Fear

(A chapter in YOU HAVE UPSET THE BALANCE OF THE UNIVERSE BY BEING BORN: Advice on How to Live by Dr Robert MacLean, PhD: http://robertmaclean.blogspot.com/p/you-have-upset-balance-of-universe-by.html. A new chapter every so often.)
    
    You are a swashbuckler.  You live beyond your means, both financially and psychologically.  You live dangerously, which is to say naked and unashamed.  Play and danger are what you need.  There is no security anyway and heaven loves those who dare.
    Fear is a bore (see BOREDOM).
    And what is guilt but fear of punishment?  Also boring.  Surrender to the air and ride on it.  If there is a cosmic bureaucrat monitoring your behavior (see GOD), give him a good show.  Sell it, baby!  Be selfish.  Be a monster.  Sin, as Martin Luther said, bravely.  You have an obligation to indulge yourself.  Once you start going for safety it never stops, it's like money.  Never enough.  Go without assurance.  Safety is vulgar.
    Taking this attitude towards fear--an attitude of disdain--gives the right relation.  Fear is ignoble.  You are noble.
    You are more than noble.  You are divine.  Fear is forgetting that one is divine.  What can possibly happen to you?
    But here is the paradox: anything can happen to you, because divinity is vulnerability.  Insofar as you are divine, that far are you vulnerable.
    Which leads to a seduction: if you make yourself tall enough you'll fly, fine, but do you want to fly?  To get high, to experience joy always can only be desirable (see JOY), and yet you find yourself yearning for a vision with a little blood in it, even if it's your own.
    The analogy is to religion.  On each of the several continents the vast majority of sentient adults are apparently bores committed to some form of religious practice or metaphysical speculation; whereas if they really believed in their eternal natures as you do it might occur to them that eternity is adequate for the contemplation of the eternal.  We have made a privileged intrusion into time.  It is the moment for things of the earth.  If they're not to your taste you'll just have to wait for the bus back.
    So it is with your fear.  You cling to it not perhaps because you are afraid but because you find it cozy, like gray weather (see WEATHER).  You suspect that it may be the price of sensitivity (see MANNERS).  Uncertainty and ambiguity are the stuff of life.  How can they be relished without fear?  Your very sensuality requires that you feel fear.  There can be no shiver of anticipation without it.
    Make yourself tall enough and you'll fly, yes, but make yourself small enough and you'll get by.  Humility is comelier than pride.  If you are of a higher race it is the condition of your moment here that you forget that.
    Fear, that is, is luxury.  An indulgence.  If it makes you feel better, go ahead.
    (See also MORALITY).