A student of the eminent Rollo May, here is my FearTalk with Kirk J. Schneider, exploring topics of interest to how to create a better democracy, and its relationship to dialogue, to fear/anxiety/terror of existence, etc.
rollo may (2)
SO OFTEN, when I mention the word "fearlessnessness" to anyone, and I suspect when they read my writing on it as well or hear my youtube videos, there is an instant pre-constructed conditioning in people in general that I come up 'against' as if it is a wall to mis-comprehension.
What I am saying is that people tend to predominantly preconceive what "fearlessness" is about. They turn the encounter into a mere psychological phenonmenon. Fearlessness to them is something about no fear or without fear. They are ambivalent usually as well, about if that is a good or bad thing. To have people going around being 'fearless' is not always good, and in fact it may be pathological. Even if people don't say these things out loud to me, I read it and sense it and I also know the history of the discourses of bias in the Western world (where I live). But this is not what my FM blog is about today.
I have given you an "image" I made from an art and healing visit to my parents grave. I've been there a few times this past week. The short of the longer story is, that everything I have learned about the "path of fearlessness" and/or "search for fearlessness" since I headed down this road less traveled in 1989, is that people (souls) are just not going to go very far in their 'freedom' to develop and mature--to reach into the zone of Fearlessness and access the Fearlessness Paradigm (i.e., FMS-7 +)... because they are too attached to their "family" dynamics as part of their conditioning within socialization and education processes. "Too attached" of course would now require a much more nuanced discussion than what I can provide here.
I wanted to just indicate how my artist-self and my healing-self, if you will, are so much part of my ongoing fearwork and travel along the path of fearlessness. So, to go to this grave site, which I rarely have since my parents passed away... is an issue not about how many times I go, but what quality of encounter I enter into when I go and spend time in the place where they are buried. Doing art and ritual at the site on this occasion (see image of stone-rubbing above) was potent. I recently made a youtube teaching video on this experience going to many places geographically where I grew up in the city I live in now, because I felt I needed to do some healing and separation work from past unhealed memories. Some would say I am doing "forgiveness" work and "grief work" etc. Partially true, but I am doing so much more. I talk about that in the video.
I'll leave you to linger perhaps with the image, and the process as you can imagine it of what I am confronting and integrating in this "death work" -- for that was a good deal of what I was absorbing for the three times I was in the cemetary and lingering and being amongst the 'dead'--all as part of death prompts (e.g., see Terror Management Theory). I was making myself experience the juxtapositioning of death/life and mortality/immortality. And, at this point, there's so much in my journaling and conversations with Barbara I have had around this work of art and the process. These are still incubating, so all I am doing here is writing a little about my processing work and how I encourage people to utilize the "arts" or what is better called the "artist's attitude" when involved in this kind of work and as involved with travel along the path of fearlessness. Truly, without an "artist's attitude" (which came to me early in life as a child/teen) the breakthroughs that I have made in philosophy, theorizing and education around the concept of "fearlessness" would likely not have been near as original and fresh as they are--at least, for the most part. To be a good critical philosopher or therapist or teacher etc., just like to be a good deep learner, requires this artistic sensibility and aesthetic development. And, with all that it requires a "separation" from family and social conditioning. Once one has really separated (if not "divorced") the social-self embeddness in the 'Fear' Matrix, then I have seen truly people transform, not just shift the furniture around in their house over and over. Most people cannot 'stomach' true separation from the social-family matrix (of the 'Fear' projection)... as the way... they cannot face into that "death" fully, as they cannot face into their parent's death fully. But, I won't go there...
I'm open to discussing this more if anyone asks me, so make Comments here if you like.
I'll close with the ARTIST'S ATTITUDE notion with an old quote from Thomas Mann in Rollo May's book in 1985:
[Mann wrote] "The new humanity will be universal, and it will have the artist's attitude; that is, it will recognize that the immense value of beauty of the human being lies precisely in the fact that [s]he belongs to the two kingdoms of nature and the spirit."
And to William Blake, along this same line:
"Not to be an artist is to betray one's own nature." (cited in Matthew Fox, 1979)
---
References
May, R. (1985). My quest for beauty. Saybrook Institute.
Fox, M. (1979). A spirituality named compassion and the healing of the global village, Humpty Dumpty and us. Winston Press.
--------
NOTE: in title of this blog I surprised myself by writing "artist in search for fearlessness" -- usually I write "in search of fearlessness" -- and, with even a brief reflection, I think this slight shift is really something worth considering. I rather prefer the claim of "in search for fearlessness" at this point of my journey. Your thoughts?
