www.radicaluncertainty.com

Author: Nicholas Williams

FREEDOM FROM ANXIETY

The only genuine way to be free from anxiety is to cultivate an unprejudiced mind. If there is no prejudice, then there can be no anxiety – it is as simple as that.

By ‘prejudice’ we do not mean hating and despising a certain group of people (although this is certainly one example of prejudice). We are talking about prejudice in a more general and abstract sort of way; what we basically mean is attachment, i.e. ‘attraction versus aversion’, ‘like versus dislike’, or ‘greed versus fear’.

When I experience attachment (which is to say, when I find myself liking or disliking something) I automatically assume that this reaction is ‘an action belonging to me’, that it is an expression of my own true nature. I take it for granted that my likes and dislikes are an expression of who I really am. This is the reason why we so rarely question our likes and dislikes, and the reactions that come out of them.

This is just like a drinker who assumes that it is he himself who wants the drink, not seeing that it is the addiction which has taken him over that is causing him to crave alcohol. Or it is like an angry person who assumes that his angry outburst is an expression of his own true will, not realizing that it is the distorting influence of the angry frame of mind that is responsible. In all such cases a compulsion is controlling me, whilst the whole time I am fondly imagining that it is me who is doing the controlling.

I never ever seem to think that the prejudice in question (i.e. the compulsion) might be something that I have picked up along the way. I never think that it might not be my ‘like or dislike’ at all, that it is in fact a way of looking at the world which has no particular validity and which I have accidentally acquired in much the same way as a person might accidentally acquire athlete’s foot or herpes. If I saw things like this I would definitely start to feel less fond of my prejudices!

PREJUDICE AS AUTOMATIC EVALUATION

‘Prejudice’, in the general sense that we are talking about it, simply refers to the process of automatic evaluation that goes on all the time in my head. The reason we say that this process is automatic is because we judge stuff that is happening to us as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ (to give just two examples) in a purely habitual or unreflective way. The point is that we don’t pay any real attention to what we are doing when we evaluate, we just evaluate. And then we react on this basis…

The fact of the matter is that the way the evaluation process is going to go has been decided well in advance by a bunch of rules that are buried somewhere in my unconscious mind. The unconscious rules which govern how I interpret (or ‘understand’) the world are sometimes called conditioning, and we obviously all have conditioning of one sort or another. When I judge a situation as being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ I am not judging the situation myself (although it feels like I am)- the situation is being judged for me by the conditioning that is lodged in my head. Actually everything that happens to me has been judged well in advance of it ever happening. It has been ‘pre-judged’, which is obviously where the word prejudice comes from.

THE ENACTMENT OF PREJUDICE

As we have said, when I judge (or evaluate) a situation I always follow up with a reaction of one sort or another, and the point of this reaction is basically to control the situation in accordance with my likes and dislikes. Therefore, prejudice causes reaction which (if everything goes to plan) turns into controlling. When I am able to control the situation successfully I get a comfortable feeling out of it – successful controlling feels good to me, it gives me satisfaction and a feeling of ‘security’. I am rewarded by a glow of euphoria – I have got it right (or so the feeling is telling me).

Generally speaking, when I am able to stay in control in this way the whole process becomes very ‘unconscious’ (or ‘habitual’). Basically, it is just like scratching an itch – I do it without really paying attention, I do it whilst my attention is on other affairs. As long as I can ‘successfully scratch’ the itch, who cares about it?

UNSUCCESSFUL SCRATCHING

The trouble all starts when I am not able to control successfully. This is when I really start to wake up out of my comfortable, automatic state and – needless to say – this ‘waking up’ is not at all pleasant. If I can scratch the itch as soon as the itch arises, then it is just as if the itch never arose, but when I cannot alleviate the discomfort of the itch, then I really start to notice it. You can be sure that I start to pay attention when this happens, and I start to get rather worried into the bargain. There is a terrible feeling of something ‘going wrong’.

Being ‘out of control’ is a very deep fear for all of us, and when it happens we evaluate it (automatically of course) as being very bad indeed, and we react by trying to control the feeling of ‘being out of control’. In other words, we try to use the tool of controlling all the more forcefully when it fails us. We don’t like being out of control and so we try to rectify this fault. But because it is our ability to ‘control the situation’ that is itself the weakness, this automatic reaction to control my unsuccessful controlling simply backfires on me and when it is when my efforts do backfire on me in this way that the fear really starts to hit home.

THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

At this point I am lost, because the intensified fear makes me react very strongly and very automatically indeed. However, this reaction simply exacerbates matters. It exacerbates two things: [1] the feeling that something is wrong, and [2] the horrible suspicion that ‘I cannot do anything about it’. We can easily see what is going to happen here - I get locked into a horrific vicious circle, a self-fuelling explosion of anxiety. When this happens to its fullest extent we call it a ‘panic attack’.

Of course, anxiety doesn’t always escalate in this way –often it just grumbles away like a volcano threatening to irrupt, and we spend our time trying to prevent this irruption from taking place. In other words, we are living under the constant shadow of this most unwanted occurrence - ‘the irruption of uncontrolled anxiety’. We lead, as the line goes, lives of ‘quiet desperation’. Hanging onto whatever security we can find (which isn’t that much, when it comes down to it).

CULTIVATING AN ‘UNPREJUDICED MIND’

The absolutely crucial thing to understand about all this is that it is no good at all being prejudicial about anxiety, in fact being prejudiced towards anxious thoughts and anxious feelings isn’t just useless, it makes everything a lot worse, as we have just seen. If what causes anxiety in the first place is a prejudicial outlook on things, then intensifying my prejudice (i.e. intensifying my feelings of ‘like’ and ‘dislike’) is just like pouring petrol on a fire in a desperate attempt to put it out. The fact that it is the failure of my reacting (the failing of my attempt to regain control) which is causing all the problems in the first place - because of the implication that it is very very important that I should be in control – is something that I don’t take into account at all.

Identifying anxious feelings and anxious thoughts as being ‘very bad indeed’ and trying very hard to fight against them (or run away from them) is what automatically happens when we are anxious – there is an absolutely overwhelming ‘tendency to react’ that just takes hold us, and carries us off. As we said right at the beginning of this discussion, we can become free from this tendency by cultivating a mind that is free from prejudice. The way to cultivate an unprejudiced mind is so simple, and so obvious, that we never actually see it.

The first thing that we need to understand is the utter impossibility of using ‘prejudice to defeat prejudice’. In other words, if I notice that my mind is prejudiced (i.e. if I notice that it automatically labels situations as good or bad and then reacts all by itself), then by labelling this automatic ‘tendency to label situations’ as being bad (or ‘undesirable’) all I am doing is strengthening that very same tendency. If I react against my tendency to react, then all I am doing is strengthening my ‘tendency to react’, and so I am feeding the very monster that is making my life so very hard for me.

Basically, it doesn’t change anything for me to be ‘prejudiced against prejudice’ because that is still prejudice. I haven’t gone anywhere different. I am still in exactly the same place I always was. Once we see this clearly (once we understand the utter impossibility of using prejudice to eliminate prejudice) then the answer becomes clear – the answer is simply to see prejudice for what it is, without being prejudiced against it in anyway. To put it even more simply, all I have to is to notice the fact that I am prejudiced, and that notice the fact that I am acting in a prejudiced way, and straightaway I am unprejudiced.

PREJUDICE CANNOT SEE ITSELF AS SUCH

When we think about this we can see that it must be true. Let us think about a highly prejudiced person – a member of an extremely right-wing party who has very strongly defined views about the absolute supremacy of his own race, for example. Such a person is supremely prejudiced, as everyone else can see easily. Such extreme prejudice stands out a mile. But the person themselves does not for one second see themselves as being ‘prejudiced’. He sees his viewpoint as being the one and only RIGHT viewpoint. Because he has validated his prejudice in this way, it doesn’t seem like prejudice to him. After all prejudice means ‘a way of looking at the world that has no real validity at all, but which is there only because of the fact that ‘it is there’.

Conditioning isn’t ‘the truth’ (even though this is how it validates itself to itself) it is merely a habitually ingrained viewpoint that happens to see the world in the particular way that it does. Because that is the way that it sees things. In other words, I have fish fingers and mashed potatoes on a Tuesday because this is what I have always done; it must be right, therefore. The habit validates itself in terms of itself and this, needless to say, is not true validation at all).

Going back to our example of our man who believes himself to belong to the ‘master race’, if he could actually see that he is in fact prejudiced in this regard, then he would no longer be prejudiced. Prejudice is a sort of a mental comfort zone, and when we see that we are prejudiced, there is obviously no comfort in this at all – the whole point, after al, is not to be aware of this fact. Prejudice is only prejudice when it does not see itself as such.

This is a very important point to understand because it shows us the key to being ‘free from prejudice’ – it shows us what the art of cultivating an even (or unprejudiced) mind consists of. In a nutshell, we can say that it consists of accurately noticing myself, and my way of relating to the world. I don’t evaluate, or analyse, or rationalize, or conceptualize, I just see, like a young child would see. A small child sees the world ‘innocently’, so to speak, and what they are ‘innocent’ of is prejudice. The very young have no pre-formed opinions about the world - they have no clever or sophisticated ways of seeing, they just see.

RECOVERING INTEGRITY

There is only one thing really that stops us from seeing ourselves and the world in this way – and that is that we don’t really want to see reality as it really is. We would rather carry on the way we always do – to actually notice what is really going on requires from us a basic ‘integrity’ or ‘sincerity’ that usually lies buried beneath the surface. How interested am I seeing the truth? Do I really want to take that risk? These are the pertinent questions that I need to ask.

Paradoxically, what helps us to find (or ‘recover’) our own basic integrity or sincerity is the very difficulty of the situation that we are in. Anxiety makes life horribly difficult for us, and this difficulty ‘forces us back on ourselves’ - it makes it more likely that we will be able to reach that level of sincerity in which we are willing to see whatever it is that is necessary for us to see in order to get to the very root of the matter.

CHALLENGING ‘DEEP’ CONDITIONING

We have been saying that it is our ‘conditioning’ that is at fault, that it is these internalized rules about what is ‘right’ and what is ‘not right’. This is not entirely correct because we have not properly differentiated between social conditioning (i.e. rules we absorb from our families and from society as a whole) and what we might call ‘deep’ conditioning. By deep conditioning what we mean is a sort of fundamental level of belief concerning pain in general, and fear in particular.

The belief here is that pain and fear are completely ‘bad’ and harmful and must be avoided whenever possible. We also have very powerful beliefs regarding what is ‘possible’ and what is ‘impossible’ in terms of being in those painful and fearful places that we dislike so much. We will focus on fear here since what we are mainly concerned with is anxiety. The most important thing to understand here is that this rule which is fear is bad, and the two associated rules which say:

[1] I must not be in that scary place and

[2] I am not able to be in that scary place

are not true at all. We can in fact see fairly easily that they are stupid rule – for example, if I retreated every time I felt fear, then this would means that my life is going to be totally ruled by fear, and this in turn would mean that I would have no sort of a life at all. In order to be able to live, I must take risks (life itself is nothing but one long risk really), and taking risks means exposing myself to fear. If I refuse to ever hang around in any scary, risky places, then my life is going to turn into one long neurotic nightmare. So – what kind of a stupid dumb-arse rule is it that says ‘fear is bad’ and ‘fear must be avoided’?

WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT…?

All of the above rules can be seen to be total nonsense just as soon as we focus on them, and this is why it is helpful to spend some time focussing on them, and focussing especially on fear itself. One good way to look at fear is to say that it has something to do with the loss of our habitual comfort zone(s).

The reason we are so addicted to control is simply because we want to ensure the continuance of our comfort zone. We have a profound prejudice against ‘not knowing what is going to happen’ next’ because if we don’t know what is going to happen next, how do we know if our comfort zone is going to continue? How do we know if our psychological security is going to carry on being secure?

Part of our comfort zone (a very important part) is ‘not knowing that our comfort zone is actually a comfort zone’. We could also try to explain this key point by saying that ‘an important part of our comfort zone is us not allowing ourselves to see just how important it is for us’. This is obvious enough, once we think about it a bit.

The next point to make is that this ‘not allowing ourselves to know what is really going on’ business has a very unpleasant sort of a consequence, which we can explain like this. If something happens to threaten our comfort zone (and just the normal uncertainty of life is enough to do this!) then something ‘funny’ happens we feel very bad, but if we were to try to figure out what this ‘feeling bad’ is all about (which we generally don’t)then we would discover that we don’t really know.

What we are talking about here is fear, and the important point to understand about fear is that it is an ‘unconscious motivation’, i.e. we are driven to desperately defend something, but we don’t actually know what that ‘something’ is, what it is that we are defending it against, nor why we it is so important that we should defend it in the first place.

If we are pushed far enough, fear appears to be about death. In a way, this is the ‘ultimate’ fear. In this case two of the above answers seem to be answered – I am defending the continuance of my own self, I am struggling against the possibility of ‘non-continuance’. [Interestingly, this still doesn’t really answer the question of why it is so disproportionately important that I should continue no matter what the cost! That is kind of ‘taken for granted’.]

The apparently straightforward issue about death is itself a bit of a blind (or ‘pseudo-issue’) however, even though this is very hard thing to accept. If I were to be really accurate what I would have to say is that it is not my self that I am so concerned, but my comfort zone, since my ‘idea of myself’ is nothing other than a belief, i.e. a ‘comfort zone’. I don’t really know what I am, and I don’t really know what death is, and if I were to be honest I would have to admit that what I am defending is my idea about the sort of continuance that I believe that particular mental construct which is ‘me’ to have.

REALITY IS NOT A ‘CONTINUITY’

Reality itself is not a mental construct, and it is not a comfort zone, which is to say, it is not any sort of a ‘continuity’. If we wanted to say something about reality, we would have to say something like ‘it is a gap in which stuff can happen’, or ‘it is openness which is equally open to everything’, or it is ‘uncertainty’. We could also say that ‘life is risk’.

This is an interesting way of looking at things because it gives us a neat definition of the rational mind (on the one hand), versus reality itself (on the other hand). We can say [1] that reality is not a construct and it is equally open to everything, and [2] that the rational mind is a construct and so is not equally open to everything. Anxiety is therefore an inevitable consequence of being rational, which is to say, of me identifying myself with a definite idea or ‘construct’.

What we are basically saying here is that our ultimate prejudice is the prejudice that all constructs have towards uncertainty or risk. This is a very strange thing though because it means that what we are actually prejudiced against is life itself. My insistence on knowing for sure ‘what happens next’ makes me take life and the universe as my enemy, and this is not a smart move on my part, since I am simply not going to win. Freedom from anxiety can only come, therefore, when I am free from my prejudice against the risk that is life.

In conclusion, we can say that the relationship between uncertainty, fear and anxiety is as follows: if I am prejudiced against uncertainty (or risk), then fear starts to come into the picture, and if I am prejudiced against fear, then anxiety begins. Following anxiety, there is ‘anxiety about anxiety’, but because prejudice against anxiety is still called anxiety, we don’t need to go any further in this naming process. But if there is no deep-rooted prejudice against uncertainty (i.e. if I have cultivated an unprejudiced mind) then this chain reaction never gets started in the first place.