Architecture of Fear

You have built, without knowing it, an elaborate structure designed to keep you from ever having to feel your deepest fears. This structure runs your life. It determines who you are willing to be, what you are willing to do, who you allow close to you, and what you will never try. It is the architecture of fear.

Here is how it works. You are in some experience of togetherness -- with a partner, in a community, in your own wholeness. But you fear some aspect of what is in that togetherness. Maybe you fear that your partner does not really want you. Maybe you fear that you do not belong. Maybe you fear being seen as stupid or weak. And so your reaction is to build a wall to separate. On one side of the wall is you, together with the things you do not fear. On the other side is the thing you fear. Behind your wall, your fear abates. You can relax.

But no wall is perfect. Eventually you see some new difference even within your smaller, walled-off territory. And the fear arises again, and you build another wall. And another. And another. Your world gets smaller and smaller. You end up inside a fear castle -- moats and walls and battlements -- a curtain wall maintained by the fear of difference. Instead of seeing and embracing difference while remaining together, you destroy the togetherness over and over, trying to see only sameness, because you believe that is the way to deal with fear.

Look at your own life. Maybe you fear that nobody really wants you, deep down. So over a long, long time, you work to create a world in which you do not experience that fear. You constantly worry about whether your partner is really a match, you find reasons the relationship should end, and eventually it does end. Now you do not have to feel the fear of being unwanted by your partner -- because you do not have a partner. You are desperately sad and lonely, but at least you will not have to feel that specific fear anymore. You have created a world in which the thing you fear does not exist.

This happens at every scale. In intimate relationships: we push people away so they cannot reject us. In our careers: we stay small so we cannot fail publicly. In society: politicians help people create worlds where difference does not exist so they will not have to feel their fears. Countries literally build walls. And within our own minds, we build structures just as impenetrable -- scrolling the news endlessly, binge-watching, eating, controlling, avoiding -- all to avoid feeling what is actually going on underneath.

At a deeper level, there are two fundamental forces at work. Loving kindness is the force of union -- it holds difference within togetherness without needing to eliminate it. The force of separation builds walls, condenses boundaries, shrinks your world. This force is not evil -- it is the necessary creative force of manifestation itself. The problem arises when you fear difference. Each fearful repetition thickens the walls. Eventually the wall becomes so thick it is invisible -- you no longer see it as a wall, you see it as just how things are.

The way through is not to tear down the walls with force or to analyze them with your intellect. It is to turn toward rather than away. Through practice -- meditation, speaking your truth, being willing to feel what you have been avoiding -- you begin to notice that the monsters behind your walls are not facts of reality. They are beliefs, written on your glasses rather than on the world. As you keep noticing, they shift from being facts to being beliefs. Then from beliefs to habitual thoughts. Then from habitual thoughts to ephemeral mental objects that arise, hang around for a moment, and dissolve. And through the gaps between them, you begin to see the light that was always there at your core.