On January 11th, 2016, I started a daily practice of writing a joke meditation of the day called Cracked Pot Meditations. I was still recovering from the treatment of cancer, and I was having very challenging cognitive issues, so I chose just to put something simple and easy to write every day. Posting it to the blog allowed me to have some accountability. Some of those meditations were poorly written and unedited. I have gone back and begun editing these and adding an illustration, starting with the April 27th meditation. I hope you enjoy.
Meditation for June 12th
What Is The Opposite of Fear?
I awoke today to the tragedy at the Pulse club in Orlando, Florida, with a sense of awe and sadness. While the events on 9/11 were of a grander scale in death and just pure villainy, this is what scares me to no end, someone who has a legal firearm, misunderstood and full of rage, walking into a crowded place and opening fire.
There are already a lot of people trying to answer who the shooter is and why they did it. We always want easy and quick answers to these kinds of tragedies. Spenser Ackerman smartly tweeted,
“A reminder that thinkpiecing before reporting is a recipe for spreading misinformation.”
The point is that I can sum up why in a swift sentence: Fear is killing people, and Love is not being taught or nurtured. We are in a culture of hoarding resources, monetizing them, and turning our backs on the community.
No matter if it is homophobia, religious extremism, or jealousy, people kill others out of fear. Fear that they will have what they have taken away from them, or the fear that they won’t get what they need or want. People revert to the fight or flight animalistic part of their brain and react, and sometimes that reaction is violent and hateful.
If You Look at our society, you will see that most of what we preach is fear. We join incentive tribes around a fire and hate what we fear. In how society is made, love can barely survive, much less thrive.
Religion
Anytime you say that you believe in the one true God, you must live in constant fear because anything outside of that faith is trying to take that belief away from you. Most wars used religion to drum up hatred from their believers. It’s an us-versus-them mentality.
Religion comes from the very origin of fear. Where did we come from? Why are we here? What happens to me and all my loved ones after I die? Religion answers these questions easily – until we arrive at the age of reason. Now, the whole world outside of your religion is a threat, and you must live in constant fear in the guise of hate and self-righteousness. It’s better to lash out with violence than to acknowledge that nothing may happen to Grandma after she dies.
Religion is a cult of control. They will keep the people in fear and serve the church and its interests. In a time where the books of religions match the science of man less and less, we have powerful men in fear. We are taking away their power and control, so they retaliate, sometimes with whole governments or sometimes with one man and a gun.
Politics
We are in constant fear, especially in America, where we only have two major parties and a system that only allows two systems to operate, and it can be argued that it isn’t even two. Like Cripps and Bloods, Republicans and Democrats use fear and hate to stir up emotional fearful responses to go out and vote.
Politics have always been dirty and shameful in American history. Still, with the addition of social media and the unregulated journalism of the blogosphere, where people spin anything in their political favor, there is no oversight to say that it is all a lie. Especially on social media, you force political discourse in real time, and people type up comments out of fear. Any legitimate journalism nowadays is behind a paywall.
Some of your favorite political blogs are just a springboard for fear-based hate and may have led to the pain or death of others.
And even with the New York Times behind a paywall, they are absolutely a propaganda machine.
Things (Capitalism)
If you have things, you do not want to lose them. You may even insure them to ensure you can get more stuff if the old ones get destroyed or stolen. Things cost things, and you need to make things to get things. You also have to spend most of your life getting things to get more things.
You might also not have anything, so you covet others’ things because you feel you deserve more than what you have. Some people have a lot of things and hoard them from others, who get those things without giving anything in return.
People put a frightening amount of sentimental value into things. It takes a lot to make someone give up on some things and hold a yard sale. People will protect their things with alarms and guns. We have a whole industry that protects those things from unworthy people getting them. That same industry also protects the rights of the few who hoard all the things.
Guns are a thing that people spend millions of dollars a year on the government to make sure we get to have them. It doesn’t matter that guns are an instrument of fear, and the faster they shoot, the more bullets they carry, the longer they can shoot with accuracy, and the bigger the bullets are, the more people fear losing. The inventor of TNT, Alfred Nobel – the namesake of the peace prize award, once said, “My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand conventions. As soon as men will find that in one instant, whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace”, and boy he couldn’t be more wrong.
Culture
Because of religion, politics, and other factors, our country is nearly divided. Looking at social media, if you didn’t fearfully cull all the people you disagree with, you would see the different cultural camps. It mainly lies in the Cities, where the population dictates the state’s direction, and in the rural areas.
We fear the way others live their lives. We fear that those other groups want to erase our way of life. The more religious certainly do, and other groups are just so feared that no one knows what they do, so we make it up to make ourselves feel better. You want to know one of the reasons our government loves Israel so much? One of the prophecies of the end of the world is that all the Jewish people will return to Jerusalem, so now you know why we had the violent crusades, the making up of a country, Christian Zionists who are in congress, and trillions of dollars in military aid to them.
We confuse identifying with groups for love, but it isn’t. One is just trying to protect oneself by being in the middle of a herd. The weak and sick will be picked off. We try to find where we can fit in, and sometimes that means finding people who will protect us and our way of life. The only way to identify is by hating on those not in your group.
Love
Someone has loved you in every aspect of your life, but love is not the ruling ideal. Love plays second fiddle to fear. We even talk about wanting love on Internet dating sites, in therapy, and in religious rituals. We thought the Internet would unite the world, but it has divided us into easy-to-classify, advertising-focused groups.
If we want to make this a better place, we must love. I know that doesn’t have the same ring to it as gun legislation, kicking Muslims out of America, or whatever else people are yelling on Facebook and Twitter (X) right now. Love also sounds woo woo and some unattainable utopia that can never exist, but have you ever been loved by someone? You would know how much better the world would be if love guided our decisions and not fear.
Love is action, love is spirituality, love is love. Love is self-sacrifice and wanting to support others to be better. Love is selfless, while fear is selfish.
“Love is a combination of six ingredients: care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust. I found that a lot of people just felt really confused about what love is, so I said, here, take these six ingredients and as you go about your life, you can ask: the action I’m taking, does it have these six ingredients?
One point that I would emphasize to people is that it’s the combination of the six ingredients that make love, because so many of us have one of the ingredients in our life – like we may be deeply cared for, but we may not be in a situation of trust. To me what’s great about these definitions is that they’re just very helpful for people in daily life trying to engage in a practice of love.”
- bell hooks
Love is he opposite of fear. If you are religious, look at the parts of your scriptures that preach love and ignore the moral judgements that preach fear. If you are a politician, stop deciding on laws that are reactions to fear and pass laws that nurture love. If you love, you don’t necessarily need things. If you loved, guns would be for hunters and hobbyists and not for people living in fear. You would no longer live in fear if you loved and felt loved.