I think I know why. Balloons are not supposed to take on those shapes, and confronting them as I did had threatened my young, fragile sense of the real, which is why I felt that pang of looming insanity. Oddly, if the Holy Ghost had appeared to me, I would have been left in wonder rather than terror, but I knew about the Holy Ghost, even if only as a child. But square balloons? That was another dimension. That was losing it.
What is fear, then, after all? One of the greatest common fears people have is of public speaking, one report I read even claiming that people preferred death to talking to a large group of people (which seems a little extreme, granted). Why? I think I know – many think that they would lose their thread of thought and stand there like an idiot as people hid their eyes in embarrassment for them – or worse, that they might say the wrong thing, like “I have to fart” even though they must know that this would never happen. Either way, the fear is that they would “lose it” before everyone and have to hide in shame for the rest of their lives.
There are many other fears, some very reasonable. Fear of heights exist because we can die from falling; fear of planes, the same thing. Even fear of silly things – like balloons – can be explained as a fear of “losing it” once the background is known. Death, insanity and loss of control, then, seem to be united behind that one idea – of losing it in general, either our life or our mental stability. If we read Kastrup, or think about it by ourselves, we can see that those two are united at an even baser level – that “losing it” really means losing our construct of reality.
All of which points to the terrifying idea that our reality really is only a construct of both deep and superficial mentation. While we can clearly see this in the fear of insanity – which is also the base of much anxiety – it is also there in the fear of death. If we take away pain, why would we fear death any more than going to sleep? In much of sleep, we disappear into nothing. In death, if one thinks in strictly physical terms, we do exactly the same thing, and yet the latter is the greatest fear of all. It seems that the fear is not, then, of the darkness of death, but of its reminder that we are nothing more than mind, as Kastrup would have it.
With this, both losing it mentally and dying again are united. If we accept that the inner mind – or the overmind, as I have come to see it – knows that life is a mental construct, then to continue life as we superficially understand it, we must have a fear of losing it. Otherwise, this life would be nothing more than a game, and hardly worthy of our concerted efforts. We would die at a whim, just to find what else we might wake up into. Existence, then, would be little more than a complex carnival. But bring in fear, and we set up all sorts of barriers against losing what, in the end, is really losing not much at all – nothing more than a rather long and complicated dream. Bring up fear of losing it, and we harden ourselves to other possibilities of existence; bring of fear of death, of losing ALL of it, and we protect ourselves from losing life at almost every cost. Fear, then, is the guardian angel of our reality, and the only way of keeping reality real. Fear, then, might even be said to be the angel standing at the entrance to the Garden of Eden.
Fear of loss, fear of social loss (ridicule), fear of insanity, fear of death – all these keep our world going. Losing overwhelming fear is the key to unlocking the greater reality. It might be one of the reasons why Jesus said, “to gain life, one must lose it for my sake,” for in that we find the idea that faith will take us through the terror we have of the loss. And once that terror is overcome, many, many new things become possible – such as losing one’s fear of dying for a good cause - or even losing fear of public speaking. FK