On Humans, Fear, Change, and Doing Our Best
why are humans so afraid?
humans, as they say, will pack bond with anything. but along with this natural tendency to bond comes projecting our motives, our emotions, and our behaviors onto other creatures.
have you ever seen the show My Cat From Hell? every now and then you’ll see a human who is projecting human motives onto their cat. “He pees on the carpet to spite me!” your cat doesn’t pee on the carpet to spite you. that is a human concept.
in the same way, we project onto our Gods.
Gods, if you truly believe they exist, are older, bigger, wiser, and more expansive than our wee human brains can even conceive of. here we are, trapped in a physical body with a computer made of fat and electricity in our skulls, imagining that we can understand what it is to be Divine. we just can’t. semantics aside (we too are Divine, imo, but that’s speaking of our souls and not our limited human experience), the Divine is so outside of our experience that we have always struggled to explain it, to define it, to understand it. we may have beliefs about it, but we can’t objectively prove any of them.
and yet, here we are imagining that we Know what our Gods think, what they want, and why. we assign human motives and feelings to them (pettiness, jealously, hate), human methods of “teaching lessons” (pain, suffering, punishment), and human limitations (lack of understanding, lack of compassion, lack of love). even those who believe in only one god and who think that he is “perfect,” assign these traits to him as if they were in any way infallible.
of course, we are just trying to wrap our brains around concepts that are too big for our little meat processors, so we put it in terms we can understand. but it becomes dangerous when we have the hubris to assume that our best conception is the right conception, and act on it in a potentially harmful way.
a while back, i had the notion that my Gods think of me like i think of my animal friends. i love them, i care about them, i worry about them, and i want them to be well. sometimes, i try to help them and i mess it up, hurt them, or even if successful, still scare them. think of taking your cat to the vet. they are probably terrified, and though you try and show them that you are trying to help them, they don’t really understand what you are doing or why they need an injection or a procedure or to go to the scary place at all. they may trust you enough to let you do it, or they may be in so much pain or so scared they fight you on it.
so too, i believe, is what it’s like sometimes with my Gods to me. They are often trying to help me, but i don’t understand, i’m afraid, i’m in pain. i might feel that They are doing something and trust that They know better than i do, or i might cry and wail and beg Them to make it stop. maybe someday i’ll understand why it happened, or maybe i’ll go to my grave not knowing and perhaps understand in the afterlife. my dark nights of the soul might be a spiritual vet visit, or the illness that warranted a checkup in the first place. the thing is that i accept that i don’t know. as often as i’ve gnashed my teeth about it, i know that there is no possible way TO know, with certainty, about anything spiritual. i don’t know why i’m here. i don’t know the meaning of life. neither do you. neither does anyone. but some people THINK they know. they know it with the passion of the newly converted. they know it with the avoidance of someone who is too afraid to face the great chasm of not knowing, so they put on their blinders and convince themselves that they know. they convert belief into knowing like it’s alchemy.
get someone who believes that they know, and someone who desperately wants to know but doesn’t possess the hubris to give their own thoughts on the matter a promotion to truth together, and you’ve got yourself a religion.
unverified Personal Gnosis, or UPGs, is a term that means that you had a personal spiritual experience, but nobody else concurred that they had the same experience, so it’s just yours and not a shared one. most polytheists look upon such things with scorn. without the primacy of the written word (and some Pagans believe in that, too – witness how many depend heavily on the written folklore as their “source” and disparage anything that disagrees with said folklore, despite the fact that that written record was pretty much always written after the fact by Christians who had very real vested interests in keeping people afraid of the Old Ways and converted or maintained in Christianity), it’s assumed that the best way to find truth is for other people to agree with you, to find concensus. except that humans are naturally agreeable; we can be convinced to go along with the crowd even when we ourselves believe it to be wrong (witness those social experiments where they have several plants pretending to be subjects give a wrong answer, and the actual subject of the study will often go along with them rather than give the right answer). not to mention, that maybe our Gods have different tasks and lessons and whatnot for each of us – after all, we’re not all on the same path, are we? is a warrior going to have the same direction as an artist? probably not.
now I’m not saying that it doesn’t mean anything when a bunch of people have the same experience. and it feels great to be validated. but maybe that experience is what that group of people can comprehend. maybe that experience meets them where they are at, and someone else’s experience meets them where they are at. that doesn’t make one or the other wrong – but it also doesn’t make one or the other definitively right.
a warrior’s mind might see a war, and a fiber artist might see an unraveling of a work that didn’t turn out to be redone in a new way. a painter might see a blank canvas, and a builder might see demolition. these all might be the same event, but interpreted in the way that their minds work. the problem comes when one interpretation or another sees enemies or reads undoing as inherently bad. instead of shaking the cosmic Etch-A-Sketch, someone whose life is built around the current structure sees its downfall as The Nothing from The Neverending Story. It is a threat. It is bad. It is The Forces Of Evil, Come To Destroy Your Way Of Life. but those who have never fit into the current structure see its undoing as a great blessing, the Evil Empire brought down by a spunky Luke Skywalker using the Force. all of it depends on your vantage point. all of it is subjective.
humans have the intelligence necessary to make themselves into world-changing apex predators, terraforming the Earth around them for good or for ill, and understanding at least some of the consequences of our actions (such as climate change). but we also have the run-and-hide instincts of a prey species, feeling threatened by every scent in the wind, and every crunch of leaves in the distance. the thing is, most of the Things Out To Get Us are ...us. some people lash out in a “hurt them before they hurt me” kind of way. some people won’t strike first but will take revenge like they’re John Wick avenging a puppy. others are just hurt people hurting others, because they don’t know any better. whatever the cause, people naturally learn to be suspicious of each other, so even in cases where no ill intentions are present, they end up in a Mexican Standoff because everyone is afraid of everyone else. this is understandable – as i said, there ARE some hurtful people in the world. but in truth, they are the minority.
right now, you are thinking that i am naive. i know. in a time where fascism is on the rise, it’s hard to think that most people are decent human beings. but even those ignorant bigots of the world are generally sad, pathetic weaklings who don’t deserve your fear. oh, they do cause harm. but mostly they get away with it because people are afraid of them. have you ever laughed in a bigot’s face? i have. boy do they hate that. because their whole schtick is reliant on intimidation. see them for the sad sacks that they are, remove that threatening aura, make it so that the onlookers who follow but don’t lead see that it’s okay to laugh, and they lose their power, because they never really had any power in the first place. their “power” is reliant on the belief that they are a scary threat. this is why they cover themselves with guns and scary imagery, like an animal puffing out its feathers or fur to seem larger than it is. but like most schoolyard bullies, most of them are bluffing. they are afraid of change, they are afraid of those who are different than themselves, they are afraid of anyone calling their bluff. they misdirect and obfuscate and claim righteous anger, all to hide the fact that they are cowering in their den, hissing and swatting because another animal passed near. they don’t have the soul strength to turn the inner eye onto themselves and do the work to grow and evolve. they want to stay just the same, comfortable and safe. they want everyone else to stay the same too, because then they know their place in the world, and that stability feels like security. if you upend the structure, it feels like the End Of The World to them.
and here we get to one of the many issues of our times: the world is changing, and people are terrified. those with power – real or imagined – are desperately trying to hang onto it, and to keep the tower from crumbling out from beneath them. Christian preachers have been predicting the Apocalypse for centuries now, and yet here we all are, still stuck with them, no one having gotten an airlift into heaven, the only destruction being of our own making. instead of facing the dangers WE have created, and changing The Way Things Are to correct them, certain members of society would rather bury their heads in the proverbial sand, declare that Jesus will fix it, or that there is nothing we can do, since it’s not really in our hands but A VAST CONSPIRACY over which we have NO control. unlike a fight/flight/freeze response where you might freeze as a defense mechanism even when you don’t want to, these people have made a conscious decision to surrender their agency, giving it up to their preachers, their leaders, their higher power, and label it morally superior to do so.
in my books, the responsible thing to do is to try your best to BE responsible, to be accountable, to do the work and turn the inner eye and as best you can, help. no one is going to do it perfectly. no one is going to fix All The Things. but spiritually mature beings who want to do good are not mindless minions to be directed by a master, they are people who do the best they can, with what they have, and what they understand. maybe your set of skills is different than mine, and maybe your area of focus is different, and maybe your understanding of what needs to be done is different. but this isn’t team sports. there is no winning or losing team. we are all on the same team. planet Earth. and if you think you’re exempt from participating, i would argue that you’re here, so you’re participating whether you like it or not. the thing you have to ask yourself is, do you want to try and make things better, or worse? because they will not stay the same.
i will say one other thing here: there is a stage where people see the problems in the world, and instead of Working For Change, they instead focus on Minimizing Harm. i understand this stance, i’ve done it too, and i still do it to some extent. this is your veganism, your zero waste, your sweeping the path before your feet so you don’t step on any tiny bugs. i’m not saying this is bad. but it is, in my experience, a freeze response. the enormity of the harm in the world is so overwhelming that you just. want it. to stop. i get it. me too. but you know in your heart of hearts that this is playing small, right? you feel helpless and insignificant, so you focus on your tiny corner, and try and soothe yourself that at least you aren’t contributing to xyz problem, or contributing much less than most. we’ve all got different roles to play, but please don’t shrink yourself down to fit into that mason jar of trash you keep. you are so much more than that, and have more ability to create real progress than you think. i believe in you. :)
this awen is a free use image
