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My first recorded FearTalk #1 (2018), with Four Arrows (Wahinkpe Topa, aka Dr. Don T. Jacobs) was the first opportunity to talk with an Indigenous-based scholar and activist-educator about the topic of fear and fearlessness. We got into talking about "aesthetics of fear" as perhaps a better alternative (more Indigenous) way to understand fear. Take a listen to this spontaneous dialogue. 

My second recorded FearTalk #12 (2021) with Four Arrows. In this talk we both again arrive back and remember "Indigenizing & Fearlessnessizing" --independently, and collectively, as a fundamental way to carry forward education for all in the 21st century. There is no other educator who is open and so progressive to want to address this topic with me, and excitingly we are going to do our 3rd FearTalk on this in the next few days, so stay tuned. 

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Note: for those who want to read up on Indigenizing and Fearlessnessizing by Four Arrows and myself, brought specifically into dialogue and critique with the field of Critical Pedagogy, go to: 

Four Arrows & Fisher, R. M. (2020). Section V Indigenous ways of knowing. In S. R. Steinberg & B. Down (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of critical pedagogies Vol. 2 (pp.547-49). SAGE. 

Fisher, R. M., & Four Arrows (2020). Indigenizing conscientization and critical pedagogy: Integrating Nature, Spirit and Fearlessness as foundational concepts. In S. R. Steinberg & B. Down (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of critical pedagogies Vol. 2 (pp.551-60). SAGE. 

As some of you may know, and others not, I have been studying systematically the essence of reality, and Truth, Beauty and Goodness since my early twenties. I pursued much of that way of knowledge as a "naturalist" and "life scientist" and Darwinian evolutionist--but my curiosity always led me into other fields beyond biology and natural history and then into the interior depths of psychology and philosophy, mythology, spirituality, arts/aesthetics and so on. At age 71, I can reflect on these travels I have made into Knowledge, Knowing and Understanding. I am an integrator of 'big synthesis' patterns within patterns and connections within connections... 

Okay, there's my brief bio, rather informally of why I become a "fearologist" eventually, as to be then equally interested in "fearlessness." The Fearlessness Movement is one of the terms I have coined along this journey of journeys to invent and discover 'better' ways to live on this planet. This beautiful earthly existences of course is also filled with suffering and construction and destruction are part of our everyday experience. I am well aware not I, nor ideology, nor ideals and wishes can change the fact that 'I' am not in control, nor is anyone else nor is our social structures and cultures. Therefore, with all these things in mind as backdrop to the play... Let me very briefly introduce you to my Big Four Inventions (again, they are really discoveries, uncoveries, models, theories, practices, ethics)--all part of my growing and developing a generative and healthy philosophy of LIFE. 

Note: The below summaries are only bare minimum sketches (I have included some resource links to my work that goes into them more deeply)

These are somewhat linear and historically accurate in their 'evolving' to the surface as expressions (findings)--yet, I am well aware that my inner creative and emergent thought around these four inventions are highly interconnected and no one comes before the other). 

INVENTION ONE (1982-3): Uni-Bicentric Theorem

Although I did not know what to call this theorem (which was a drawing at first), in the early stages, it was a mock-up image of FLOW in the universe (or, more accurately, the Earthly world experiential and theoretical relationship to the Universe). I was in a sense ready and searching for a big pattern to 'map out' and display of how things flow in an order of things, you could say. That the universe, and our experience as humans (and all living things, perhaps even non-living things) does operate in a pattern, not chaos in any total or random sense, but there 'is order' to what is going on. My entire eco-biological and natural history observing and study prior to 1982 was steeped in this admiration for 'design' in Nature--and yes, for 'intelligence' in Nature. I loved that with passion, and found it beautiful, true and good, in some sense. But it was only in this 1982-3 period when I first discovered the philosophy of Ken Wilber. I did not know anything about him and his work at the time. I discovered one book, and I saw a diagram in it of the Flow of the Universe (from an interior perspective of consciousness). Wilber is primarily a Zen (and beyond that) consciousness theorist and practitioner and had published many works since 1972. And, it was seeing this one diagram he had in the book that made me study it and modify it over several years, but ultimately it came back to the same place. I was also influenced by the philosophy of the 'seer' Rudolf Steiner and Carl Jung (to name a few) prior to 1982, and "pattern" as "form" and deep within the invisible interior of consciousness and evolution, this was really interesting to me. I am always looking at "form" of things not just content on the surface. The diagram I stuck with was a great 'story' of how LIFE and HUMAN existence (in particular) goes through patterns, some healthy, some pathological. 

The basic resource (form) of this is articulated on the FM ning (and other places, e.g.):  https://fearlessnessmovement.ning.com/blog/reconfigurations-of-the-love-fear-problem

As you can see, I was later to add "Love vs. Fear" problem to the original diagram of the Flow. 

 INVENTION TWO (1984): Thought Experiment A-ness/D-ness

After massive study of many fields of knowledge, and a deeply engrained and instinctual attraction to aesthetics/arts and making, I came finally to a way to depict a lot of the intellectual and philosophical and value problems I saw that were 'killing us' here on this planet. It was the year 1984 per se, as I recall, when I was attracted to put my artistic skills together with a method of "philosophical" work, more specifically often referred to as a "thought experiment." I was thinking in meta-patterns (meta-cognitively), and attempting to understand general ways of creation-making (i.e., of solving problems, of creating solutions): "How would God (a Creator) go about creation object x?" The most simply object x (standing for literally anything), would be simplified in this thought experiment to something I could draw and color with simple art materials (e.g., colored pencil and paper--later, I added black felt pen and ruler). I won't go into the long description and subtelty here of what all transpired but I basically was able to arrive at only four (paradigmatic) distinctly different ways of coloring and drawing a rectangular shape (i.e., object x). I have displayed this as a model called A-ness/D-ness (visual metaphoric assessment tool) in many publications and talks over the years. You can search the FM ning site in the upper right corner search box "A-ness/D-ness" or just "A-ness" or "D-ness" alone and it should bring up some more information for you to get a better flavor of this first of my discovery/inventions--and, in many ways, I think it is my best one overall in my career as a thinker/designer/inventor/educator. You of course, may or may not find this so interesting. It has never been to me without a great curiosity of all that it can teach us humans. 

Some links to more on A-ness/D-ness (e.g.):  https://fearlessnessmovement.ning.com/blog/fearless-intimacy-an-aesthetic-assessment-tool

 INVENTION THREE (1990s-2000s): Love-Fearlessness-Fear Trialectic

This is an invention hard to pin down to an exact date of appearance but it was most importantly post-ISOF. I mean after the arising spontaneously of my co-visionary experience with Catherine in late 1989. We birthed the In Search of Fearlessness Project (ISOF). It was to be a counter movement to undermine the Fear Project (as I called it then) and to offer new vision for a better way to live e.g., "path of fearlessness." That's a long story to be found elsewhere for those who search for it. The more refined theory that came (again, a model of meta-patterning of the way Life works)--came as a trialectic model of Love vs. Fear as the problem I was trying to solve. It's a long time problem in the wisdom traditons not unsimilar to the Good vs. Evil problem on this planet. Anyways, the short of this invention came by using the Uni-Bicentric "form" (see Invention One) and combining it and creating a simplified relationship between Love, Fearlessness, Fear --as dialectical and trialectical as a dynamic of growth and development (of movements in life forms)--and, underlying this was to assert that the "path of fearlessness" is extremely important to understand if we want to shift the world from a world dominated by and toxified by fear-based living with love-based living. Again, this is an ethical project and fearlessness was the key, I thought to solving the binary division of Love vs. Fear. 

Some links to more on this trialectic (e.g.): https://fearlessnessmovement.ning.com/blog/fisher-s-four-paradigms-human-condition

 INVENTION FOUR (2000's onward): FEARANALYSIS

Fearanalysis is probably my most basic invention, and it is a take-off variant of psychoanalysis. Fearanalysis is my unique way of studying fear(ology)(ism). I have been since late 1989 and co-founding In Search of Fearlessness Project (another fifth invention really), and a Research Institute by that same name, always looking to develop a new and needed (critical) methodology to study fear (and fearlessness). Every other discipline and approach to studying fear that I had found in the literature, was inadequate to my mind. This is still so to this day. So, I'll call it fearanalysis as my fourth big invention, with a closely related term feariatry (see below). 

Some links to more on this (e.g.,): https://fearlessnessmovement.ning.com/blog/fearanalysis-2-wilber-s-induction-to-terror-management-theory

https://fearlessnessmovement.ning.com/photos/feariatry-and-tmt

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I am pleased to announce today is the release of our new book "Art-Care Practices for Restoring the Communal"

Barbara (my life-partner) and I have undertaken a study of how people responded to COVID-19 "lock down" experience for a year; our main methodology was the use of Spontaneous Creation Making (SCM) as an arts-based and aesthetic practice, of which we have used since the late 1980s and it has been called a "fear vaccine". We've created this book for people to understand how art and ritual and community-building are all part of how one builds a resilient self/other relationship, especially arts are well-suited to this when under duress and extreme fearful and terrifying conditons (e.g., the trauma of COVID-19 lock down in 2020-21). 

Please share this post and help this book get out there in the world. It documents the process, the impacts of online teaching and nourishing a group as well as it offers a guide of how to do this process of SCM in your own relationships and communities and groups--any time. 

"The Uses of Beauty and Order" (a 13 pp booklet) by the founder of Re-evaluation Counseling (Harvey Jackins) came out in 1972 and talks of the "environmental crisis" facing human beings and that we are responsible to "clean up" [1] our messes... meaning, not only the physical 'garbage' we 'dump' but on the inside 'distress' ('garbage') we also hold inside our body/mind and social systems and institutions that function upon philosophical premises of oppression is 'normal' and that's the way it is. That's human nature for us to be violence, and dumping on each other, etc. Jackin's, peer-to-peer theory and praxis is a marvelous tool that I have used since the early 1980s, and am still using it as a way to not let my distress accumulate (as 'fear' patterning) in any ways, and mostly in ways that stop me from being a fully alive, creative being who is interested in beauty and order in the environment (inside and outside). That's why in this publication Jackin's argues: 

"With discharge [via peer counseling sessions] we can begin not only to realize but to act on the truth that every human being is gifted artistically, in the visual arts and in all others. In the meantime, it is perfectly possible to take a length of wire and bend it into an interesting shape, then mount this piece of wire sculpture in a prominent position. It's possible to take some torn pieces of tinted or colored paper and move them about on a sheet of cardboard until the arrangement pleases the arranger, glue them in place and, with such an 'abstract collage' mounted on the wall, be continually reminded of one's own ability to create beauty. A poem or verse which one has composed belongs in plain sight to be read and looked at. This will be another signal that one is a creative human being in charge of the environment [as a steward, and co-maker, co-participant in evolution itself]." (p. 12)

I recently am working on an art project with stones (a 1/2 dump truck load of them) which most people use only to "decorate" their landscapes and keep down weeds and grass from growing (as a suppressant). I am working with the stones in an artist residency right now to make them interesting, beautiful and even sacred... I just am learning how to do that with children at the daycare center and kindergarten school where I am artist in residence, and of course, then there is the difficult challenge to get the staff and parents and other adults around the children to 'attune' and 'resonate' with the words and direction of Jackin's (above)--and to playfull engage as part of their day in making art, and connecting with the art of the stones I am working on their premise. Mostly, the adults are quite in a "rut" from what I can see, and they can hardly gaze to the environment around them. Often they are on cell phones when they leave their car and walk to work, and often they have a preoccupied (if not worrying) mind about what they are doing and what is happening and how this or that is going to coordinate. They are managing their lives. This management paradigm is quite working in the opposite direction of a creative-artistic-aethetic paradigm.

As a fearologist and artist, what I am interested in is the role of fear/anxiety and how it shapes one's creativity, aliveness, and everything else in the environments we make, the relationship we engage in any moment in time. Too often, most all people are living lives feeling a "victim" (prisoner) of some kind, and often they are not aware they feel this but are just on 'autopilot' doing things that are functional and help to manage their day. Jackins' experience is that human beings who have been hurt and not fully allowed to heal their hurts from birth onward, are carrying distress-based (fear-based) patterning in their nervous system and memory systems, and when that accumulates there is a sense after awhile of feeling like the environment is "hostile" (more or less) and one has to try to survive within it--but for Jackins, like myself, the hostile perception (as a fear projection and defense mechanism) can become quite distorted and totalizing of one's inherent being and destroys the best part of our human nature. This is, says Jackins, due to "past fears of isolated groups of human beings in danger from weather, disease or other hostile forces" but his point is, that within a healing culture (practices) such dangers/fears can be healed through adequately so that humans do not carry around trauma (unhealed painful memories) for any length of time beyond what is necessary. The past thus, when unhealed, turns to dominate our nervous systems and thinking patterns, we 'become our distress' (i.e., our fear patterning). We feel victimized. We then justify our behaviors that come from fear-based (distress-based) sourcing. We even justify that it is okay we oppress others and accept our social oppression because that's the way it is--the world is hostile, etc. 

Fearlessness as a paradigm is quite in the opposite direction of this fear-based paradigm of victimization and oppressive patterning. Thus uses of beauty and order making (healthy creativity to enhance one's world individually and collectively) is a way to stay in "present time" reality (says Jackins), and that leads to a greater humanity and care for everything to follow from that. Arts and aesthetics, are critical to good fear management/education. 

Your thoughts? 

Notes

1. To be clear, I use "clean up" in this context within a sophisticated therapeutic philosophia (or therapia) based on many traditions but in particular I most recommend the theorizing of integral philosopher Ken Wilber on "Cleaning Up" as one of four calls to come to full consciousness and attention in the best way humans are potentially able--and, such a mode of "cleaning up" is not just some psychological clinical, homogenizing, white-washing, or purification schema of a germophobia, xenophobia, paranoia about Nature--no, I and Wilber are talking about something very different and you may wish to read his writing on "Cleaning Up" in this larger transpersonal and evolutionary perspective; see Wilber (2017), pp. 11, 75, 264-66, for e.g. (also see his writing on the analogous process of "shadow work"). Wilber, K. (2017). The religion of tomorrow: A vision for the future of the Great Traditions--more inclusive, more comprehensive, more complete. Shambhala. 

The above logo (I created) is Barbara and my new collaboration as artists-researchers-teachers, as we have just moved back to Canada and settled in Calgary, Alberta. Studio M* is a place and space for us to co-create with the Calgary Community (in particular the Beltline Neighborhoods downtown), and beyond that with anyone in the world who wishes to be in collaboration with us and wants to utilize Studio M*. Barbara has posted an initial blog ("Barbara Bickel tumblr") on this project, and the location of McHugh House (120 yrs. old) where our studio 6 space is--which I encourage you to have a look at some of the earliest stages of our creating and imagining. We're very excited about the possibilities... 

As for why this is important to the Fearlessness Movement per se, I would encourage you to read the Studio M* Manifesto (version/exhibit #1.0), I have reprinted the Manifesto below (notice the particular reference to "without fear")... So, if you are interested to be a signatory of this Manifesto contact us r.michaelfisher52 [at] gmail.com and if you are traveling and want to drop by the studio to see what is going on, and if wish to join our Studio M* envisioning processes, then WE INVITE YOU to participate and help build a synergy that can make a positive difference. We look forward to hearing from you. If you are interested in doing some kind of creative/artistic Residency with us, give us an email: r.michaelfisher52 [at] gmail.com and we can talk about potentials for you using Studio M* ... that is, if you find our Manifesto in some way resonates with you and your work in the world... 

Studio M* : Manifesto    Exhibit #1.0 (Aug.-Sept., 2017)

         WE are a research creation lab intersecting Arts, Culture & Healing

• WE are committed to an inclusive & expansive curatorial practice that stems from the Latin root curare- “to take care”
• EVERYTHING is encountering others, human & more-than-human, a tableau of unique creative collaborations
• WE commit to a Matrixial co-poetic paradigm of Artworkings in radical trust
• WE practice a co-relational Aesthetic as foundational and preceding the Ethical, while both ought to inform the shape of the Political
• WE live with the premise that EVERYTHING began without fear... imagine that!
• SPONTANEITY is the life-blood-water of play, humour, sociality, sustainability, health & ecological sanity

Signatories:

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*M stands for “Matrixial” theory based on Bracha L. Ettinger’s art & philosophy. See, for e.g., her book The Matrixial Borderspaces published in 2005 by University of Minnesota Press. Or a good video of Ettinger with art historian Griselda Pollock, go to "Istanbul in/+ Leeds Event 3: Making with Bracha Ettinger": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqwWIr3WjxU

Studio M* is a restorative and transformational learning, teaching, and creative inquiry space for all. Co-conceived by artists-researchers-teachers Drs. Barbara Bickel and R. Michael Fisher. 

Still image of myself in the video: "Fusion Coloring" (2017). Video by Greg Wendt

I have always been interested in various lines of development in the human potential. The cognitive line, the moral line, the self line, fearlessness line, and particularly the aesthetic line. For how our development takes place along these various lines, as developmental psychologists call them, one can relate how one perceives fear and fearlessness, and thus, how one is capable to manage and/or transform fear and enhance fearlessness. That's a hypothesis of interest that requires research.

For myself, I have utilized aesthetic practices of various kinds, often related to the arts in some way, and I still practice this. The following 16 min. video is one of my first teaching videos that just begins to explore this relationship and how you can develop your aesthetic line... and assist the movement toward fearlessness... hope you enjoy this video, and feel free to pass it on, and send me comments. https://vimeo.com/220708479

As much as it is so important to acknowledge the nature and role of "fear" (complex as it is do define) in human affairs (e.g., philosophy of fearism) there is an equally important inquiry and education to be had in regard to how "fear" is not the only motivating, or even most powerful motivating force in human affairs. The basic philosophical and theoretical arguments are rich and complex, beyond the scope of this blog. However, I want to point out that if you wish to understand my own thinking on this topic then you really have to engage the feminine (feminist) matrixial gaze theory (i.e., matrixial theory) of Bracha L. Ettinger. She is a post-Lacanian psychoanalyst, theorist, artist, activist, and most importantly, as I have written about her and her work (often with Barbara Bickel), she is the next most powerful psychoanalytic thinker since Lacan, and before that, since Freud. And, the good news... she is working on an entirely new basis for the theories of human motivation, subjectivity (or what she prefers to call transubjectivity).

Barbara and I and a small group of artists Barbara knows have studied Ettinger's difficult texts some years ago. After that year long study online, it has been awhile and so Barbara and I took up recently to study her videos online for 40 days, attempting this as a practice. We'll be sharing and writing more on that later. But just to introduce you, if you haven't already been introduced to Ettinger and matrixial theory (a non-phallocentric theory) then I will give a link to an excellent lecture on YouTube below. To close off this short blog I want to say that I am ever-ongoing impressed by the depth and "truth" from her work in understanding human beings, and her aesthetical-ethical foundation for guiding a new way of being beyond a fear-based orientation to the world. Her linking of early-mother and child bonding (mostly, in the womb) is brilliant psychoanalysis in my view, and she is slowly being recognized in the field and beyond as an important theorist. At one point in the video (below) she says, that it is our nature in connection in the matrixial borderspace of the I and non-I (self and Other) that from the beginning we were unknowingly embraced in "fascination and awe and compassion" which is our natural state of recognition of the Other and which is the protoethical ground for any ethics, and she adds to this claim that such an awe and compassion in the earliest stages of subjectivity (largely unconscious) is a connection/recognition/co-emergence "before fear, guilt, shame, action, cognition, abjection and disgust." This is the primordial matrixial ground for a theory of fearlessness, in my words.

Go to YouTube video on Ettinger's lecture in 2010 at the European Graduate University, where she often teaches: "Aesthetics, Protoethics and Matrixial Subjectivity."

Just watched the "Elegant Universe" PBS series on a DVD with Barbara. We get DVDs from the SIU library for free, and often pick up science documentaries like this one on the new physics of "string theory" as a potential "theory of everything" to explain the entire universe, with nothing excluded from such an explanation in one unified theory... well, when I was watching it, much of the aesthetics of the string theory representations in a way reminded me of the more "solid" universe in the drawing I did spontaneously a week ago and then the less "solid" with the black lines on top -- looking a lot like "strings" as the new physicists were describing. Is this just an "accident"? Well not that I care that much if I was attuning to strings in the sense of physics, I was exploring in these spontaneous colorings aesthetics more than anything... and it is not surprising to me that "elegance" (a notion of beauty) is a term physicists use when in this aesthetic modulation/register... so, I wrote some notes on this "art" piece to complete it based on my experience of the documentary. Yes, point being, I am so much dedicated like these physicists to "discovering" something not before discovered... I can't seem to help it...