Fear

To borrow from the wisdom of Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, I qoute:

"An unrealistic perception of life is the basis of fear. People are not willing to live. People are not willing to die. That is their whole predicament right now.

The fear is simply because you're not living with life, you're living in your mind. Your fear is always about whats going to happen. That means your fear is always about that which does not exist.

If your fear is about the non-existent, then your fear is 100% imaginary. If you're suffering the non-existential, we call that insanity. So, people may be in socially accepted levels of insanity. But if you're afraid, if you're suffering anything that does not exist, that amounts to insanity, doesn't it?

People are always suffering, either what happened yesterday or what may happen tomorrow. So your suffering is always about that which does not exist, simply because you're not rooted in reality. You're always rooted in your mind.

Mind; One part of it is memory, another part of it is imagination. Both of them are, in one way, imagination. Because both of them don't exist right now.

You're lost in your imagination, that's the basis of your fear.

If you were rooted in reality, there would be no fear."

This insight teaches one to understand what a powerful and debilitating influence fear can be, yet it is almost entirely derived from our imagination. I was watching a lecture recently and the topic was determining a reasonable course of action for the Occupy protestors, now that the tent cities had been broken down. This speaks to a much larger question, "How can we bring about wholesale change in our society?" Can we ever change society without conquering our fear?

Many suggestions have been made about "positive" ways to affect change. Always centered on the notion that a workable model of a new type of society should be built to demonstrate the sustainability of more intelligently designed social system.

In listening to this discussion of fear by Sadhguru, it occurs to me that the opposite may be true. Instead of showing how a new system is better, or even how the old system is broken, a more effective course of action is to create a wholesale movement in real time of people simply opting out of the existing system to the greatest extent possible. Notice I didn't say "practical", because opting out will definitely create hardships for anyone who chooses to do it. So as a practical matter, this course of action will not be easy.

So what am I talking about? I am talking about a movement, one person at a time if necessary, of seeing your fears for what they really are, realizing that you are not powerless to confront them, and taking simple steps to make yourself less indebted to the system as it exists. Less subject to the fear.

Remember, the banking system derives the lion's share of it's power by the simple fact that almost everyone is conditioned to be utterly dependent on banks to survive. Being dependent on anything is nothing more than giving into the fear that possesses you when you imagine life without that which you have become dependent upon. As Sadhguru says, that fear is of something that does not exist in today's reality. It only exists in the imagined reality that is possible in the future.

If you want to bring about wholesale change, indeed to FORCE a wholesale change in our culture, maybe the best course of action is to purposely create a vacuum in the current reality, a vacuum that must be filled by something once the chasm has been dug. It's risky, because there is a chance that the new system that emerges is either just as bad as the current one or, god forbid, even worse.

Is it a gamble worth taking?

If you think it is. Close your bank account. Give up your drivers license. Walk away from your tax paying job. Get off the grid as totally and completely as possible. Avoid any connection to the existing paradigm. Don't do things which require the permission of the government or society. Live on cash. Avoid mail. Get a pre-paid phone. If someone asks you for your ID, step back, ask yourself why what your are attempting to do truly requires some sort of official identification. If you don't see how your identification is vital to the enterprise at hand, refuse to show your ID or walk away and forget the enterprise all together.

I know that it's almost impossible to escape from the grid completely. All you can do is make the awareness of the "grid" important to your decision making. Find the level where you can survive which maximizes your freedom and still allows necessary comforts.

If large segments of our population made these kinds of choices, the power structure would crumble. Walk away from your debts. Stop caring about your credit rating. Stop driving cars. Live outside the system .... if you do ... it will eventually crumble.

And I don't say this from an idealistic point of view. I have actually already changed my life to reflect these new understandings and I am more peaceful and happy than I have ever been. I don't have much in the material sense. I have almost complete freedom in every other way though. I never check the time, because it doesn't matter. Other than rent day, the calender is mostly useless to me now. I do what I want, when I want and I answer to no one. It's a frugal but liberating life. I would recommend it to anyone.