In my master's program once a friend interviewed me to see why I was studying sustainability issues, why I was concerned. At the end of an hour long interview or so, he pointed out that my answers to his questions showed that I was studying sustainability out of fear. I was baffled. It didn't make any sense to me and, yet, logically, I couldn't argue with it. So, I just dismissed it.
I had heard throughout my life about the concept of acting out of love versus fear. I think I must have heard it everywhere from Bible classes as a child to self-help books and poetry as an adult. It always sounded simple enough. I never thought much about it.
However, it really clicked with me when I read "The Book of Mirdad" by Mikhail Naimy. I read it at a time when I was starting to look inwards in order to deal with the identity crisis that moving to Greece entailed for me. I had spent several months here and still had not found a job. I felt guilty and useless, but I knew that I hadn't done anything wrong to warrant feeling that way. I knew that I wasn't guilty of anything but following my heart and I certainly wasn't useless. So, in those hot summer months, feeling lost and insecure in a big, noisy city, I decided to figure out where those feelings were really coming from. I started reaching out for every bit of knowledge and guidance I could get in the area of "what is life really about?".
I remembered this book that a good friend of mine had given me and decided that it was time I read it. It was intuition.
Once I started reading "The Book of Mirdad" I couldn't stop. It's an incredible cache of wisdom and truth. The idea that our actions are guided by either love or fear is a major theme in the book that really touched me deeply. I could feel those words. I couldn't explain how or why, but I knew them to be true.
We are all acting out of either love or fear. It's a nice thought. So simple. But I wasn't craving nice thoughts. I was looking for things that would help me delve into the mysteries of my life. So, I put it to the test. I started watching my intentions more closely to see if it could be applied, in real-life situations. Do fear and love really guide me?
What I found was amazing. I could trace all of my intentions back to one of those two sources. If I did something out of anger or frustration, I could always find the roots of the anger and frustration in fear. If I was angry with somebody, it was because I was afraid of being hurt by that person, or afraid of being hurt by a situation. Fear is a lack of understanding. We don't understand what's happening, so we are scared by it. Feelings of frustration, anger, sadness, and loneliness can be seen as a lack of acceptance. We aren't fully accepting of the situation. We expect it to be different, so we get sad or angry about it. But why don't we accept the situation? Why do we experience feelings of complete powerlessness? A lack of understanding. Fear.
Love is understanding. Love is acceptance. The term unconditional love is actually quite redundant. Love in its true form is always unconditional, by nature. It accepts everything and everyone, as they are. It is understanding and patient with life's processes. And we are all in-process.
It was really cool to figure this out and see it in effect in my own thoughts, feelings and actions. What was more eye-opening, though, was realizing how far-reaching those intentions are. They impact everything I do.
Let's take the example of a beggar to illustrate this point. If there is a beggar on the street who approaches me for money, I can either give it to him or not. It seems pretty straight forward and a lot of people might say that giving a beggar money is always the better thing to do than not. Some people might say quite the opposite.
But let's look at why I might give the beggar money. Maybe I would do so just to get him away from me as quickly as possible. In this case, it's either because I'm directly afraid of him or because I don't understand his situation, I can't accept that there are beggars, it makes me feel sad, so I give him the money out of fear, based in a lack of understanding. Maybe there's even a sub-conscious part of me that's afraid that I could someday end up like that, so I pay him in order to feel like a good person and avoid the karma of bad people. I'm paying out of fear of bad karma or a punishing God.
So, is not paying him any better? Well, not if I don't pay him because I'm feeling greedy. I'm hoarding my money for myself so that I'll never have to face a situation like his. In essence, I'm afraid of not having enough, myself. Or suppose I don't pay him because I feel I'm better than him. I resent him for not contributing to the economy, like I do. These feelings of superiority and resentment are fear-based for sure. Maybe it's greed again; I'm afraid that his status as a beggar is impacting me in a negative way, slowing down the economy that supports me or sucking away the tax money that I work so hard to earn. They are based in a lack of understanding the situation and this, on some level, scares me.
However, if I give or don't give the man money out my concern for his well-being, then I'm acting out of love. I might not fully understand his situation, but I'm not letting my lack of understanding lead me to act out of fear. I'm accepting the man and his situation, regardless. That is love.
But it should also be clear that I'm not saying it's either/or. I'm not saying that you can only have love or fear. Most of the time, we have both intentions and the emotions they bring. We feel scared and happy at the same time. It's hardly ever straight-forward. We all experience all of these things. The full range. And, indeed, I believe that we need to experience them.
However, when we act, we are acting out of either mostly love or mostly fear. I can fool myself as much as I want, but when I take an honest, deep look into myself, I can see clearly whether I am acting out of fear or love. And it takes some time to learn how to pick the pieces apart and detect your own unique patterns and defenses, but once you do, it comes almost automatically to think about intention in your daily life. The simple word, "Why?" is infinitely helpful. There are no absolute morals for what kind of actions are right or wrong. Only I can know whether I am acting out of love or fear. Only I can know if I'm acting in integrity.
Maybe it sounds silly to some people, to think about why you do stuff all the time. To think, "Am I acting out of love or fear?" might really sound ridiculous to some.
All I can say to that is that it's helped me to act out of deliberation and intention, with the reassurance that I know why I'm doing the things I do and, therefore, I am empowered. When I am in control of myself and my actions (due to understanding them, not repressing them) I don't get myself into all kinds of crazy, drama-ridden situations. So much of the suffering of the world is due to peoples' lack of awareness of why they do the things they do. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that we, as a human species, are self-destructing. We are self-destructing by means of self-medication, by means of violence, by means of environmental degradation. It just makes no sense. So, it's essential that we figure out why we're behaving the way we are. We need to do this as individuals as well as communities/collectives.
In learning from this wide array of emotions and gaining some clarity about what causes these feelings in us and which feelings we prefer to experience and which intentions we prefer to base our actions in, we are able to take responsibility for our feelings, intentions, actions and consequences. That means that we are able to take responsibility for our happiness and well-being. We can no longer consider ourselves victims of life. This is a tremendously empowering development in a human life. If extrapolated to general society... well, just imagine a world of people who act consciously out of love. They don't let fear and it's emotions (greed, jealousy, resentment, loneliness, anger, etc) guide their actions. Imagine that world.
Now, I challenge you to contribute to making that world a possibility. Are you acting out of love or fear today?
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