What is love?”
“The total absence of fear,” said the Master.
“What is it we fear?”
“Love,” said the Master. (Anthony de Mello)
Do you all agree? Is Love is the opposite of fear?
Dozens of blogs and articles online say this. Personally I don’t think it’s that simple though. I think various emotions can exist inside us at the same time. But since the people who write this do have at least part of a point, I’m going to go into this subject by quoting a few.
Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. It’s natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement.
Jampolsky, Gerald G.
The underlying assumption is that love and fear are the basis of all other emotions. In the words of
Frank Sant’Agata
Love and fear are the only emotions we as human entities are able to express. All the others are just sub-categorical emotions. For example, on love’s side there is joy, peacefulness, happiness, forgiveness, and a host of others. On the other hand, fear reflects: hate, depression, guilt, inadequacy, discontentment, prejudice, anger, attack, and so on.
Biologically this is true to some extent. Fear and anger are both biologically expressed with only one hormone: adrenaline. The response to adrenaline is either fight (anger) or flight (fear). This duality is pretty basic. It is in fact so basic that it has been used in the enneagram as the motivating power in six out of the nine personality types. Three have fear as the main motivating power and three have anger as the motivating power. In the enneagram the three personality types left have sadness or sorrow as the motivating power.
I’m bringing the enneagram into this because it is a way of talking about the personality that has more dimensions and is therefor closer to the truth of our lives as we experience it.
Back to the theme of today: love is the opposite of fear. Looked at biologically this would mean that love is the absence of adrenaline. This makes some sense. Fear certainly makes a lot of spiritual practice harder. Breathing for instance becomes hard when fear takes over. Focusing on the needs of someone else is harder when we are scared for our own lives, livelihood or whatever. In other words: fear makes love harder.
As JD says (*):
Fear is wired into the biochemistry of our bodies. Fear has been a necessary part of physical survival. Fear provided that extra amount of strength, speed, and agility to save our pre-history ancestor from being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger. (The Fight or Flight Syndrome). Those same physiological reactions are present in our modern-day bodies which respond just as strongly to psychological fears as they do to physical fears.
The tiger was real – our psychological fears are not. Our bodies, not knowing the difference, treat them as one and the same. Thus, if we are to change our relationship with psychological fear, it is necessary to find the source of our fear and heal it.
I agree to some extent: our psychological fears are only partly realistic. The tiger was concrete. But since he could often be neither heard nor seen – fear was probably often there even when the tiger wasn’t. Similarly for ordinary healthy people fears are usually based on something. For instance, with the present economic difficulties many people are afraid for their jobs or their business. The foundation is real. However the outcome on the stock market is by now overdone I think. Most of the underlying uncertainties have been dealt with reasonably well by governments (in Europe especially). Once people become afraid – they infect each other.
I don’t think that kind of fear has anything to do with love. It’s not the opposite of love, but rather on a different level or something.
There are all kinds of things more related to fear than love. For instance Jiddu Krishnamurti explored the iidea that thought and time are the root of fear. For Sogyal Rinpoche “the ultimate fear” is “the fear of looking into ourselves.”
(*) Originally at: http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/~acceptance/YourPurposeWeb/TransformFeartoLove.htm
I think both can co-exist in one person, love being generated by the heart and fear being generated by the root chakra.
As a sober member of AA I can attest to the fact that making a “fears list is very freeing.” we do this in step 4, which is our “resentment” list. Fear should be classed with stealing, it harms more.
http://davesawakening.blogspot.com/2011/03/metal-in-our-minds.html
I think the concept being pointed towards by this ever-more-popular “love/fear” dichotomy is basically true. The problem is that “love” and “fear” are both loaded words–conjuring up many conditioned associations in the mind that serve to distract from the essence of what is being said about their relationship to each other. I do agree that everything we do is rooted either in love or in fear, and I also agree that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive–that some things we do have roots in both love and fear (like a mother instinctually reaching down and grabbing her child, who has just absentmindedly stepped down from the curb towards traffic)–but I think upon close examination, nothing we do can be shown to be rooted in something other than love or fear. Anything we do can be traced back to either or both.
Sometimes I think “love” and “fear” aren’t the best words to use in describing this concept, because they are both culturally loaded words, so full of associations that can easily distract one from the essence of the message they’re being used to convey in this case. It took me a while to accept the idea because at first, to be honest, considering “love” and “fear” to be polar opposites was alien to my way of thinking, owing to my lack of understanding of what those words mean in this particular context. It took some reflection and contemplation, but I now recognize the forces that are being referred to when people speak of “love” and “fear” in this way. Although the meanings that culture and conditioning cause us to attach to the words may shed light on some of the particular manifestations of this dynamic, in other ways they can be obstacles to understanding.
Sometimes Eros and fear feel much the same. Fluttering heart, shortness of breath, boundless energy, lack of hunger, etc etc. Adrenaline.
Agape, on the other hand, lends its meaning more to action. I guess we call that “charity” (in the Greek sense, not the United Way bullshit sense). It seems to be less emotion and more a method. That’s what tosses a wrench the love/fear duality thing for me.
If God/The All/The Absolute/Whatever can be equated with Love, then one might say “All/The Singularity is Love”. But then the polarity becomes Something/Nothing. This is the most “zoomed-out” duality I can conceive of. But translate that into emotion, and you’ve got a duality of Some emotion/No emotion. So that would place all emotion on one end, and apathy or “nothing” on the other.
I don’t know where to go from there yet.
Dan , you said exactly what i’ve been thinking. Stella, I’m totally with you on that one. I feel that if I get to the real/absolute meaning of love, then the rest will all fall into place.
My theory: Beliefs/Religion/Philosophy,etc. are a function of Love, Fear, and True Desire. Your beliefs in turn drive reality.
Please email me if you think of anything else impacting our beliefs. Don’t say other people though because other people just influence love, fear, and desire.
ryan.koglin@gmail.com
Funny that. This has been a recurring theme for me in the last year. I have not done any research on it (so thank you for that), and I too thought there was more to it than that. Now I am not so sure. I used to think everything could be traced back to anger, sadness, fear and happiness – that these four were the base of the subtler, more complex emotions. Now, after a lot of questioning and exploration, I think the Love/Fear dichotomy is probably right…and I don’t think they are necessarily emotions. I think either love or fear gives rise to emotions. The closer I look, the more true it seems, but I am far from finished.