from any external injury. As to what may happen to it in the future, we shall see later on. Today there is nothing wrong with it.
“But,” you say, “something will happen to it.” First of all, consider whether your proofs of future trouble are sure. For it is more often the case that we are troubled by our apprehensions, and that we are mocked by that mocker, rumour, which is wont to settle wars, but much more often settles individuals. Yes, my dear Lucilius; we agree too quickly with what people say. We do not put to the test those things which cause our fear; we do not examine into them; we blench and retreat just like soldiers who are forced to abandon their camp because of a dust-cloud raised by stampeding cattle, or are thrown into a panic by the spreading of some unauthenticated rumour.
And somehow or other it is the idle report that disturbs us most. For truth has its own definite boundaries, but that which arises from uncertainty is delivered over to guesswork and the irresponsible license of a frightened mind. That is why no fear is so ruinous and so uncontrollable as panic fear. For other fears are groundless, but this fear is witless.
Let us, then, look carefully into the matter. It is likely that some troubles will befall us; but it is not a present fact. How often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives; so look forward meanwhile to better things.4
Let us, then, look carefully into the matter. This is the first antidote to the imaginary fears of our lives. Seneca’s advice here is not so different from Proverbs’ statement that “[t]he simple believeth every word: but the prudent man looketh well to his going.”5 We must ask the question or say what we’re scared to and receive an actual response instead of taking our imagined answer as a certain truth. We must try the thing we’re worried about to realize it’s not as big a deal as we made it to be in our minds. As shadows shrink when the object approaches, our fears diminish when faced.
In addition to looking carefully into the matter, we must also train ourselves to hope. To see things not only with a pessimistic lens, but with an optimistic one as well. We must douse the flames of fear with hope:
There will be many happenings meanwhile which will serve to postpone, or end, or pass on to another person, the trials which are near or even in your very presence. A fire has opened the way to flight. Men have been let down softly by a catastrophe. Sometimes the sword has been checked even at the victim’s throat. Men have survived their own executioners. Even bad fortune is fickle. Perhaps it will come, perhaps not; in the meantime it is not. So look forward to better things.
The mind at times fashions for itself false shapes of evil when there are no signs that point to any evil; it twists into the worst construction some word of doubtful meaning; or it fancies some personal grudge to be more serious than it really is, considering not how angry the enemy is, but to what lengths he may go if he is angry. But life is not worth living, and there is no limit to our sorrows, if we indulge our fears to the greatest possible extent; in this matter, let prudence help you, and contemn with a resolute spirit even when it is in plain sight. If you cannot do this, counter one weakness with another, and temper your fear with hope…
Accordingly, weigh carefully your hopes as well as your fears, and whenever all the elements are in doubt, decide in your own favour; believe what you prefer. And if fear wins a majority of the votes, incline in the other direction anyhow, and cease to harass your soul, reflecting continually that most mortals, even when no troubles are actually at hand or are certainly to be expected in the future, become excited and disquieted.6
Until this point in the essay, we’ve focused primarily on imagined fears. Is it not true, you might now find yourself wondering, that while many of our fears do not come to pass, some do? Are not some fears justified? In both story and life, the answer to that question is yes. Shadows of fear cast by threats, both real and imagined, are always the close companions of all who would go on a glorious enterprise. Fear crawls in the sandbox of uncertainty; lurks in the land of the unknown.
In The Hobbit, Bilbo first fights the fear of imagined things when his Tookish side awakens, and he decides (after hesitating, like Dante) to leave the comforts of the Shire. He later fights the fear of real things when he stands in the tunnel approaching the dragon, Smaug:7
“Dear me, what a fool I was and am!” said the least Tookish part of him. “I have absolutely no use for dragon-guarded treasures, and the whole lot could stay here for ever, if only I could wake up and find this beastly tunnel was my own front-hall at home!”
He did not wake up of course, but went still on and on, till all sign of the door behind had faded away. He was altogether alone. Soon he thought it was beginning to feel warm. “Is that a kind of glow I seem to see coming right ahead down there?” he thought.
It was. As he went forward it grew and grew, till there was no doubt about it. It was a red light steadily getting redder and redder. Also it was not undoubtedly hot in the tunnel. Wisps of vapour floated up and past him and he began to sweat. A sound, too, began to throb in his ears, a sort of bubbling like the noise of a large pot galloping on the fire, mixed with a rumble as of a gigantic tom-cat purring. This grew to the unmistakable gurgling noise of some vast animal snoring in its sleep down there in the red glow in front of him.
It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.8
If Bilbo decided to turn back and let fear win, there may have been the momentary comfort of avoiding a potentially fatal confrontation with a dragon. But what then? His story would have gone from one of triumph to one of tragedy. He would have gone home, and the cost of his decision to be dissuaded by fear would have grown. Holding the memory of his cowardice, his spirit would have grown consistently more restless, just as the threat of Smaug would have swelled until his fires were ready to consume all. These are the consequences of the fear unconfronted.9
The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with [] dissolution and extinction… For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated, and the whole future is condemned to hopeless staleness…10
Against every instinct, Bilbo does not decide to turn back, and his boldness delivers him from fear. That is why he is one of the heroes of The Hobbit and why we would do well to follow his example.
His decision to continue in the face of an actual (rather than perceived) threat is a decision we must make many times in our lives if we want to become the heroes of our stories. In myth, the hero shows how, even if our fears are more real than imaginary, our response remains the same: confront them.
“Where your fear is, there is your task.”
(Letters of C.G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951 – 1961.)
We see this advice encoded in the myth of Perseus, with his slaying of Medusa (the embodiment of fear). (See On Immediate Action for more on Perseus.) It’s the same advice as that of modern psychology: avoiding negative emotions (like fear) makes them stronger and us weaker. Each time we avoid something, we train our brains to more firmly believe: “This is something to be avoided.” Only by exposing ourselves to them do we lessen them and their control over our lives.
In psychology, this is called exposure therapy. This is why Perseus uses a shield to see Medusa—his strategy is one of gradual exposure. Someone afraid of elevators might be asked to take a step toward one. Someone scared of needles might be asked to look at one. Someone with post-traumatic stress might be asked to recall or describe the traumatic experience. In each case, the key is getting the person to reverse a pattern of avoidance and create momentum toward confronting.
So it is: we must learn to test our fears to see if they’re imagined. This alone will cause many of our ills to fall away. But even if that test reveals the fear to be more substantive than theoretical, more actual than perceived, the answer isn’t to avoid it; it’s to find ways to expose ourselves to it gradually. That is how fears, both real and imagined, may become our greatest allies. Every fear confronted is a power absorbed.
We must remember: by retreating or running from that which we fear, we are not gaining safety, but losing it. “[W]e are more exposed to danger when we turn our backs.”11 Because in the end, the things we think protect us only end up making us more fragile. By shying away, we betray our Self and deny the opportunity to grow stronger.
This is why, ultimately, we must engage our fears. Follow its tracks and hunt it down. For the hero “would be amidst all the dangers, really fighting the battle of life, not dancing in the clouds.”12 The hero answers the daily summons to witness when and where fear arrives in his day and then stands up to it. He lives by the code: chase your fears. Face them forthrightly. Absorb their energy. Grow stronger. Repeat for the rest of your life.
It can start small: have the conversation you’ve been avoiding, send the message you’ve been talking yourself out of, ask them out, share your art with the world and subject yourself to critique, sign up for a competition, and risk losing at something you care about. Whatever it is that fear has kept you from doing, step aggressively toward it.
Slay the dragon in its lair before it comes for the village.
—
P.S. If fear plays a significant role in your life, consider using the Litany Against Fear from Dune as something like an affirmation:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
P.P.S. In Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis has senior tempter Screwtape describe how demons seeking to win human souls for Hell must manipulate and corrupt the faculties of the imagination, hijacking it to forecast future troubles and anticipate hypothetical ills.
We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy [i.e., God]. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.
Your patient will, of course, have picked up the notion that he must submit with patience to the Enemy’s will. What the Enemy means by this is primarily that he should accept with patience the tribulation which has actually been dealt out to him—the present anxiety and suspense. It is about this that he is to say “Thy will be done,” and for the daily task of bearing this that the daily bread will be provided. It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross, but only of the things he is afraid of. Let him regard them as his crosses; let him forget that, since they are incompatible, they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practise fortitude and patience to them all in advance. For real resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible, and the Enemy does not greatly assist those who are trying to attain it: resignation to present and actual sufferings, even where that suffering consists of fear, is easier and is usually helped by this direct action.13
There is an obvious exception here. When something in our immediate presence is actively harming us, the fear (maybe more appropriately called terror) is obviously not a product of our imagination. For the most part in this essay, I am not talking of present ills; I am most referencing (with a few exceptions) imaginary or anticipated ills. Another quick qualification: I admit that, on occasion, our imagining of a potential fear might, in fact, save us from whatever threat we perceive. It’s hard to know what things we’ve avoided in life… because they never happened. So fear should not simply be discarded as always imagined; it must be tested before it can be trusted. It’s when we accept them as the gospel truth without looking carefully into them that they become bigger bullies than they ought.
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto II.
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 13: On Groundless Fears.
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 13: On Groundless Fears.
Proverbs 14:15.
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 13: On Groundless Fears.
When Bilbo thinks of cowardice, it is represented as the “least Tookish” part of him; when he acts with an eye toward adventure and courage, it is the Tookish part of him responding.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, p. 205.
In a sort of paradox, we might say we should fear nothing, except fear (or, at least, the consequences of yielding to the spirit of fear). The Bible’s treatment of fear helps us make this distinction.
The Bible distinguishes between two types of fear. The first, thought to be a good thing, is the “fear” of God (which is the beginning of wisdom). Fear in this context is different from how we typically think about it; this type is more about reverence or awe for God’s power and understanding the consequences of living in discord with what He created. This essay is not about that kind of fear.
This essay is about the second kind of fear, which is the “spirit of fear” mentioned in 2 Timothy 1:7: “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” A spirit of fearfulness—timidity, uncertainty, and doubt—is a deviation from God (a “sin,” so to speak). This is why the Bible reiterates a few hundred times some combination of “do not be afraid” and “do not fear.”
Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, para 551.
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 104: On Care of Health and Peace of Mind.
Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, p. 507.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, p. 25-26.
This is an amazing piece. I'll be rereading it often. Thank you so much.
Quite relatable. Needed to read it. Thank you for sharing it.