The Norm Report - Month 101
July, 2010 E-mail: normrlee@att.net
Norm Lee’s website: www.nopunish.net
Over 29,700 visits
For those who’ve been training to relax,
death is liberating.
— Shantedeva
FIFTY YEARS AGO this month, untold numbers of Americans stopped taking showers. The cause was not a shortage of soap or water but widespread public panic after watching a movie: Alfred Hitchcock’s "Psycho."
In the infamous shower scene Anthony Perkins’ character repeatedly stabs the hapless and helpless Marion Crane thru the shower curtain as a violin screams. In this black-and-white film, the blood was chocolate syrup. The "murderer" was not Tony Perkins, but an extra that Hitchcock had chosen to play that scene.
So while thousands, behind lock and key, fearfully took sponge baths, or quick tub baths, or none at all, in reality there had been no blood, no stabbing, and no murder. The victim was not nude, the corpse was not dead; the terrifying 45-second event had been pieced together in the editing room from 78 cuts of film. Thousands suffered in mental anguish over images projected on a silver screen.
A couple of decades earlier millions of usually quite stable citizens ran screaming into the streets on hearing Orson Welles’ fictional radio show dramatizing an invasion of aliens from Mars. And in the Twenties a "prophet" named Miller predicted the end of the world, and had groups by the hundreds gathering on hilltops, arms raised in prayer, believing that on the cusp of world destruction the arrival of Jesus from the sky would snatch them to heavenly safety. Such is the power that fear can have over "normal" people not trained in mental discipline.
FEAR EVERYWHERE
That power is well known on the worst fringes of politics, religion, and corporate advertising. History shows that manipulating the masses with fearful messages brings power to the charleton, the unprincipled and the sociopath. For the past nine years, in the aftermath of the Sept 11, 2001 attack on the twin skyscrapers in NYC, the mass of Americans have lived with low-level post-trauma anxiety sending both legal and illegal drug sales sky-rocketing. Like characters in a Kafka story, we feel guilty and vulnerable, but in confusion about what, exactly, we’ve done wrong. When people are being held hostage by terror, civil liberties are the first to be sacrificed.
As long as a people are enslaved by fear, there can be no peace. And there can be no freedom. Personally, there is no peace of mind. The hatred and violence all around us seems beyond our ability to deter or influence for good. The only thing that we can change is ourselves. There we can create peace of mind - but only if we know how to do it.
When hatred and fear has gripped us, we see enemies everywhere. If we wish not to live a fear-based life, we need to develop a clear, stable mind. Anxiety and fear gradually calm out when we tame the internal chaos. We can train in taking charge of the thought process, and follow up with persistent practice. With the internal dialogue disciplined, the dark emotions can be dissolved. By examination we discover that the nature of thought is not substantial. Since thoughts are not real, we can stop supporting them, dwelling on them, reacting to them compulsively and automatically.
In fearful situations, first there are the fight-or-flight thoughts. There is an instant at the very outset when they have not yet gained momentum. At that moment there is an opportunity to diffuse the emotional intensity that our thoughts support. Without our support, those emotions cannot continue. We can find the training needed to break the habit of clinging to those feelings, those thoughts.
Few of us have escaped the abuse which, on some level, was inflicted by parents and teachers, if not by siblings or classmates. Bullies of all ages abound, terrifying everyone, dispensing misery and discord. Blind to how their anger destroys trust and respect, they proudly justify and defend it. They are unaware they are "out of control" and lack the skills to be masters of their minds and their own lives. "Those torn by the pain of anger will never know tranquility of mind. They can never rest," wrote Shantideva many years ago. Until we start working with our minds, we are ruled by our emotions. Thus we play out our individual dramas of hope and fear.
The national fear level rose dramatically on Sept 11, 2001, and nine years later it has not yet receded to earlier levels. The government in power, seeing their power increase with each rise in popular fear, periodically announced fear alerts of red, orange, etc. Suspension of "guaranteed" liberties was readily accepted in exchange for the illusion of security. In time, the alerts stopped, but the suspension and the fears remain.
WHAT CAUSES OUR FEARS?
There were always cats in the house when I was a child. Once – only once - a lady visited us who feared cats as she did the Devil. When our cat "Spanky" sauntered into the room that lady let out a yelp, leaped up on the sofa, gathered her voluminous skirts around her legs, and screamed in terror. The cat wisely fled, but we kids, delighting in adult absurdity, giggled breathlessly. Reflecting in later years, I felt compassion for the poor woman in her suffering. But Spanky did not cause her fear. It was her own thoughts that made her panic. She was not in charge of her thought processes.
Most any dictionary or encyclopedia lists dozens of "popular" phobias: snakes, bees, earthworms, birds, you name it, it has a name. Fear of the boogieman, fear of Jabberwocky, fear of Hefalump, fear of communists under the bed. Fear of the dark, fear of the alphabet, fear of number 13. I lived in a town on Route 666 in Arizona where God-fearing citizens marched on the state capitol demanding the road number be changed. The number 666 signified the Devil, they believed. The number was changed and the fearful citizens relaxed - but not by much. Evil lurked everywhere.
What do we fear, basically? We fear punishment from phantom parents who rise from the unconscious to plague us thruout life. We fear the inexorable march toward death, and busily suppress the thought of it. But ultimately we fear the dismantling of the illusion of Selfhood, or its chief supports. We don’t want to lose the house, the car, and our "nice things", the clutter. More than that, we feel fierce attachment to our body, which has been, alas, disintegrating with time. Then there are our trophies, our victories, our merit badges and mililtary decoration, our gold watch, our youthful wife, all of which represents our worth. Our identity. Our ego.
The morning paper shows us a world caught up in madness: enemies could blow us up at any moment, and we rattle incessantly between hope and fear. When we deeply examine hope, we see fear there. We may also see that all people everywhere have the same fears, the same sufferings; that in reality there is no disconnect with other beings. And we see that we all share the same desire for happiness. Thus the basic goodness and kindness in our hearts is liberated. At the end of the day we find that it is our thoughts and actions that determine our happiness or misery, that our hate and greed increases our fears of poverty as our dread multiplies our terror.
Reality check: Nothing is as it appears. We are like dream people getting annoyed at dream objects. With insight, seeing the insubstantial nature of everything, we can see the absurdity of working ourselves into a frenzy. "America," said Bill Maher, "is a nation of ten-year-old girls."
All over the world people are succeeding and failing, hoping for success but fearing failure. When I left my three-year tour of Japan and Korea in 1954 it was to quit the service and attend Syracuse University. As I left I told my friend Ed that I had a great many fears about failing, but there was one fear that could not stop me: I had power over the fear of failure. That is why I succeeded, despite many failures.
We fear we will get hurt, so we put up walls of hostility and prejudice. We cling to rock-hard opinions, arrogance and pride. But there are always cracks in those walls, and thru them emerge the things we really care about. We can learn to expand those cracks by training, and bring down those walls that keep us separated from those we love.
The greatest harm comes from our own aggressive minds. As Pogo, the sage of Okeefenokee swamp, famously said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." We can train to live without certainty, to accept confusion, and relax without the "security" of insurance. We cannot know what will happen to us next week, or tomorrow, or even moments from now. The only real safety is to be found in the Now. None of our control strategies can dodge the unpredictabilities of life, and keep us safe. That fact makes us uneasy, nervous, and afraid. The wise response to that is to grow up. To take responsibility for our lives. We can call on the wisdom and courage not yet discovered inside ourselves.
Today more and more of the fearful are carrying guns. Those who can affort it are withdrawing into gated communities – where they fear their gardeners, housemaids, plumbers, meter readers, and the guards themselves. Franz Kafka wrote of worlds where there was endless fear, but the objects of fear could never be determined.
ON THE FEAR OF DEATH
In "Journey to Ixtlan", Carlos Castenada takes instruction from Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer. "Death is your ally," he tells Carlos, "It sits on your shoulder and whispers advice. It is your wisdom friend and constant companion. Listen to it." That is unsettling to Carlos, who has membership in a culture that is afraid of death so avoids talking or thinking about it in personal terms - but finds it fascinating on TV. Don Juan trains him in connecting with Reality by touching the earth, abandoning conceptual reality, and learning to live with uncertainty and insecurity.
If we haven’t relaxed with groundlessness, the emptyness of phenomenon, death will likely be a terrifying experience. We don’t eliminate all fear, but if we’ve got past conceptual thinking, we won’t run for safety into self-absorption. Our fears will connect us with all others who are similarly facing dying and feel alone and afraid. Lacking training in dealing with discomforts and fears, death could be frightening in the extreme.
At bottom, the thing we fear most is obliteration of ego, which is illusion. We cling to the small and fearful cocoon of ego, but we could fly with the freedom and joy of a butterfly. Once out of the cocoon we can see what we previously could not: the cocoon was our prison, the source of our anxiety and fright, the terror pieced together from 78 clippings of movie film.
— norm
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