On Showing Fear

Showing fear in certain confrontations. I have done it. I see it in myself. Yet I can also see that among average humans I'm not a total coward. I've been in typical fights in school days and didn't make a bad showing. I was aggressive in sports. But I definitely began to show fear in certain confrontations once I started to separate from life. Like, the kind of visual fear that makes people accuse you of being a coward. Here's how I look at it, and this isn't justifying anything.

I think when you get into Man #4 ground you are an extreme in the human community. And you are in a more dangerous situation. Spiritually. So confrontations mean more for you. Because everybody - the General Law - is against you. Nobody really is pulling for you or on your side. So you become aware that if you make a mistake you can get yourself in a bad situation (like prison).

So in those flash moments when you show fear you are really showing fear of the potential disaster that can happen to you in that moment. I mean, I've been in states where I could just kill everybody. That is as extreme as being in the rare altitude of real development. So, because I don't want to kill everybody, each little confrontation has more potential for disaster for me, so I flinch and blanche (is blanche a word?) and hesitate, and sometimes literally freeze, physically.

That is higher will keeping me from a stupid temptation and stupid personal disaster in confrontation with the General Law. And I just have to swallow the fact that the witnesses see "cowardice." It IS to them, anyway. But to me it's me not wanting to kill everybody. It's me recognizing a dangerous situation (dangerous for me specifically in a spiritual sense) and backing away from it.

Does that sound like justification? Because I just started seeing it that way. I was just thinking I'd become a coward. But the pattern over time began to say something to me. It occured with people like one of my sisters who it's ridiculous to think I'd be a physical coward against. The incidents were just me moving towards a bad event and me stopping in my tracks, literally in FEAR of "going there." Because of the consequences.

It's the old connection between the artist and the criminal. You can veer towards one extreme from the other. I can truly develop and be in strange ground or I can veer into kill everybody violent chaos. Because I have enough control I don't do that. But "some" events or incidents seem to have more meaning, or more potential for getting me into bondage to the General Law and it's specifically those events and incidents that I had these unique psychological and physical reactions just at the point of possible confrontation.

I havn't had one lately, which is maybe why I can see it now more objectively, and see what was maybe occuring in those events.

And the accusations of cowardice are just ridiculous usually anyway, because nobody for the record is actually challenging me. (They sense the kill everybody potential in me.) It's more of the typical taunting you get from the massed General Law. They feel safe because of their numbers against you. It's healthy for me because it kills vanity. In fact, like I said, before I began to see it as I've described it here I was just accepting of the fact that I seem to be a coward.

New Books

Look at this: you have to build a new library. But since no more new books exist to be discovered, the new library looks like this:

1. Book of Internal-Considering
2. Book of Self-Remembering
3. Book of External-Considering
4. Book of Non-Identifying
5. Book of Observation of Features of False Personality
6. Book of Separation
7. Book of New Thinking

Each book can only be "read" by doing the book. The book exists, but "out there" in experience.

40 Day Work Effort (3rd of '07)

The above depiction of a 3x5 card shows 16 hours worth of self-remembering effort accomplished. (Each x equals a 15 minute span of time; there are 64 x's.)

In an average day there will be 16 hours when a person is out and about (assuming 8 hours of sleep is the norm).

Each day of the 40 days of this effort I'll make up a card like this and put an x in the box for every time I'm able to be awake at a fifteen minute interval starting from the previous interval. 64 x's is the most I can mark in one day. I'll record the total number of x's marked for each day.

I keep moving the start date up, but I think today - the 16th - is the day, unless it's tomorrow.

April 16, 2007 - May 25, 2007

Day 1 -

John Owen, Biblical Theology - extracts

When men [shallow Christian scholars and church leaders] exercise their minds about spiritual matters while being themselves strangers to the Holy Spirit and His evangelical workings, the outcome is often a despising of, and hostility to, the Spirit of Christ in those to whom He has graciously bestowed His gifts in accordance with the New Testament promises. Surely some part of the philosophy that they have learned must make them understand that such evangelical talents as are well-pleasing to God must be manifested publicly, and will be seen in operation among the pious; but, even if they refrain themselves from mocking the Holy Spirit openly and directly in plain language, yet it is still their custom to exercise their impudent wits in criticism of those whose privileges they do not share. Very Suffenuses themselves, they are never more popular among profane mockers than when the mark of their elegant and witty attacks is the Spirit of God dwelling in the pious.

In external matters, where the study of Christian theology has some common ground with secular sciences, they [shallow Christian scholars and church leaders] are often fierce and fiery disputants; they are subtle investigators of theologico-philosophical propositions. They give appearance of being (and often in truth are) great gluttons for their books. And yet, when they must stand before the people and expound the mysteries of the gospel, they merely demonstrate their own ineffeciency and emptiness.

From page 610-11 of Owen's Biblical Theology.