Fearlessness

The Buddhist Long Game

If we have no fear, we have no thinking. No conceptual mind. And vice versa. No thinking, no fear.          ---Tsoknyi Rinpoche.

Just imagine the amount of thinking going on in your world. How much of that activity arises from a variety of unacknowledged fears? It was shocking for me to realize the subtle yet influential underlying apprehension driving many of my decisions for much of my life. Once I began to grasp that tendency, I found it possible to soften the dominance of mental activity just by settling into my body. If I was fortunate, the underlying anxiety would largely disappear. Remembering that all mental activity is essentially empty helps. The bottom drops out. I wasn’t so captured by the virtual fun house of rationalizations seducing me to prepare for whatever I thought would happen next. Ultimately, there’s only one directive that matters: there’s nothing whatsoever to do.

If I was modeling consciousness as a three-level house, the main floor would represent discursive mind, the continuous daily chatter of thoughts, memory and planning, mediating emotion. The upper floor is where grand schemes unfold, where mythologies thrive, where calculated assessments influencing daily decisions and actions are hatched and cultivated. The basement is a much deeper elemental ground in the quiet depth of consciousness where motivations may still drive us but where peace is more accessible. In exercising mindfulness, I go into the basement. It’s quite satisfying to be able to retire to the basement any time, noticing the party going on upstairs, the noise, the singing, the breaking glass, the cacophony of chatter, and not having to participate or be affected by it in the least. It’s a little like waking up in a dream and discovering maybe I do have some control over the flow of imagery there. But then, of course, is there only one floor I can call the dream? Or is it all floors? Is the dream in me? Or am I in the dream?

Certain things become clear over an extended period of regularly retiring to the basement. Automatic and unabated discursive mental activity is often a defense, a survival mechanism. I mean the deliberative and linear nature of the waking state, the analytical mind. It’s always active, yet just the act of naming it as a defense opens a door into a normally unconscious dimension of the inner world. What is revealed are thoughts of inadequacy, uncertainty, and fear. My thinking behavior, the party on the main floor, is about competency and approval (in the present as well as in an imaginary future), driven by a question of whether I can claim those qualities and possess sufficient confidence that I will have enough time to become them or not. Most often, the foremost desire is to do something, and quickly. My thinking process is always a little impatient. It’s about being somebody, reaffirming identity, the one I desire to be or the one I want others to see. Accompanying that desire is a sense that there’s not enough time to be (or become) that somebody. I must act swiftly and with complete confidence. This is my strategy—which is not really a solution to anything. Nevertheless, ego must be fed.

The relaxation upon bursting this bubble is profound. From my basement Lazy-Boy, I can have some of that relaxation any time which means fear slips away. I am released from its anxious directives.  Fortunately, fear is not a permanent condition. As soon as the natural defense mechanisms are witnessed and unwound, it’s possible to dial it all down, sometimes to near zero, for extended periods of time. True fearlessness, the fearlessness of one who can drop the entire ‘story,’ is rare. In general, fearlessness, like equanimity, compassion, or surrender, is another quality of presence. It may be cultivated or arise spontaneously. However it appears, it is a gift.

The strategy to quiet the mind requires navigating a storm of ideation about what to do when thinking appears again—fear of the future. It could be object-oriented meditation or following a specific visualization process. Thinking may appear at any time while doing anything—or nothing. All the ‘fixing’ that might rush into awareness is the reassertion of ego with its catalog of antidotes. It’s ego’s panic because the medieval king is fragile and always needs reinforcement and protection.  None of the protections are me.  ‘I’ am somewhere else.  I’m perched apart, watching the entire crazy, helpless, endlessly entertaining creative process of fortifying defenses, which may then dissolve like so many sandcastles before the incoming tide.

Identifying and dropping these two critical mental patterns has been enormously clarifying. ‘I’ can observe my inner process without getting caught in it. There are probably several names for conventional psychological guidance in this territory, but one is called Internal Family Systems, a popular and highly articulated counseling technique to identify and defuse troubling emotions and self-defeating beliefs. Except I wasn’t ‘applying’ a method when these realizations originally arrived. Something just snapped…and I was free. Even better, I know how to free myself the next time. 

How one arrives at that freedom is not the most important issue. The context and nature of any release from fear, whether momentary, extended, or incomplete, is how it manifests in action. True fearlessness lies at the nexus of empathy, enlightened action, equanimity, and the softening of ego. Melt the heart of the king (or queen) with kindness. It is where uncertainty meets trust, where structure meets chaos and doesn’t recoil, where empowerment, joy and compassion intersect. These qualities naturally and spontaneously subvert the conditioning of the fear-based, selfish (and self-denying) zero-sum paradigm and maximally defended ego of modern culture.

To be fearless is to be fully embodied, to operate outside the subversion of presence, the fake empowerment of today’s inverted totalitarianism. Not only is it a personal revelation, but as the fruit of deliberate collective inquiry, it’s a revolutionary condition. In fact, fearlessness is lawless, at least in the sense of social convention being a set of unwritten laws limiting acceptable human interaction. But let me be clear. I am talking about the absence of fear, not jacked-up compensation in the face of fear.

The context of fear is large. We have built-in neural patterning for survival, mediating threats, needs and self-protective options. All those mechanisms are subject to conditioning. The neural gain on the autonomic system can be elevated to high degrees of sensitivity, winding us up to hair-trigger reactivity to the proper stimuli. This is the neurochemical ground of primal, instinctual fear, including the biological mechanisms mediating perception, emotion, and internal states. Fear can be rooted in emotional, especially traumatic memory, motor patterning mediated—or obscured—by numerous defense mechanisms. And since trauma, defined as repeatedly thwarted, unresolved emotional expression, despite being largely unconscious, is pervasive throughout modern life, virtually no one is free of fear.

There is also the socio-economic context, deep familial, tribal, and cultural conditioning operating to establish and enforce social cohesion. Social conditioning is coercive. The dominant paradigm exploits fear to condition behavior, more so now than ever because the messaging has become so sophisticated and the drive to manipulate and monetize emotion is so strong. After his election loss, Trump, while bellowing ‘fraud!’, expertly and successfully solicited huge sums from his acolytes multiple times per day. That messaging tells us that when we are afraid, we must look to ourselves as the source, not to the influence of the daily deluge of mass messaging. These are mechanisms of social control. We saw them play out in ever more extreme ways in the 2022 election cycle.

The origins and mechanisms of fear in our lives all serve a purpose. At the same time, we have the capacity to reflect on our beliefs and reflexive responses to everyday events, appetites, preferences and needs such that we can consciously explore alternative strategies. Extending these resilient and adaptive practices to the collective exponentially increases complexity. But this is the cutting edge of transformative group practice now, in which the presence of fear can be named and defused.

Mahayana tells us we each intrinsically hold the same potential as Buddha.  What prevents us from accessing that potential is much deeper than garden-variety cognitive confusion. The activity of the confused mind fixes our attention on categorizing and simplifying our experience into binaries which become the bars of our solitary cells. Arriving at pure perception involves unwinding all the triggers and layers of fear, the building blocks of relative existence accumulated since birth. We can bust out of the binaries, including, if we are skillful, illuminating what we most fear about ourselves. For me, that innermost fear has been about insufficiency, not being enough. Whether the source was ontogenetic or environmental makes little difference. This fear has driven virtually all that underlies my entire undertaking. 

The clarity we build through this type of practice, generating glimpses of the absolute resulting in incremental behavioral changes, eventually become automatic. It may be called by many names. I call it the Buddhist long game: the transformation of mind. Every such path of inquiry is a journey into the heart of suffering, which is itself a journey into endless opening. As separate or as alienated as we may feel, this is one thing we all share. Ultimately, all practice is directed toward one simple truth: most emotional fears, tenacious as they may be, are in essence illusory. When we examine them closely, we find no substance there. We have our story about them, yet they have no true reality. Which is not to say that fear can merely be dismissed. Not at all. The outcome of inquiry, however, depends a great deal on the method and the context.

Compassion, both situational and pervasive, is closely related to fearlessness. In the first, we express empathy and respond to the suffering of others in a direct way, either emotionally, materially, or both. The pervasive form is an encompassing awareness of the profound common nature of human experience, addressing the suffering and bewilderment at the heart of being human as well as confusion about the difference between what we believe is real and what is wholly true. Holding such a perspective while surrounded by an ocean of fear without being affected by it is nearly unimaginable. Yet fearlessness grows with compassion. And vice versa. They are inseparable. Absolute compassion is entirely incompatible with fear.

In stepping through the gateway of compassion, we step into fearlessness. Compassion cannot fully manifest without knowing all phenomena exist in an expansive state of equality. Actions arising within that state hold all experience in the same positive condition of equality. In this sense, any words such as ‘pure,’ or ‘fearless’ are redundant expressions of a uniform state of clarity and enlightened intent. There is no distinction between what is fearful or not—or, for that matter, what we hope for. We may be able to befriend emotion—including what has been ignored or repressed. There is no distinction between the mundane, the sublime or the threatening. Being present in this state requires enormous devotion. There is no real distinction between enlightened fearlessness and compassionate intent or any other way of being.

In what is called the awakened mind, there is no duality of sensory appearances and what the mind imputes about them. Within enlightenment—awareness without transition or change—the universe of appearance and possibilities—whether samsara or nirvana—arises with nothing to renounce or attain. 

                            --- Longchenpa, Choying Dzöd

Many of our fears are variations on denial—self-imposed disempowerment. They are responses to threats which have become so familiar—and to which the nervous system has become so habituated—that they become comforting costumes layered upon core reality. Over time they assume an increasingly fixed identity, as if abiding fear becomes a way of confirming our most reassuring view of ourselves. But our fears are subject to causes and conditions and therefore can be reviewed through cognitive process. Their reality can be disproven and, with some effort, uprooted. In this sense, we might easily assume fearlessness is a matter of will. But in saying so, we confuse rationality for wisdom (intelligence). Knowing more will never take us to the truth of enlightened fearless intent. Wisdom comes with the practice of inquiring ever more closely and deeply—with bottomless compassion for oneself—into the sources and nature of our fears, whereas rationality can easily become counter-phobia, throwing a cover over those sources and burying them further from sight.

The spontaneous and captivating activity of mind is often described as an untamed mustang. It is attractive, seductive, and wild. Fearlessness recognizes the beauty and spontaneity of that wildness without being seduced by it. The fearless one sustains an unflinching gaze into their own suffering, compromise, self-limiting beliefs, and behaviors—and empowers others to do the same. The fearless one acts with compassionate intent holding fear, hope and separation as having no substance, no traceable origin or destination, no firm ground at all. The fearless ones sustain the consequences of living beyond convention, even if it means putting one’s own safety at risk, not solely to place a spotlight on the entrenched and reactionary nature of the dominant paradigm, but to engage with it, transmitting a highly contagious view of the possible. We are all on the same path and there is no enemy.  The fearless ones affirm there is enough for all, there is unbroken and perpetual relationship with all; there is infinite choice and nothing to do but create.

This is a power by which we glimpse our full nature. It can shake our world, arousing awareness of our own fears and the sway they hold over us. The fearless one even evokes our fear of fearlessness with a gentleness that melts our defenses, exposing our vulnerability and the artifice of our times. The fearless one opens possibility for something new, a vast, spacious, and timeless freedom we know in our hearts is possible, yet which, without the support of others, we are barely strong enough to sustain more than a few moments at a time. Unfolding into fearlessness is to embody compassion, breaking through the familiar into a new territory of freedom--inviting others to do the same.