Did you know that the human heart may feel love, may appreciate beauty, but for most is tethered to fear as if an iron ball were chained to it? This heavy metal in our hearts, it feels black. It's not beautiful like the night sky or the shadow of a tree on asphalt, but a ripping darkness that chokes us like a noose. We pace around our houses thinking of current events--which due to human fears like the ones we have are just awful.

There are wars to worry about, climate change, overpopulation, nuclear proliferation. It's like wearing a lead vest that prevents us from X-raying our hearts. There seems to be no solution to our fears; they hang about the Earth like a miasma in the atmosphere, growing arms which strangle the childhood out of us. We drearily go about the day in dread, not so much depressed as just afraid.

The darkness often strangles our will to produce offspring, whom we rightfully believe will be cursed to inherit our own fears. We wish the world would stop, that there would be some deus ex machina like an alien invasion--for even if there were a chance that the aliens willed us harm, they would at least give us a sliver of hope that our ordeal of helpless fear had come to an end for just a moment.

We conjure philosophical notions out of a seeming nothingness, but the nothingness is really our hearts trying to break out of the prisons of terror that lock them down. As humans we fear the lawlessness of our hearts, so we conjure cops to throw us in prisons. We fear our ability to make wise decisions, so we banish our freedom from our lives. Then, we desire some paltry power so that we can feel immortal for a minute before the flames of our foolishness dash our hearts back to ash.

Yes, let us be afraid, for it means that we don't have to do anything, that we are too weak to survive as a species. Let us retreat into the prisons of terror and indulge ourselves with every dark desire. It has become traumatic merely to exist in the state of fear that causes our suffering, with a black halo around our brains that suck in light like a black hole. We retreat into addictions, pleasure, distractions. We need to loosen up, we think to ourselves. We need a drink, a hit of something, a fling, a vacation.

However, it is not enough to attempt to retreat when there is always the raw desire to survive flung against a seemingly inevitable doom. So we reach into Pandora's box for that last glimmer of hope, and let hope surround us. We plot ridiculous courses to salvation. We write philosophies, poetry, start cults, sects, and ignore that power that is within us that could overcome all things--that is, that power within us that by its nature is all things and which alone could release us from our fear.

I think, however, that we fear growing beyond our frail egos and embracing this fundamental freedom to become all things. We say that it is selling our souls to the Devil, not knowing that we fundamentally are the Devil. We fear what we really are perhaps a bit more than the dreadful situation we are in, because if we knew what we really were we would feel obligated to take responsibility for our own existence, growth, and salvation. It would require a fundamental reorientation that we are not sure we can muster, and so the temptation to delegate responsibility to others seems logical. There is no other explanation for our predicament: we were born into this, and we will die in this because we cannot fathom that all of this is intrinsically us.

It would destroy the universe, we tell ourselves, if we were to acknowledge that we actually are the universe. But what would our fear do with a universe under its command? Perhaps the same thing it always does: delegate and blame. There is a fundamental delegation of responsibility that goes with belief, a fundamental denial of our will which we place in bondage to fools who destroy our world.

"God is doing this," we tell ourselves. Or we do not, but never is it us that have the responsibility of running this show--and how can the show go on if everyone delegates their responsibility to some Other? I capitalize this word, this Other, because the purpose of the Other is to be blamed. Other humans are in charge, and no, I cannot dash them to pieces. God has willed that we suffer like this, so no, I can't dethrone God. We do the same with the Devil, or entire pantheons of beings, or with Other People. They all serve the same purpose, which is to allow us to pathetically prostrate ourselves before them to abdicate us of any responsibility due to our own fear.

I advance the notion that much of what we pathologize are actually traits that show us who we really are. Mania is not an attempt to overcome limitations, it is merely mania. Schizophrenia is not visions of other worlds and beings than others are accustomed to, it is schizophrenia. Antisocial behavior isn't an overcoming of societal limitations, it is antisocial behavior. There is a fearfulness in our interpretation of certain psychological traits when they pop up, and it is almost as if these diagnoses are there to redefine this behavior so that it can be controlled. Such a pity we can't overcome the world, isn't it? If we could, we would feel an obligation to do so, and that just would not do to a person who is consumed by fear.

It would be deadly to deny the facticity of any number of things, but perhaps this facticity inherent in the things of the world is there because we will not destroy the very concept of the Other which prevents us from being this Other. So, let us return to the concept of fear: we cannot escape its grasp if we do not know that it is ourselves that we are really afraid of--because that would mean to acknowledge that we are completely corrupt murderers on a cosmic scale.

Could we be illuminated and still remain in this state of allowing some unspeakably evil Others do all of our nastiness for us? Perhaps it may be amusing to allow them to, to send them off to kill and give them a little pat on the head as if they were pet wolves we unleashed on some hapless victims. Perhaps the leaders of this world would appear as some kind of ridiculous joke, a laughing stock of stupid killers under the delusion that it is they who are in charge.

I have a fantasy: perhaps I could become every Other while retaining my own consciousness, like a spirit that leaps from body to body causing people to act out of fear because it is intensely amusing to scare people to death. If I am an Other to you, then you would merely be my victim, because I would view my Otherness as a license to ruin your life, your world, and eventually dissolve the entire universe and go somewhere nicer. Perhaps an entire universe made up of nice beaches with cool, salty breeze and a never-ending supply of gazpacho. The absurdity of your situation merely makes it funnier: here we are, with the Earth dying, nuclear weapons pointed at every major power, and fools in charge of the world who use ludicrous ideologies to remain in power.

Are you scared? Is that knot in your chest twitching a little? It's times like this where madness seems tempting, that it seems like a viable solution to our problems. Your ideas of self--couldn't they just be discarded and simultaneously enlarged to encompass everything? What a strange paradox that would be, to actually be what we are afraid of and cast it off like chains we no longer have need of.

There would be no need to be afraid, no need at all. But death? Is that not what we are all afraid of, besides the Other judging us to be stark, raving mad? Can death and the Other be rendered moot, so we can all hold the puppet strings together and step gloriously into the effulgence of a life without fear?