The Fear Paradox Read online

  The recognition of the paradox of consciousness makes us wonder how it is that we fail to recognize these seemingly obvious limitations. To my thinking, our barriers in perceiving our limitations in consciousness stem from the fact that our minds are inherently self-absorbed. To us, the easiest explanation available is that, since we are aware of our thoughts, we must be the one in charge. In this way, it is a bit like the nature of magic and illusion. We perceive an outcome and attribute it to an observed chain of events, ignorant of the underlying, actual causality. Marvin Minsky, in his 1985 book The Society of Mind, brings this starkly into focus, saying, “None of us enjoys the thought that what we do depends on processes we do not know; we prefer to attribute our choices to volition, will, or self-control.”74

  In many ways, our fear of not being in control is justified. Not only are our Imaginations continually producing images and working on adaptive solutions, but even simple actions such as deciding to turn our head might possibly be initiated subconsciously. Benjamin Libet, a neurosurgeon, has done a number of studies using brain stimulation to explore this issue. In his studies, he has examined the question of volition by observing the initiation of thought and behavior while measuring neural electrical activation. He discovered that, in simple physical actions such as picking up a glass, our brains are initiating these actions microseconds before we have the thought, “I think I will pick up that glass.” This reveals that our sense that we are making choices to initiate physical movements is somewhat inaccurate.75 Our brains and non-conscious minds seem to be doing much more than we realize. And there is an understandable vulnerability in considering ourselves to be a bit less in control than we like to believe.

  As we have seen, so much of our society has emerged to ward off feelings of being less in control. The very fact that we presume more agency than we actually possess may be evidence of our discomfort with our inescapable vulnerability. From the very existence of “courage” across diverse cultures, to the ways in which we build psychological defenses against emotional pain, to the elaborate structures of technology arming us against societal insecurity, we see significant evidence that people don’t like being afraid and like admitting it even less.

  Returning to my patient Mason from earlier in the chapter, we can see our non-conscious minds are home not only to our rich and vital Imaginations, but also to our pain and suffering. Past experiences, many of which carry unresolved pain, come to rest within us in what is loosely called long-term memory. What makes this particularly problematic is that our security systems, what we are calling Fear, are built to keep us away from danger. One of the primary signals to our brains that we are close to danger is pain. So, if our threat detection systems discover pain within us, they are constitutionally wired to keep us away from that pain.

  The ways in which our mind does this are called psychological defenses. These include more benign experiences, such as positive thinking, rationalization, devaluation, contextualization, and avoidance. We all use these defenses to some degree in our daily lives when the pain is not too severe. But defenses such as splitting and dissociation are used by our minds when our pain threatens to overwhelm us. These are the defenses born from trauma, and they happen to us and not with us. In using the term trauma, it is important to note that we are identifying experience that is overwhelming to the nervous system. This can result from what is called acute trauma, such as abduction, sexual assault, physical assault, or torture, but it can also occur from what is sometimes called “small t” trauma. This lesser form of trauma refers to ongoing experiences that cumulatively come to be too much for the nervous system to manage. Mild forms of neglect, lack of emotional validation, or even too much relentless parental supervision can lead to what we call “small t” traumas. These are the “little too much” or “little too little” disruptions that make it necessary for our minds to take more drastic measures to ensure survival. Figuratively, we build walls, we bury parts of ourselves, or we run. But what is happening inside us is quite problematic. Our minds have the ability to break connections to memory, to partition off what is unwanted, and to split the personality into many pieces. And when these defenses become chronic, it becomes very difficult to restore our well-being.

  What is tragic in this equation of Fearing our own minds is that the very experiences within us that most need our care and attention—our pain and suffering—become a threat to us, something that must be defended against. We turn our backs on ourselves and, in the process of staying alive, we lose what is most precious to us—our minds.

  Chapter Six

  Can You Imagine?

  “…the less fear and doubt are embedded in the instructional process, the easier it will be to take the natural steps of learning.”

  —W. Timothy Gallwey

  As a therapist, I am often painfully aware of the inability to reach someone caught in despair. Every attempt to bring light into their darkness fails. The mind of someone in despair is a bit like concrete: nothing gets in; nothing gets out. All efforts to help seem to fail. And even though the hopelessness they are experiencing might not be as dark as they feel it to be, to that person, the despair is real and inescapable.

  I saw a young man like this some time ago for a first session. He knew despair and this form of darkness all too well. To him, it felt like someone sitting on his chest, and he couldn’t get him off. Little by little, everything in this man’s life seemed to have a dusting of gray on it. He would see the future moving farther and farther away while he remained trapped in a painful and disappointing present. He longed to escape but lacked hope that he ever would.

  “I can’t imagine… I just can’t imagine anything ever changing,” he kept repeating. “I just can’t imagine.”

  As I sat with this idea, I began to wonder about how often these words show up in my work. More than my interest in the exact words, I wondered about the feeling, the difficulty people have with seeing possibility in the future. For some, like this young man, it was part of a much deeper, all-encompassing depression. But for others, I discovered, it could take shape as a feeling of stuckness in a particular area of their lives, or more subtly, as a vague absence of desire. Regardless of the form it took, not being able to “visualize” the future brought with it a feeling of disappointment, sadness, regret, and at times, emptiness.

  I began to realize that the cognitive and emotional movement that brings us from the present to the future is important to our feelings of satisfaction; and equally, as we discovered in Chapter Four, the anxiety-filled movement that brings us experientially from the present to the future is tied to our ability to Imagine.

  What Is Imagination?

  As a figure of speech, the words, I can’t imagine, or some version of them, are quite common in everyday language. We all use them occasionally. But for some reason, on that morning, this expression evoked a wondering in me.

  In its colloquial sense, “I can’t imagine” is a convenient way to convey a subjective experience of improbability, something beyond the norms of what one would expect or want to expect. It may be that a possibility seems ridiculous or painfully impossible, or it may even reveal a sense of impropriety regarding a particular possibility.

  Although to imagine is a form of cognition, this type of statement is quite different from saying, “I can’t remember his name.” Although there is some surface similarity in that both types of statement seem to be referring to mental operations (imagining in the former and memory in the latter), the difference is that, as a figure of speech, the former type of statement is not intended to offer an assessment of one’s own cognitive capacities. We are not saying, “My imagination is not working right now.” Instead, we are referring to what is personally conceivable to us. As an expression, it is more existential than cognitive, more about the scope of one’s personal universe and less about how well one’s brain is functioning.

  The experience of Imagination that we are
considering here reflects the sense that beneath the surface of our awareness is a mind that is continually working creatively. Research by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio supports this. Beneath awareness, our brains are producing images, the favored language of the brain and mind. The production of these images happens, according to Damasio, through the ongoing play of the brain in relation to consciousness.76 Damasio reasons that this non-conscious part of the mind is so immense that most of the images produced never reach consciousness.

  Nancy Andreasen, a professor of psychiatry at Iowa Carver College of Medicine, has done meaningful work in attempting to identify and measure this aspect of the mind. In her book The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius, she attempted to understand the minds of artists who are objectively viewed as geniuses. She discovered in the self-reports of artists, such as the eighteenth-century English poet Samuel Coleridge, an almost exclusive attribution of creative agency to some non-conscious process.

  In one example, Coleridge described how the lines of his poem Kubla Khan came to him in a dream fully formed as “images [that] rose up before him as things.”77 Upon waking, Coleridge wrote down as much as he could remember, some two hundred-plus lines. He regretfully had to consciously fill in a few blanks.

  Andreasen likewise believes that the human brain is a self-organizing system with tremendous complexity and equal potential. The old adage that we use only 10 percent of our brains is perhaps more right than we might imagine.

  Damasio adds to this picture with his recognition that the human capacity for conscious creation is what truly sets us apart as a species—and further, that conscious creation only became possible through the evolution of a mental space that our primate relatives significantly lack. Going by many names, this is a space in which images can be held and consciously manipulated. Cognitive scientists such as Stephen Kosslyn refer to this as reflective space.78 Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier call it the space of conceptual blending,79 and Merlin Donald, the neuroscientist, simply identifies it as consciousness.80 It is the space in which we use something we know to understand something we don’t. And, as we began to consider in Chapter Four, it is in this space that the seeds of an Imagined future take root.

  What I have found in my work is that Imagination is vital to well-being. I am not speaking specifically of the artist, the inventor, or the entrepreneur; I am talking about how each of us is dependent upon the Imagination for our capacity to adapt and to bring forth who we will be in the next moment.

  Imagination, as I expressed in Chapter Three, came into existence to see what might be hiding in the dark. And yet, what we find is that Imagination appears not to have limited itself to this narrow purpose. Imagination allowed us not only to see potential danger in the future, but alternatively, it allowed us to envision ourselves in a better, safer future.

  Imagination gave us the rare capacity to adapt to changing environmental and psychological conditions. No other species appears to be able to adjust, adapt, and survive as well as we do. And, most important to note, much of this process of Imaginative adaptation happens on a non-conscious level. Imagination, it appears, is continually working to adapt and generate new possibilities for an ever-changing future, even without our knowing it.

  It is interesting to consider as well that some of these adaptations appear to be related more to satisfaction, meaning, and pleasure than merely to survival. Our minds naturally seek out what “feels good” to us, and we consciously consider possibilities that seem to be right for us. Our Imaginations, on both a conscious and non-conscious level, appear to support the unfolding of who we are and who we might become.

  In artistic creation, artists may “feel” the seeds of a work forming within them. It may be a color or an image or an emotional tone. There may be a desire to express a particular pain or a meaning from the human condition. It may be a startling experience of beauty found in nature and a longing to share that beauty. Or it may be a sense of something missing, something to be searched for.

  Michelangelo, it is said, spent excessive amounts of time selecting his marble for a sculpture. He did this because he believed that the creation he was envisioning existed within the marble itself and that his work as a craftsman was merely to uncover the creation. In this, we find both the humble recognition of his indebtedness to an a priori source, possibly divine, and equally, a projection of something happening within his own mind. In other words, the metaphorical marble in which Michelangelo found his creations might best be considered the marble of the mind.

  These qualities of Imagination are recognized by most artists, but I would propose that they are something all of us need to appreciate to a greater degree. Imagination is what happens when we self-actualize. It is the curator in our ongoing desire to express ourselves, and it is what is missing or faulty when we have difficulty seeing ourselves in the future.

  Although it does appear that Imagination emerged to help Fear promote security, this was not the end of the road for Imagination. From there, our minds continued to evolve ever greater capacities for invention, creativity, and meaning. Little of this had to do with the need for safety. Fear may have planted the first seeds, but Imagination continued to cross-pollinate in ways that seem to go against the original imperative of security. Imagination, in its self-fulfilling role, puts us at risk. Curiosity did kill the cat, and Fear remembers. The oppression of Imagination by Fear was unavoidable in the pursuit of survival. If bringing forth who we are threatens our existence, then what other choice does Fear have but to shut it down?

  Imagination is self-organizing and seems to enjoy the playful invention of self. Without this, we find ourselves limited in our ability to move into the future, to find hope, and to engage meaningfully with life. It is not just a loss of creativity or an inability to make our lives more interesting. Imagination is the platform that transforms mere existence into meaning.

  This is a fight we have been fighting for as long as we have had consciousness. Fear strives for security, and Imagination strives for meaning. And as we will see, it is not just our individual lives today that are touched by this struggle. The very history of Western culture has been shaped by it.

  The Day We Lost the Fight

  For more than one thousand years, following the fall of Rome, Fear held our Imaginations captive. It began around 400 AD and lasted into the Renaissance, and even beyond. The imprisonment of our minds was achieved through a form of religious doctrine enacted by a bishop who gained influence in the early Catholic Church through his writings on human weakness, particularly his own. This was Augustine of Hippo, known to most of us theologically and philosophically as St. Augustine.

  The time in which Augustine was promoting these ideas coincided with the rise of Christianity. Rome officially adopted Christianity in 380 AD, and, over the course of the next several hundred years, its influence spread across Europe, into the Middle East, and down into Northern Africa. This was, according to some historians, a very precarious time in which barely 5 percent of the population was anything other than a slave or a peasant. Invasions by barbarians and Goths, widespread disease, and changing social, political, and religious structures all undoubtedly made this a time of tremendous upheaval. Yet Christianity seemed to thrive in “the ruins of Rome.”81

  As part of this societal movement, Augustine was able to imprison the mind by legislating against “curiosity,” which he viewed as a threat. In fact, starting in about 400 AD, Augustine explicitly designated curiosity a sin.

  In his writings on curiosity, several themes emerge. All of them, however, seem to pivot on the basic idea that curiosity leads human beings away from the contemplative, and thus away from God. Augustine called curiosity a “disease,”82 and associated it with a “lust of the eyes.”83 He considered human beings lowly creatures who were vulnerable to temptations of the flesh. The eyes, being of the flesh, could be caught by curious sights that were strange and beautiful
. While at home in contemplation of God, Augustine grieved the ways in which even his own mind could be diverted by the curious sight of “lizards catching flies.”84 Eyes were the “princes of the senses”85 and as such should be directed only to the divine.

  To the Church at this time, the only sight worthy of the eyes was the Bible. Other books came to represent a knowledge that took us away from God. Augustine promoted this association of curiosity with forbidden knowledge. There were, according to him, realms of knowledge that were inappropriate for us mortals to explore. These included the morbid, the grotesque, the dark arts, astrology, and divination. These were often called the “curious arts.”86 But more than this, any pursuit of knowledge for its own sake was viewed as sinful. As lowly creatures within the early Christian cosmology, it was seen as morally inappropriate for us to ask too many questions. The most iconic example of this is the story of the fall in the Garden of Eden.

  This time witnessed a marked decline in intellectual pursuits. Libraries were destroyed and texts were burned. Many philosophers and educators fled to Persia in the East, taking with them as much of their intellectual heritage as they could carry. Some of this destruction of knowledge happened at the hands of the Goths, who were out to destroy the existing culture, but this cannot adequately explain the comprehensive retreat from knowledge.