How Your Fear can Lead You to Your True Self | Dr John Demartini

[Inaudible]. Hi, I'm Dr John Demartini. I've been involved in the study of human behavior and personal development for 47 years.

I have the opportunity to travel all over the world, educating all different types of people in all different walks of life. And very commonly, I get asked by people around the world on what exactly is fear and how do we deal with it? And is it a good thing?

Is it a bad thing? And the whole spectrum of responses are out there by different teachers. And it could be confusing.

Some say, it's the very path of your destiny. If you conquer your fear, you'll be fulfilling your soul's mission. Others say, no, you want to avoid all forms of fear, it's a sign to avoid things and go off on the easy path.

I've seen a whole spectrum of ideas about fear. So I'd like to clarify it and put it into context because in some contexts, all of them are accurate and other contexts they can be misleading. So, first of all, I'm going to describe fear as an assumption that you're about to experience through your senses or imagination, more loss than gain, more negative than positive, more pain than pleasure, more disadvantage than advantage, more risk than reward, from somebody or yourself, in the future.

And so it's an assumption you're about to get some negative experience, you might say. Now fear has its opposite. So I'm going to describe that.

Now fear has another name called phobia. It's opposite has been called through the ages, philia. Some people call it a fantasy and phobia a nightmare, but I'm just going to put this into context and elaborate on this.

I think you'll get a kick out of it. You might want to pull out some paper and actually write along with me. I want you to imagine a magnet down here with a positive and negative pole.

And if you try to cut that magnet in half, you get a positive negative pole and a positive negative pole. If you cut those in half, you get a positive, negative, positive, negative, positive, negative, positive, negative. No matter how many times you slice the magnet up, you get both sides.

In our mind, believe it or not, we have the same thing. And there's a beautiful analogy in the magnet, really into human psychology. If we assume in the future with our imagination or our senses, that we're going to get more positive than negative, about to happen, we have what is called philia.

If we assume there's going to be more negatives and positives in the future, we have a phobia. Phobia is another name for fear. The philia is sometimes called a fantasy, as I said, and the phobia is sometimes called a nightmare.

One won't occur without the other. They're inseparable like two poles of a magnet. Let me give you an example.

Let's say that you walked down the street, you run into this individual, you're a man, single, and you run into this beautiful woman, or a woman, single, run into this beautiful man, handsome man. And you get a little bit enamored by it. And you get infatuated with that.

By the way, that's another name for this, infatuation. [Inaudible]. And this one could be almost resentment, the opposite.

[Inaudible]. So what happens is you could actually have, run into somebody that you're infatuated with, if you're infatuated, that means you're conscious of the upsides and unconscious of the downsides. So I'll put that here, conscious of the positives and unconscious of the negatives.

And over here, you're conscious of the negatives and unconscious of the positives. So if you're infatuated with somebody and philic towards them and attracted to them, you'll create a fantasy about what's going to happen when you're with that individual. And when you do, the second you do a fantasy towards them, you're going to create the fear of loss.

[Inaudible]. So I'm going to call that the fear of loss. So if you get highly infatuated, extremely infatuated, you have an extreme fear of loss.

That can lead to jealousy, that can lead to anxiety about them leaving you, this type of thing. But on the other side, if you perceive somebody that you resent and you really are turned off by them and avoid them, then what happens is you actually have a fear of gain. Here you have now the fear of gain.

So I'd like to just describe here, there are two sources of fear in a human experience, the fear of loss of that which you seek, and the fear of gain of that which you try to avoid. That goes down into what we call the amygdala area, the desire center in our brain, and we have in the desire center, a desire for food, prey, in our animal nature, and a desire to avoid predator. Because the prey is anabolic, we can eat it and it gives us sustenance.

The predator can eat us, break us down, catabolically. So the fear of loss of the prey, which is starvation and the fear of gain of the predator, which is being eaten in death, those are the two basic fears that underlie all fears that we experience. Anything in our life that we perceive that supports what we value most in life is perceived as prey, and we're going to fear the loss of it.

Anything that challenges what we value most in life, is going to be perceived as predator and we fear the gain of it. So our animal nature, in a sense, the desire centers of the sub-cortical area called the amygdala is living, trying to avoid pain and seek pleasure, avoid phobias, and try to seek philias. But in the process of doing it, the more we infatuate with something and have a philia about it, we fear its loss.

And the more we resent something, we fear its gain. So both of those poles have both. In other words, if we have a predator coming at us, and we fear the gain of the predator, we have the fantasy and the infatuation of getting away.

And if we are infatuated with the prey, we have the fear of losing it. So, you can't separate the two, they're like two poles of a magnet. So there's no such thing as a phobia, without a philia or a philia without a phobia, they're inseparably entangled together like two poles of a magnet or two quantum particles.

Either way we could see it that way, they're quantumly entangled. Now, right down the center, where we embrace the positive and the negative equally, in that state, if we're completely neutral, that means we're not infatuated, we don't fear its loss. If we're not resentful, we don't fear it's gain.

So right down the center, we automatically have in a sense, a neutral state. This is sometimes called objectivity. [Inaudible].

Objectivity means non-biased, non partial, non-polarized, non opinionated, but a neutral state, where you have a completely balanced state of mind. This objective state, where we're not emotional, but we're actually reasonable, as we neutralize our emotions and go into this reasonable state, we actually get to a point where we don't have this fear of loss, or fear of gain. Now, let's say that anything that supports our values, and I'm going to put over here, and anything that the support is greater than the challenge to our values.

Here the challenge is greater than the support to our values. So if we actually see something that balances where the support equals the challenge, this is where we're in a state of objectivity, and we have the least amount of fear. We dissolve our fear.

Now this is a conditional state. This is a condition of the mind. This is a condition of the mind.

And this is in an unconditioned state of the mind. Unconditioned. Some people like to say that the unconditional state is a balance between these two.

Now that's the mean between the pairs of opposites. That's the path of meaning in life. Viktor Frankl, when he talked about in search of meaning, it's finding the meaning of things.

Finding the meaning of things means that when you're infatuated with something, you're conscious of the upside, your intuition is trying to bring out the unconscious, which is the downsides, to bring it back into the mean. And when you're conscious of the downsides and unconscious of the upsides, your intuition is trying to bring the unconscious to where you, see the upside of things, to bring you back into the mean. That's extracting meaning out of these emotional polarities.

The moment you have the mean down here, the center, and extract meaning, we could say it's an unconditional state and some people like to state, and I'm going to use an analogy here or an acronym, the State Of Unconditioned Love - the soul. So if we perceive that breaking through, and dissolving the fantasies and the nightmares, the philias and the phobias, the seeking, and the avoiding process of our mind and integrate those and go after true objectives in our life, the path, the state of unconditional love, where you're doing something you really love to do, then we could say breaking through fear, as a path to the soul, has meaning. Some people have write at that, but it has to be put into context.

Now the soul is a synthesis of opposites, in other words. So if you're infatuated with somebody, you're attracted to them, if you're repelled from somebody, you're obviously push them away. The balance of the two is what makes love.

Love is always the synthesis, the pair of opposites, synthesized, synchronously at the same time, in a perfect balance. When you love somebody, you're going to have times when you like and dislike, they're going to go back and forth, the like and dislike components, but to love somebody is to embrace both of them equally, synchronously. So we could say that our fear is letting us know that we have a polarized perspective.

And if we actually neutralize it, it is actually a pathway of our soul, if you will, pathway of our most authentic self. Now let's impose something on there that I'm probably more known for, and that is the value applications. I have written a lot and written a book called the 'Values Factor'.

I talk about values. I'd like you to imagine that we have a set of lines here, and we're going to put seven lines here. And up at the top, we're going to call this the highest value.

And down below, we're going to call this the lowest value. And there's a series of values in between whenever we live by our highest value, when we are intrinsically inspired, spontaneously from within to go and fulfill it. And we can't wait to get up and do that, we're more objective.

And we move in this direction. So whenever we live by priority and live by the highest value, we automatically go in the path of the soul. When we do, we have more objectivity, objectivity neutralizes the polarities that breed the fear of loss and the fear of gain.

So if we go in there and ask questions that our intuition is trying to reveal, we can actually transcend our fantasies and our nightmares, our philias, and our phobias, and actually follow the path of a neutral path, which in a sense is the term ambition. Ambi means two sidedness, a condition of two sidedness is what ambition meant. An individual that automatically integrates these two has a higher ambition and a higher directionality in life than a person that's trying to pull in this direction.

Imagine if you're trying to go in one sided direction, you're trying to get a magnet that's positive without negative. In Buddhism, there was a statement that says the desire for that which is unavailable, the fantasy, and the desire to avoid that which is unavoidable, the nightmare, is a source of human suffering. Why?

Because if we go out looking for a fantasy, we're going to have the fear of loss and we breed the fear. If we go off in this direction or try to avoid this direction, we keep running into it. So either of these two poles by themselves are incomplete and running your life by trying to avoid pain and try to seek pleasure is a futile attempt.

Nature has a way of making sure that we have pleasure and pain or the positives and the negatives and everything else, balanced. Like I said, you don't get a half of a magnet. You get a balanced magnet.

So we're going to automatically live in fear the second we set up fantasies. Now, let me give you an example of that. If I say that I want to go and be in a relationship that has got all positives, no negatives, all kind, no cruel, all nice, no mean, all give, no take, all support, no challenge, all peace, no war, I have a fantasy and the moment I have that as an expectation, my brain, with its intuition, is going to reveal the unconscious part, and it's going to create an anxiety for fear of losing that, and, why?

Because the brain knows that's not a true objective. It's a fantasy. And the brain has a wisdom and knows, in it's executive center, not the amygdala, but the executive center, knows when something's a fantasy.

And it basically whispers the unconscious to you, which lets you know the downside, which we have anxiety and fear. So we can create automatically a fear of something in the goals that we set if they're fantasies. We automatically say, well, I'm going to go and do this thing and we exaggerate it in time or exaggerate it in magnitude and space or set up something that's only one sided, we automatically in our brain automatically create a fear to let us know that we're pursuing a fantasy.

We're trying to get the one side. So the more our brain is looking for a pleasure without a pain, the more our brain points out the pains. That's why our executive center in the forebrain is designed to take fantasies and turn them into true objectives.

And it's designed to make sure that your intuition is used to make sure that you're thinking of the downsides, along with the upsides. One of the wisest things you can do is ask, 'What is it, the goal you have, what obstacles might you run into and how do you solve in advance? ' The purpose of the executive center in the brain is to take the fantasies where you're blinded and only see the upsides and don't see the downsides and think in advance what they can be and be prepared for them.

So you're not reactive when they occur. You're proactive. So your phobia is your friend when you're pursuing fantasies because it's letting you know that you have pursued something that's not authentic and it's not objective and it's not grounded.

So in other words, your phobia is not necessarily a bad thing. It's letting you know that you're searching for a fantasy, which then gives you the fear of loss, or you're perceiving something that's got more negatives than positives because you're addicted to its opposite and trying to run away from it. And every time you search for a fantasy to avoid pain or a fantasy to get pleasure without pain, you're automatically going to have phobia come up.

So phobia is your friend to let you know, you're not setting real objectives. It's trying to help you break through the illusions of the fantasies that you're pursuing and get you onto an objective, which has both sides. Imagine again, having a relationship with somebody that's only one sided, it's not going to happen, but if you understand that a human being has a set of values and when you support their values they can be nice, when you challenge their values, they can be , and to expect them to have nice and mean moments and to love the individual for both sides, which we all want to be loved for.

If we pursue a real objective, the individual as they really are and love them in a sense without those conditions of one sidedness and we can love them unconditionally in that moment, we don't have this fear coming up, we're neutral and we embrace the person and we can get that out of an individual. But if you're expecting somebody to be one sided and you expect a fantasy, you're automatically going to be let down and you're automatically going to have your intuition bring up a fear to let you know you're pursuing a fantasy. So that fear is coming up in your mind to help you break addictions to fantasies and to help you go into true objectives.

So fear is your friend when it's put into context, but it can also be appearingly assumed enemy if you're looking for a pleasure without a pain. So when people go and try to do the positive thinking and they try to go, and I just want to focus on the positive, never wanting to think about the negatives and just focus on the positive, fear is going to haunt them constantly because they're going to be searching for fantasies. But if there is somebody that's more grounded and they're more interested in what's real and what's more objective, then fear is going to be seen as a feedback to make sure that you're setting real goals, real objectives, in real times, that are balanced, because the truth is, life is going to give you both sides.

You're not going to get a one sided outcome. And by the way, if you're infatuated with somebody or something, you'll tend to minimize yourself to them and feel you're too humble to admit what you see in them is inside you. And then you'll want to change, you'll inject their values into your life and you'll try to live in their values.

And if you resent somebody, and by the way that's futile trying to live in other people's values. And if you resent somebody, you'll be too proud to admit what you see in them is inside you. And you're going to want to change them relative to you, which is also futile and being around them when you're trying to change them, and then they don't change is a fear, fear of gain and being around somebody that you fear the loss of, because you're not living up to the expectations, is also a fear.

So every time you judge and have a subjective bias and you have a conscious and unconscious split, you're going to have fear. You're also going to have the fantasy or the philia that goes with it. But the second you see both sides and embrace both sides and set true objectives by living by your highest values and having foresight and planning and seeing both sides, you can actually dissolve the impact that the philias and the phobias have on your path.

So fear can be seen in proper context, is a vehicle to break through, by breaking through the fantasies that go with it, by seeing both sides at the same time and having a true objective, you can transcend the phobias and the philias of your life and get on with something that's truly meaningful and truly an objective. So I just wanted to just take that time to go over those. And by the way, there's many different types of fears.

You can have the fear of loss of loved ones. You can have the fear of loss of knowledge or fear of not knowing knowledge, the fear of a failure in business, the fear of loss of money or not making money, the fear of rejection, the fear of ill health, death, or disease, or the fear of somehow breaking the morals and ethics of some spiritual authority. But all of those are built out of the fantasies that if you have those things, life will be happier.

And the addiction to happiness is part of the cost for the sadness. The addiction to the fantasy is what causes the nightmare. I always say that the depression that you have in your life, if you ever have a down moment, the depression is a comparison of your current reality to some fantasy that you're addicted to because they come as pairs, as long as you're addicted to the fantasy of a positive, without a negative, your life intuitively has to bring up the negative without a positive to counterbalance it, to make you associate with that fantasy, that fear and that pain to try to break that addiction.

So our fantasy of one sidedness and in extreme rigid judgments of absolute perceptions of positive or negative, adds to our fear in our life. But if we actually live by our highest values and live by priority, and we go up into our objective centers of the brain and start seeing both sides and set goals that are both sides, we actually transcend the fear, break through the fear, if you will, and fulfill what we could call our soul's mission. Thank you for joining me for this presentation today.

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