You’re Not Afraid of The Unknown

I was talking to my mom today as she lay in her hospital bed in the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. She’s trying a new chemotherapy that causes severe neuropathy and it’s disintegrating her body as fast as tissue paper submerged in boiling acid… Needless to say, she’s suffering intensely and is extremely afraid.

But what is she afraid of?

Eyes wide, terror contorting her face, she says to me, “Sarkis, I’m afraid.”

What are you afraid of, Mom?

I’m afraid of the unknown!

It’s that dramatic moment in the black and white silent movie where huge words flash on the screen, THE UNKNOWN! OH, NO!

Point blank and with a totally straight face I say, “No, you’re not”.

(Record scratch *%&$#^$%@!) Mom, suddenly perky, a bit confused, and strangely relieved, cocks her head as if demanding an explanation and says, “What?”

“You’re not afraid of the unknown. That’s impossible”, I say.

She’s a bit let down that I don’t empathize with her in the way she wants, but I go on to explain that “fear of the unknown” isn’t actually a fear because you can’t be afraid of something that you’re not aware of. If it doesn’t exist in your own experience how can you be afraid of it?

I briefly take her through a series of questions that quickly and ultimately reveal some very real fears she has. It turns out, she’s not afraid of the unknown, she’s afraid that things that have already happened to her will happen again, and she is unwilling to experience those fears directly. In other words, because she is afraid to face or admit to her fears directly, they all get locked in the unconscious and collectively labeled “the unknown”.

Fear is a common experience, a universal experience. We all experience fear. Similar to my mother, the things that I’m afraid of sometimes seem like mysterious, unseen phantoms waiting to attack me when I’m not looking. Yet, when I turn and examine these fears I regularly discover that they aren’t random or unknown quantities at all; they are precisely coded lines of thought recurring over and over again in my mind (and unfortunately, sometimes also in my experience).

The fact is that most fears in this world are recycled; there are no new fears out there! We might all be able to put our specific names, dates, and time stamps on the fragmented memories that define our fear-stories, but the stories themselves have an archetypal, poetic mythology that almost all people can relate to.

Let’s take the “Fear of Annihilation”, for example, as something that most humans on the planet can relate to. Fear of dying, death, not existing, being killed, of our own ultimate mortality; these are all versions of the same core fear. Fear of annihilation is not new or unique. Even something like “fear of spiders”, if examined closely, ultimately crawls and slithers its way back to fear of annihilation. Even though I don’t sip tea on my front porch dreaming of the glorious day when I will be annihilated, at least there is some comfort for me in knowing that most (if not all) of my fears are already known quantities. I like knowing that I’m not alone in my fears, and I feel strangely empowered when I know my fears are not actually mine; they are the collective, unconscious fears of humanity.

Once I realized that fear is not an unknown quantity I felt liberated to take more responsibility for my story, for what fears I unconsciously recycle in my on-going self-perpetuating fear factory. I realized that what is truly unknown is my vast potential to create anything I want for myself in this life. If I’m afraid, that can be a signal to stop and examine my present circumstances. If I find that I am projecting a past experience into a possible future, then I can drop that fear and come back to the present moment, to the unknown. As long as something is unknown, then there is no limit to what it can be.

Even though my mom was still in pain and still struggling with a life and death situation, she was far less afraid because she had faced what she’s actually afraid of. Calling it the unknown may have temporarily spared her the direct experience of her painful reality, but it created an even larger and ultimately more painful false fear of the unknown that haunted her at every tick of the clock.

You don’t have to be afraid of the unknown. If you are afraid (and there is no immediately visible danger) you can stop and examine what it is that you are actually afraid of in that moment. Let yourself become aware of the fear by asking, “What is it that I am actually afraid of?” Sit quietly, breath, and see what answers come. Then you’re back in the present moment of your life, where all the excitement and fulfillment actually takes place. Then fear is not a prison that keeps you locked in the known, it’s a direct beacon of guidance back to reality.

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