fear

The Faces of Humanity:  How We’re All Made Up of Different Versions of the Same Person

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Live Without Your Mask

There’s a (pretty) famous Japanese proverb that talks about how we all have 3 faces.  It goes like this:

“The first face, you show to the world. The second face, you show to your close friends, and your family. The third face, you never show anyone.”

I think it’s true, but – actually – we can take it a little deeper by exploring how there are more than three faces that the average person ‘has’ and also where they  come from and why.

Perhaps even more importantly than raising our AWARENESS of this ‘stuff’, we can also ask ourselves what we need to ACCEPT, in the face of these faces, as well as what ACTION we can take to improve our lives and grow more real accordingly.

(Awareness -> Acceptance -> Action – it works every time: see ‘Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World’ if you wanna apply this to your life as a whole).

If you read this article, it will help you to make sense of the MECHANICS of your relationships with yourself and the world and to start unblocking yourself and moving forward towards the only thing that really matters: an experience of WHOLENESS (or ‘connection’) to yourself, the world, and reality.

The ‘problem’ with all of these faces we each have is that we either think they don’t ‘exist’ or we think that only one of them ‘exists’ and try to ignore other parts of ourselves.

Actually, it’s completely normal and healthy to have multiple versions of ourselves in different contexts and situations because different contexts and situations allow us to express certain REAL qualities about ourselves that we might not otherwise be able to express.

Everything real about us is always within us – sometimes, it just needs a little bit of help to express itself.

The ‘FACES’ we show the world aren’t necessarily the same as masks (which mean that we’re ‘hiding’) – although, of course, they sometimes can be if we have an unreal relationship with our own emotional ‘stuff’ (shame, guilt, and trauma in the shadow or fear, pride, and desire of the ego, etc.).

All of us are FLUID because reality is in FLUX – sometimes, we just forget that and this can cause confusion if we think that we’re supposed to be ‘static’ (which is just UNREAL).

These are the most common faces of the ‘average’ human being (if such a thing exists). As usual, they fit into the only three levels that anything can fit into: The Self, the World, and Reality.

How many do you recognise in yourself?

Self-Facing Faces

At the level of our relationship with our ‘Self’ we have four faces (at least). Whatever it is that we really are is what EMERGES in the interplay between the four of them.

 

Face 1: Who You Wanna Be (To Yourself)

The first face we all have is the ‘Future Facing Face’ (or whatever you wanna call it). This is basically the face we carry of the person we want to BECOME.

This is comprised of all kinds of things that are related to the desired future we have for ourselves and we have to constantly SHOW ourselves this face in order to remind ourselves of where we want or even INTEND to be going.

It is comprised of things like:

-Our standards

-Our goals

-Our ambitions

-Our vision

-Etc.

Some people show themselves this face more than others and – indeed – you have to keep showing yourself this face in order to BECOME this face.

The reason that a lot of people become stuck or stagnate in life is because they haven’t cultivated this ‘face’ and given themselves a direction to move in.

That’s when other less ‘positive’ (or – at least – future facing faces) faces tend to get a hold of them and weigh their sense of identity down in an unreal direction.

The only ‘problem’ with this ‘Future Facing Face’ is that if we have an unhealthy relationship with our own emotional ‘stuff’ (shame, guilt, and trauma etc.) then the future becomes a projection of our EGO, rather than anything REAL (because we are creating goals and a vision of ourselves based on the fundamental assumptions of denying who we really are as a way of avoiding facing our shadow ‘stuff’ etc.)

Face 2: Who You Think You Are Now (To Yourself)

The second ‘face’ that most of us have is the face of who we think we are NOW (i.e. in current reality). The keyword there is ‘think’ because it’s a product of our thoughts and mindset, not who we necessarily are in TRUTH.

Some of our thoughts might be ‘real’ or accurate (i.e. aligned with actual, valid truth) but often they aren’t because we get caught up in our INTERPRETATIONS of life, rather than life itself.

Anyway, this is the ‘Now Face’ and it’s a product of all of our self-assessments and conclusions about ourselves based on where we’ve been, where we think we’re going (based on the Future Facing Face), and the ways in which we JUDGE ourselves in the present to varying degrees of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (which is what all judgements deal with).

It’s ultimately, a product of the STORY we tell ourselves about who we happen to be right now.

The interesting thing (imo) – and the thing that makes the biggest difference to the quality of our lives – is not necessarily the STORY itself, but the WAY IN WHICH WE TELL THIS STORY.

If we tell the story in a way that is fixed as a FINAL DRAFT then we will stop ourselves moving and take ourselves out of reality (and be less likely to show ourselves a real Future Facing Face because we have conditioned ourselves to be PASSIVE).

If we tell ourselves the story in way where it is constantly being written and updated then we will be more likely to keep learning and move into real life (whatever that is in the context of our own lives).

Face 3: Who You Fear You Might Be

The third face is the ‘Fear Face’ – this is the face of who you FEAR you might be. This is usually shown to us when our emotional ‘stuff’ gets a hold of us and distorts our view of ourselves by our SHAME, GUILT, or TRAUMA (or a combination of the three).

When shame distorts our vision of yourself, it will affect your view of both your ‘Future Facing Face’ and your ‘Now Face’ because it will take unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ from the PAST and cause you to stop trusting and believing in yourself (so these three faces are ultimately about the Future, the Present, and the Past and your real or unreal relationship with each).

This SHAME will tell you that you aren’t the type of person to be able to get the future that you want.

It will tell you that who you are right NOW is no good.

This is just your FEAR talking and the unresolved emotions you carry within yourself that make you feel like you’re not good enough. The FEAR FACE is the one that you show yourself when you start to believe that this shame is the truth about you (because you haven’t started to DISSOLVE the shame by facing REALITY and have instead become driven by it).

It’s the same with GUILT and TRAUMA:

When guilt distorts your vision, you convince yourself that you’re a ‘bad’ person in the present and that you ‘don’t deserve’ the future that you want. This is just your emotional ‘stuff’ showing you your FEAR FACE.

Trauma – which makes us feel powerless – will  distort your ability to tap into your own power and will make you feel that you can’t CREATE the real future that your (real) ‘Future Facing Face’ wants to you to move towards (because it will distort your view and tell you that you’re passive).

There is more variation and complexity here but  – ultimately – you have a face you show yourself in your weaker moments that is purely comprised of your FEARS about yourself.

This is ‘normal’ and part of the human experience but the more overpowering your emotions are the more you will show yourself this face and start to believe that it’s who ‘you’ really are.

If you listen enough and believe it, that’s when you stop moving and stop growing REAL and hide behind ego instead (which is just a mental box you put yourself in to keep all your emotions and ‘shadow’ stuff at bay).

Face 4: Your Shadow Face / The Unknown

Beneath the surface of all of the faces we do show ourselves from time to time, there is another UNKNOWN FACE that bubbles away beneath the conscious experience of ourselves and that drives the course of our lives without us even knowing (not consciously at least).

This is our SHADOW FACE and it’s comprised of all the different things about ourselves (qualities, goals, ideas, ‘parts’, etc.) that we have at some stage in our lives cast aside and disowned as being ‘unacceptable’.

This usually happens because the World CONDITIONED us to believe that certain things shouldn’t exist and then we hypnotised ourselves to live as though they don’t – this being the case, over the course of our lives we try and act like these things don’t exist or suppress them (with socially unacceptable emotions like ‘rage’, for example).

The TRUTH of the matter, however, is that these ‘hidden’ parts of ourselves are just as REAL as the parts that we do face and – as what’s real is always real – these parts never go anywhere.

In fact, they’re not even ‘parts’, they’re just certain EXPRESSIONS of what we are as a WHOLE. We just conditioned ourselves not to EXPRESS them.

Even though we try and hide this ‘Unknown Face’ from ourselves, the ‘parts’ that comprise it never go anywhere and continue to call for our attention (so we can integrate them) from beneath the surface of ourselves.

One of the most common ways that these parts ‘call out’ to us is through PROJECTION.

All that means – at the simplest level – is that we try and hide these parts behind the CONSCIOUS FACES we show ourselves but UNCONSCIOUSLY we project them onto the world outside of us.

A classic way of determining this kind of thing is to look at what annoys us in other people.  For example, if somebody’s RAGE annoys you – it’s probably because you haven’t ACCEPTED your own rage that’s bubbling beneath the surface of your conscious faces.

What this means in the context of this article is that we all have a FOURTH FACE: the Shadow Face that is shown to us as a reflection of ourselves in the world or as a projection reflected back from others (if we can decode the matrix).

Facing this ‘Unknown’ face is the best chance we have at growing more WHOLE (instead of just being fragmented by only facing the fragmented, surface level faces created as a response to keep the shadow ‘stuff’ at bay).

World-Facing Faces

There are two main types of World-Facing Faces that we show the world (and which are affected by our relationships with ourselves and our ‘Self-Facing Faces’):

Face 1: The Character You Play In MOST Social Situations To Survive Them (Who You Show To Strangers/People You Just Met or Want to Keep at A Distance).

The first face that we have for the WORLD is the default face that we want to show other people. This is influenced by all of the SELF-FACING FACES and how we ‘feel’ about ourselves but it’s also inspired by two other things:

  1. How we need others to see us (because of our emotional ‘stuff’).
  2. How we have LEARNED to survive social situations in the past

This ‘DEFAULT’ FACE is just the one that we use to make sure we can get through life on a daily basis and to interact with people we might come across like strangers we have to talk to (people that work in coffee shops, taxi drivers, people we meet for the first time at networking events, etc. etc.).

We will try and COME ACROSS in a certain light in order to reinforce the stories we tell ourselves because of our Self-Facing Faces and the ‘Shadow Stuff’ we want to keep at bay but we will also put on a strategic way of being based on how we survived social situations in the past.

This might involve using strategies like ‘being polite’ or maybe even something like trying to be ‘humorous’ and making jokes. Whatever strategy you use, it’s ultimately about gaining CONTROL of the interaction so that you show the face you want to show.

Everybody does the same thing and it’s something we have to do to keep ‘society’ going.  Depending on how REAL you are with yourself will affect how much of your real self can shine through(the most whole version of yourself possible in a given moment).

Even if you’re relatively REAL, there will still be a slight warming up period around new people whilst you figure them out – whatever strategy you use to ‘warm up’ is just your DEFAULT FACE for the world. It’s not ‘You’ – it’s something that you CHOSE based on your conditioning and expectations of yourself and others.

Face 2: The Face You Show The World In Different Partnerships or Groups (E.G. Might Be Different Among Friends That Parents).

This is where things get (more) complicated.  There are multiple versions of this face which is the face that you show different PARTNERSHIPS or GROUPS that you’re involved in based on your own relationship with yourself (and your ‘Self-Facing Faces’) and the EXPECTATIONS that whatever group you’re in has for you (and what you think about these expectations and whether or not you care about modifying the way you come across because of them).

Here are some simple examples of your CONTEXTUAL FACES:

You might have a face that you show your parents that you wouldn’t show your friends.

You might have a face that you show your friends that you wouldn’t show your parents.

You might have a face that you show your boss that you wouldn’t show your wife/husband.

You might have a face that you show your wife/husband that you wouldn’t show your friends.

You might have a face that you show yourself (one of your Self-Facing Faces) that you wouldn’t show any of these people (not a group, just here to demonstrate the point).

The short-version of all this is that each one of these partnerships or groups forms a new SYSTEM and you need different faces to SURVIVE them because of the roles you’re asked to play and the EXPECTATIONS that come with that role.

You can still be REAL in each of these context but how much realness is able to creep out depends on the DEPTH OF INTIMACY in each of these relationships and whether or not you’re allowing expectations to be more main motivation or realness.

The number of these CONTEXTUAL FACES changes and varies over the course of our lifetimes depending on how many different groups we’re engaged in or how big our network is (or isn’t) etc.

Reality-Facing Faces

Even though in reality we are ultimately WHOLE (i.e. not divided into all of the different categories and labels that we use to make sense of the world – which we’re doing in this article too because it’s just how we make ‘sense’ of the world), we have at least two faces that show us a reflection of REALITY.

Face 1: The OBSERVER making sense of all this .

The first of our Reality-Facing Faces is the OBSERVING FACE.  This is just the version of ourselves that occasionally (for most) is able to STEP BACK from the complexity and confusion of the interplay between all of the Self-Facing and World-Facing faces and to watch things unfold.

This Observing Face is important because it is a version of ourselves  that we are able to show ourselves BEYOND JUDGEMENT.

All of the other faces mentioned so far – apart from the SHADOW FACE (which contains who we would be if we stopped judging ourselves)- are ultimately unreal because they involve JUDGEMENT at some level (which is always unreal because all you can do with reality is ACCEPT it – the opposite of judgement).

The OBSERVING FACE is an AWARENESS of what we have observed or are observing and allows us to hold space so that we can start to respond instead of just reacting to the promptings and conditionings of the other faces.

This comes from the place of WHOLENESS that is within us at all times (in fact, is what we are) and allows us to come from a place that’s REAL instead of being a fragmented consequence of our outdated biological wiring, emotional ‘stuff’, or social conditioning and programming (like the other faces mentioned at the levels of self-and world).

The FACT that you can OBSERVE all of the other faces is proof that they are not ‘You’. They are just survival tools that form the foundation of the EGO (which is fragmented, not the bigger which is an EXPERIENCE of being alive which always comes back to AWARENESS).

Face 2: The REAL self (who knows what to do with all this Awareness and to ACCEPT it and to take Action)

The final Reality-Facing Face that’s relevant here is the one (which is really part of the same process) that you show yourself when you ACCEPT what the OBSERVING FACE has become AWARE of and decide to take ACTION based on this (Awareness -> Acceptance -> Action, it works every time).

When you take this kind of REAL ACTION it allows you to stop holding yourself back based on the limitations of your Self-Facing and World-Facing Faces and to put yourself back on track towards a natural DRIVE towards wholeness that we all have.

By taking action you always learn more about reality and you always  become more whole because you  will eventually end up having to bring your SHADOW ‘stuff’ to the surface (as you find the EDGE – i.e. where all your ideas about yourself meet reality and you can grow more REAL).

In short, the realest faces you can show yourself are the ones that EMERGE when you are able to step back from the ‘other’ faces (Self-Facing and World-Facing) and to put yourself on the path of growing real.

When you do this, you realise that you have NO faces – you’re just FACING THE TRUTH and constantly moving forward and experiencing life as a WHOLE.

 

 

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Action Kills Fear. Bullshit Makes it Worse.

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The more time you spend away from reality, the greater your FEAR of returning to it.

The TRUTH is that you know deep down when you’re being UNREAL – even if you hide behind layers of masks and BS.

The REAL you is ALWAYS calling to you beneath the surface of yourself and will show up in all kinds of CREATIVE and DESTRUCTIVE ways to get your attention and bring you back home:

-Maybe it’ll call you through the whispered sympony of your own restlessness.

-Maybe it’ll PROJECT the parts of yourself you’re trying to disown out into the world around you so you have to EMBRACE them anyway.

-Maybe it’ll DERAIL or sabotage your goals and relationships because it KNOWS that you got into them for UNREAL reasons and it wants to show you something TRUE.

One thing for sure is that you’re ALWAYS involved in the process of RETURNING BACK TO WHOLENESS whether you know it or not – the problem is that you BLOCK it by resisting life but you can only resist for so long and you can’t hide behind anything REAL (read that again).

When you’re trying to resist the return back to the TRUTH about yourself then you get involved in all kinds of CONTROL FREAKERY, HOLDING BACK, and HESITATIONS.

All of these patterns are just your EGO’s attempt to try and keep the REAL YOU at bay so it can keep tricking itself into thinking it exists.

When you get CAUGHT up in this state, then your overall state becomes a FEARFUL one.

It’s fearful because everything about it is rooted in BS:

-The BS that you carry about yourself and keep hypnotising yourself with.

-The BS that you carry about the world that stops you showing up in it.

-The BS that you carry about reality that stops you moving and pushing through.

This FEAR is about taking the first steps and returning back home because you have become DEPENDENT on all of the illusions that stop you going there.

The more you resist, the worse it gets, until eventually that REAL SELF will EXPLODE from beneath the surface.

To KILL the FEAR, you need to start RESISTING YOUR RESITANCE and taking ACTION – only then will you see that there is nothing to fear.

Once you’re home, you’re WHOLE, and everything else is just gravy.

 

Let me coach you and help you take actions that will change the game for you.

 

 

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“I Don’t Like It/ It’s Not Nice / It Hurts Therefore It’s Not True” – Your Ego

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“The truth will set you free (but first it will piss you off or make you miserable).”
–Personal Revolutions: ASCIR

We’re all walking around trying to live our lives with a REALITY DISTORTION device in our heads.

More than just distorting our reality, this device wraps itself around our SOULS like a parasitic vine and makes us think that we ARE whatever it shows us.

It’s kinda screwed up.

For many of us, we decided to start using this device and buying into what it shows us because we’ve become convinced that the thing we want the most is the thing we most need to avoid.

What is this magical ‘thing’ that we all crave?

It’s called the TRUTH and it’s with you any time you’re ready to quit the act and get REAL.

The problem is that most people have ‘stuff’ from the past that has sent them into HIDING.

When we feel the need to HIDE – because of our shame, guilt, and/or trauma or because of the BLIND TRINITY of fear, pride, and UNCHECKED desire – then we start to think that the COMFORT ZONE we’ve built to keep hiding within and DISTORTING reality from behind is the limits of ourselves and the world.

We’re not to ‘blame’ for finding ourselves in this state – more often than not, we keep ourselves imprisoned within that comfort zone because we have forgotten how to TRUST and BELIEVE in ourselves because something happened somewhere along the line that made us FORGET the truth about ourselves.

The problem is that everything we really want comes from breaking free of the cage and learning to STRETCH ourselves.

Only if we stretch can we allow the TRUTH back in and start growing REAL again.

Of course, when you’re stuck in your own prison like this the ‘guard’ that keeps you there is the one you CREATED for yourself: the EGO.

To stop any new TRUTH coming into your life it will help you LIE to yourself to keep your illusions in place:

“I don’t like it…so it can’t be true”

“It’s not ‘nice’…so it can’t be true”

“It hurts…so it can’t be true”

The TRUTH can never hurt you, though, because it’s everything you ever wanted and really are.

The thing that HURTS is holding onto illusions that the light of reality is showing you to be DISTORTIONS.

Ride it out.

 

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What if you weren’t afraid? Fear: How to Live Without Fear by Living With it

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Getting your real life back by overcoming fear and finding your edge.

I know a lot about fear because I used to fear a lot.

I used to be afraid of what people might think.

I used to be scared about what might happen if I did or didn’t do [X].

Mainly, I used to be scared about losing certain things: losing my ideas about myself, losing the things that I owned, losing illusory ideas that had no tangible reality to them like my ‘reputation’ or my ‘future’ or my ‘life’.

I’m one of those people who’s always tried to live spontaneously and to not hold anything back but, if I’m honest, I’ve had plenty of dark nights of the soul or moments of pain and anguish where I’ve had the world hold up a mirror to me and show me that I’m either nothing like I thought I was or, even worse, exactly like I feared I might be.

Life has been a wild ride. That’s how I know most of the stuff that I write about on this website or in my book(s) or that I share in my coaching sessions and elsewhere.

I know how to live a pretty good life now because I’ve screwed up so many times: I know how to be strong because I’ve had moments of weakness; I know how to be real because I’ve been unreal; I know how to get things done because I’ve wasted so much time on unreality which really just amounts to nothing.

I want to be as honest as possible in this article because it’s an article about fear and how you can master it. If the last decade has taught me anything it’s that the only difference between reality and unreality is the presence or lack of fear and that once you acknowledge that you have little if anything to ‘worry’ about.

The best thing that ever happened to me in my life was losing everything. I can say this with sincerity because the main motivation that had brought the things I lost into my life was fear and once those things went I was left to face myself and to rebuild on the only thing that still remained: reality.

This article is about the wonderful idea that nearly 99.9% of the things that you fear are unreal. Why is it wonderful? Because if you imagine the possibilities of a life without fear and you realise that most of your fears are unreal, you’ll see that you can do just about anything.

What if you weren’t afraid? What would you be doing right now?

Most of the things that stop you being who you need to be and living the life you need to live are just examples of you holding yourself back.

This article is gonna show you how to let go.

Table of Contents

Two Kinds of Fear: Rational and Irrational

It’s all well and good for me to say that we can live without fear but that would involve denying a basic truth about the human condition which is that our bodies evolved fear and that they evolved it for a reason.

Before we go on, we need to acknowledge an important distinction between two very different types of fear:

  1. Rational Fear: Rational fear is biological in origin and is an instinctual mechanism designed by millions of years of evolution to keep you (or your body) alive and ticking. This kind of fear isn’t always ‘right’ in the sense that it isn’t always triggered by actual danger but it will give you the jolt you need to GTFO in the face of possible danger so that you can live to be real another day (a simple example is that you might feel fear when you see a non-poisonous spider: your instincts don’t care about whether or not it can actually kill you – they just wanna get you away. Sharpish.).
  2. Irrational Fear: Irrational fear is either sociological or psychological in origin and has only entered your life because of your CONDITIONING. This kind of fear is never ‘right’ (unlike rational fear which is hit-and-miss but always serves a life-preserving function). This kind of irrational fear is the stuff of nightmares as it will take you away from yourself, the world, and reality and give you erroneous ideas and assumptions at every level of your being. This sociological and psychological fear is the reason that we let the world hold us back and we don’t allow ourselves to be who we really are.

This article is about embracing the rational fear for what it is and allowing it to go about the business of keeping us alive and about managing our irrational fears so that we can live the real lives we deserve instead of hiding from ourselves and our own potential because of pure, unadulterated bullshit.

Before we move on, here are some quick examples of the kinds of fears we’re talking about:

Rational Fear

Biological: “Oh no, if I fall of this bridge/cliff/abyss/etc. I’ll die” / “Holy shit, a spider.” / “OMFG, he’s got a gun”, “This food looks a bit mouldy”, etc.

Our biological fears are protective and are triggered instinctually – they can become irrational fears if we cling to them in the face of evidence that they are pointing us away from the truth (for example, if we learn that the spider isn’t poisonous or that what we thought was a gun is actually something else but still act like the fear is real).

Irrational Fear

Sociological: “I’d better not follow my dreams/say what I really think/wear what I want/grow my hair/whatever because people will think [X]” / “I should [X]” / “It’s really not appropriate for somebody of my age to be doing this”, etc.

Psychological: “I’m such a piece of shit” / “If I show my real self, I’ll be rejected” / “I can’t forgive myself for this thing I did twenty three years ago” / “I’d better hide my anger/horniness/love because I don’t know how to control it”, etc.

Irrational fears are triggered and kept in place by our CONDITIONING – in other words, they always enter our psyche and experience of ourselves, the world, and reality from the outside in (instead of being sourced in the reality of inside out).

Just like rational fears can become irrational the longer we cling to them in the face of evidence, irrational fears can sometimes become rational if there is evidence to support them based on the feedback we get from reality (for example, maybe you really will be rejected if you show your real self – it doesn’t matter though).

Knowing whether or not your fears are rational or irrational will help you decide whether you can – or even need – to get rid of them. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of what is written in this article.

A Word About Jail

When I talk to coaching clients about fear and getting rid of it (the irrational stuff), I often find that a lot of them put forward the objection that if they abolished their fears they’d be the best versions of themselves and that they’d be acting on infinite possibilities and opportunities but…they’d end up in jail.

This isn’t just something I’ve heard a couple of times, it pops up a  lot.

For some reason, we seem to think that we need our irrational fear to keep us in check and that if we didn’t have this illusory mental barrier we’d all be running around in a state of debauched anarchy, ripping each other’s clothes off without permission, looting department stores, and killing each other.

I beg to disagree.

What these future jailbirds are forgetting is that, when we’re real, it’s not our fear that keeps us in check but our sense of wholeness in ourselves that allows us to relate to everybody and everything around us. Even if you don’t want to see it in those terms, it’s not like as soon as your irrational fears are taken out of the equation that your sense of rationality and ability to think for yourself will be cancelled out too.

You’re not gonna go jump off a cliff or leap out the window just because your social programming is under better management.

When you’re real, you have the discipline and self-control necessary to be able to move forwards with your vision (choo choo) and to manage your biological wiring and social conditioning. In other words, you have mastery over yourself – this means that you can have a life without fear and stay out of jail.

Fear is the thing that makes us unreal in the first place – when people think that without fear they’d turn into lunatics and go off the rails, what they’re really saying is that they have a co-dependent relationship with their fear and that they’ve allowed it to define them.

As you read the rest of this article, think about how you can live some of these ideas without being in a cage (mental or physical). If you have fear about losing your fear then you’re in deeper than you think but it’s all part of the same process and you can free yourself whenever you’re ready.

All you gotta do is get real.

Fear Without Fear: Wholeness Over Fragmentation

Most of what you read on this website or in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is about letting go of your fear. As you start to live a more real life of purpose that is shaped around your real human values and aligned with your realness, you will start to feel less fear anyway.

On this site, we’ve already looked at getting on The Train and living your purpose as well as learning to kill your fear of loss by developing an abundance mentality. Ultimately, all of the things we talk about boil down to the same thing: knowing yourself in your wholeness, instead of attaching to fragments, and then doing something to express it.

The rest of this article will build on that basic idea: that a lack of fear means you are being real / whole and the presence of (irrational) fear means that you’re being unreal / fragmented at some level (we’ll elaborate).

Stop Holding Yourself Back with ‘Nothing’

Here are some basic things you can start doing to stop giving attention to the ‘nothing’ of unreal or irrational fear:

Step out of your black and white thinking by letting go of ‘good’ and ‘bad’:  Reality just is what it is – it isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’; it just is and you either accept it or you don’t. This doesn’t mean that you become passive or nihilistic because being real is about being full, not empty (as passivity and nihilism suggest) and about putting this ‘fullness’ out into the world by connecting to what is whole inside you (connected to yourself, the world, and reality) not what appears to be fragmented (disconnected from yourself, the world, and reality).

Killing your irrational fears and moving with your life instead of against it is about letting go of this fragmented dualism in the form of our learned value judgments about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (etc.) and learning to see things in terms of real or unreal instead. When we look at the world and our intentions for it in terms of ‘real’, we see things in terms of wholeness and become more whole; when we look at the world and our intentions for it in terms of ‘unreal’, we see things in terms of fragments and become more fragmented.

Fragmentation always leads to fear because it is unreal and leads to the kind of friction, frustration, and eventual misery that comes from taking reality out of the equation.

In short, if you can learn to be honest with yourself (if nobody else) you can let go of the ideas of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ that hold you back and just do what needs to be done – if it’s real then it will be about wholeness and won’t harm anybody and will allow you to grow into yourself as the world grows around you.

Set boundaries by learning to say ‘No’ (it’s a magic word): The only thing worth saying “Yes” to is reality because reality is the only thing of any value.

Many of us have been conditioned to say “No” to reality and “Yes” to unreality which means that we end up sending ourselves into hiding, building our lives according to somebody else’s agenda, and then wondering why we’re not living our own lives and being scared to shake the foundations of the unreal life that we’ve built to keep hiding from ourselves.

The easiest way to get your fear in check is to start saying “No” to anything unreal… This is your life and it’s flashing before your eyes. Stop tolerating the bullshit that isn’t serving you or which only serves to reinforce your lack of respect for yourself.

Say “No” to the job that’s holding you back and putting you further and further away from your own soul.

Say “No” to the unreal relationships that sap your energy and take away the valuable time and attention that you could be using to get to where you need to be.

Say “No” to the image you have of yourself that stops you from being whoever it is that you really are.

If you keep tolerating unreality that’s all you’re ever going to get.

Life is too short and the only thing keeping you from your real life is the fear of saying “No” to anything but.

Don’t be scared to ‘break’ your own heart: A broken heart is always more real than a closed one but a real heart can never be broken.

Anybody who ‘closed’ their own heart is just living in fear and that fear comes from a fundamental misunderstanding about who you are, what you’re capable of, and what reality is.

The truth is that your ‘heart’ (or whatever you wanna call it) can’t be broken because your heart is that part of you that is connected to the whole and nothing that is whole is capable of being broken into pieces.

The feeling of being ‘broken’ just means that you’ve exposed a gap between your ideas about yourself, the world, and reality and that you’re growing more real by healing this divide.

You keep your fear at bay by trusting and believing in yourself and not worrying about being broken because you understand that everything is a process and you will rise again with a stronger connection to reality.

The most fearful thing you can do is ‘close’ your heart because you’ve been hurt in the past, perceive yourself to have failed, or because somebody judged you and you treated this judgment as being real… A closed heart is just the illusion of stasis and will lead to a lack of activity and an attachment to the ego.

Kill your fear by knowing nothing can break what’s real about you. Close nothing about yourself and be open to everything (whilst still setting boundaries by saying “No” to unreality).

Stop Listening to the World Over Reality: Irrational fear is what happens when you don’t really understand that there is a difference between ‘The World’ and ‘Reality’. The short version is that ‘Reality’ just is what it is but ‘The World’ can be changed if you’re real enough.

The reason ‘The World’ can be changed is that it’s just a bunch of conceptual ideas that we’ve collectively decided to treat as being real, not something that’s actually real in itself (we spend a lot of time arguing about and shifting these concepts based on our own interpretations of things which are influenced by our inner ‘stuff’).

Listening to the world instead of reality is the cause of your conditioning: the shoulds that make you hesitate instead of being spontaneous and taking real action; the ideas about how you should look or feel or think in certain situations.

Flip the script and listen to yourself before you listen to the world – the world is really just the unreal product of everybody else’s fears and it gives you more fears to be controlled or influenced by.

Stop listening. Tune out. Listen to yourself and nobody else. Ball up and live real.

Learn to manage your fear internally and externally: Rational fears can usually be dealt with externally – by either exposing yourself to things incrementally (if there’s no danger) or by removing yourself from the source of that fear in some way (literally GTFO or abolishing whatever has triggered the fear).

Irrational fears need to be dealt with internally at the level of your belief system: this might require testing your assumptions about yourself, the world, and reality (check out Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness) or by learning to manage your interpretations of things at the psychological and sociological levels to make sure that they’re as real as possible (more real, less fear).

In general, it comes down to remembering that there are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

If you’re lacking truth at some level, then the likelihood of fear increases because a lack of truth means a lack of wholeness and an attachment to fragments at the level of your identity. This is where things start to get interesting because the presence of irrational fear means that you have constructed an unreal personality for yourself and need to dismantle it by remembering that you’re wearing a mask and taking it off.

Find your tribe: No man or woman is an island – we have evolved to be social creatures and to live and share our lives with others. A lot of irrational fear comes from the fact that you’ve been living an unreal life and so have surrounded yourself with unreal people that aren’t part of your tribe.

Your tribe = people who share your values and who are growing in the same direction.

When we lose touch with our tribe, we feel isolated and restless and start to lose social momentum because we keep hitting illusory external barriers in the form of unreal people and situations.

The first step to finding your tribe is getting in touch with your real self and getting out into the world – the more real  you are, the more real other people will be in your presence. Get on the Train, live your purpose, and find others who are going to share it with you.

Help those that are more afraid than you: As you become less fearful as you stop giving into the fragments that you carry, you’ll begin to see the fear that you left behind in the faces of almost everybody around you.

Most people are afraid because they’ve been conditioned in the same way that we all have – they’re in a kind of woken dream as they go through life responding to the ideas in their heads instead of the reality that’s in front of them.

Helping others by being compassionate and speaking with your actions, not just your words, allows them to become less fearful, but also allows you to go deeper into reality as you learn more about your own fear by helping them with theirs. Ultimately, you will see that both are unreal.

The greatest way you can help others is by responding and communicating to what’s real in people when they come to you, not their fear. This might anger those who are trying to hide their souls from themselves behind their unreality (see this post about drama and taking the mask off) but, ultimately, you’ll be doing them a favour by seeing the best in them and respecting them enough to not buy into the bullshit that they tell themselves.

The price for this, of course, is that you have to be real with yourself. Get over your own fear and then guide others down the path that you’ve walked on: it’s always about being more or less real than you currently are.

Live on your edge by taking action and thinking big: To grow real, you have to keep learning and keep taking action so that you can spend as much of your life as possible in the ‘sweetspot’ of your edge.

Your edge is just where your ideas meet reality and you get new insight that sets you free of the fear-motivated patterns and ideas that are holding you back.

Without finding your edge (not having somebody else tell you where it is) you will only ever go around in the same circles and repeat the same patterns that are familiar to you.

Find your edge by actively chasing the goals that challenge you and even scare you a little bit; put yourself in the lion’s den and face the parts of yourself you know you’ve been hiding from yourself.

Think big and take action. Don’t spend your life just doing what you’re comfortable with – that’s the embodiment of fear and it will only lead you to where you already are.

 “Only ever doing what feels comfortable is a form of suicide.”
-Personal Revolutions

Know where you are and don’t judge yourself: A lot of the fear in our life comes from the fact that we’re constantly judging ourselves and our progress in relation to the imaginary standards and ideas that we have about ourselves in relation to other people.

Not only is all judgement unreal because it’s an example of fragmentation over wholeness but it is also usually rooted in unnecessarily complicated ideas about what human life is.

Here are the only three stages of human life that you really need to concern yourself with:

Stage One: Childhood – In which we have no (irrational) fear because we are in a state of wholeness.

Stage Two: Unreality – In which we have nothing but (irrational) fear because we are in a state of fragmentation due to the shame that we have been taught about our wholeness and the mask we have been CONDITIONED to wear because of this shame.

Stage Three: Personal Revolution / Realness (Reality) – In which we return back to wholeness because we have found ourselves in a situation that exposes the gap between our ideas about ourselves and the world and reality or because we otherwise ‘wake up’ to the truth somehow and put it into action.

If you look around you, you will see that most people never go through a ‘Personal Revolution’ and die clinging to the little fragments of unreality that they define themselves by and which leave them in a state of confused frustration that leads to lives of quiet desperation.

Be honest with yourself about which of these three stages you’re in – going through a ‘Personal Revolution’ doesn’t mean that the world won’t creep in from time to time and that you’ll never experience irrational fear again but it does mean that you’ll be more whole overall.

If your life is defined by fear in the form of friction, anxiety, or any other shades of unreality then you’re still in stage two and you have to get back to being real at some level (yourself, the world, and reality or all three).

Knowing where you are and where you’re going will keep your fear in check – especially if you design a process that allows you to start becoming more whole again (like getting on the Train and making your values valuable to others, etc.).

Fear is a normal part of our human lives but it isn’t life itself.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to start pushing through your edge, overcoming unnecessary fear, and living your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get moving again.

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