Fear & Desire
As of late, I’m on a journey that I don’t understand. It appears as if I am healing early, early wounds – when my power was taken from me through fear and intimidation. In those early days my sensitivity picked up on the unconscious world around me, and was terrified that the ship was sinking. Safety meant disconnecting, and doing whatever it took to please the giants. I took on the mantra, “I can not fail . . . or I will not survive.”
Fast forward to adulthood and I’m on a team of 16 players from the Brookside men’s golf club playing against another team. I’m feeling disconnected and not knowing why. The feeling as I putt is, “I cannot fail, or I will not survive.” The old scenario has reappeared in different clothing. The result was of course failure for 9 holes. No one can putt or succeed under the conditions that they have no room for failure. Once my singles match was lost I was free to work with my partner in the team match. Suddenly I was reconnected and sinking all the big putts . . . fear was gone and I was putting to make the putt rather than not to fail.
We had a week before our next matches and I had some time to reflect on the early childhood fear that had been projected onto the present. I did some grieving, sat with it, got real clear on the fact that nothing I do on the green today can change anything that happened back on Cambridge Ave. in Phoenix, Arizona where I grew up.
The next week I went out and to my surprise there was no censor inside my head or body telling me to be tentative. There were no conditions, no result that could be achieved other than just putting the ball into the hole and enjoying that moment for what it was. And of course the putts were falling, I felt completely fearless.
The question for me lately has been, How can I do this more in my life? The sensation of being free of those early childhood binds was like being let into Disneyland for the first time. And I’m not sure if I can even take credit for the healing. It was like something had been “lifted” from me. Sure, my availability to making the connections helped, but I’ve been trying to shake this monkey for a long, long time.
Here are a couple thoughts from Joseph Campbell (from The Power of Myth) on ego transcending and its place in the spiritual quest.
“For to experience this sense of compassion, accord, or even identity with another, or with some ego-transcending principle that has become lodged in your mind as a good to be revered and served, is the beginning once and for all, of the properly religious way of life and experience; and this may then lead to a life-consuming quest for a full experience of that one Being of beings of which all temporal forms are the reflections.”
“When life comes into being, it is neither afraid nor desiring, it is just becoming. Then it gets into being, and it begins to be afraid and desiring. When you can get rid of fear and desire and just get back to where you’re becoming, you’ve hit the spot.”
