The second postulatethat fear distorts truthand the third postulatethat working through fear paves the way to truthprovide the great key to answering these questions. And the answer is irrefutable. For it must be so that fear distorts truth; by definition, it makes us too afraid to see the truth of things calmly and objectively. Fear causes us to invest ourselves in seeing the truth we wish to see, not the truth that is. This is perhaps the single most important principle we can rely on to find a path to freedom. Simply put, fear makes us afraid to see reality as it iswe need to see it in a way that makes us feel safe. Freeing ourselves from fear, therefore, necessarily reveals the truth behind the distortion. This, then, becomes our task: to let go of any investment in seeing things as we wish to see them, becoming willing to see them as they are, whatever we may discover.
And this applies to how we approach the question of an absolute truth. If we reject the possibility out of hand before adopting such a willingness to consider it, it can only be because there is a hidden investmenta secret need based on fearmaking this decision for us. Similarly, if we insist on any particular point of view at all before being willing to be wrong, we may be sure there is an unexamined fear driving the insistence. Our exploration begins with the decision to follow the trail of this fear, deconstructing it all the way to completion, so that we may then make a clear assessment of whether the transcendent view we seek is possible.
This point cannot be overstated; if we reject an idea (such as the possibility of an absolute truth), if we cling to a point of view, we must be willing to look at whether we have fully and honestly examined our reasons for doing so. We must always consider whether a hidden fear has us invested in a need to reject a thing, with a secret agenda to preserve our convictions. The only guiding principle we can rely on is that fear obliges us to see what we wish to see, not what is. This becomes our test of truth in every situation. If we want to know whether an absolute truth is possible, we must make certain we are unafraid to consider it. We cannot afford to sell ourselves short in this endeavor. The stakes are no less than our chance for freedom from fear and the discovery of our fulfillment.
And yet the resistance to doing so can be enormous. Wars and crusades have been engaged because of just such investment in beliefs. It is the source of political partisanship, cultish behaviors and the wide variety of relationship struggles. All of these and more are built on fear's strategy of self-protection and security. If we seek a true fulfillment, free from the anxiety behind such an approach, we must find our way to resolving the fear that has been distorting our view.
A Cause for Real Optimism
Of course, it can be challenging, to say the least, to break from the consensus. Our enculturation conditions us to buy into the strategy of fear. Seeing everyone around us doing the same, we become afraid of not playing the game of fear. In fact, we are socialized into this from the first moments of our lives. Nevertheless, we are left exhausted and depressed by this strategy and long for a different approach to life, one that offers the chance to breathe freely once again.
Our postulates propose this alternate approach. Without fear imposing its blinders and distortions, there would be nothing to limit our infinite view, a view that would explain all relative truths in a sort of "unified field theory" and show us the way back to freedom. As with the fractals of Chaos Theory, when we rise above our fear, we see the tangled web of differences around us resolve into an elegant whole, a whole that is coherent, purposeful and beautiful. But to attain this view, we must not let a worn-out conviction in fear stop us from even attempting the climb.
Deep within each of us is still the sense of wonder and awe, the love for life, that was natural to us as children. It was then that, as Emily Dickinson said, we dwelt "in Possibility," a place where we could spread wide our "narrow Hands/ To gather Paradise." Deconstructing anxiety is how we reawaken this potential. Whether it is an actual memory, perhaps faded into unawareness, or merely a longing waiting to be fulfilled, we will discover that this sense lives within us still. This is not meant as a platitude and is certainly beyond wishful thinking (for it will take courage and honesty to direct our attention onto fear). The postulates propose that before the learned repressions of fear, before we became jaded by the heaviness of life and its apparent disappointments, we knew this truth. In fact, it was completely natural to us, again, as we see in children. And this, precisely this, is what gives rise to the urge for transcendence of our sorrowful state and the call for a greater fulfillment. Somewhere inside we still know of this fulfillment, though it may be buried under layers of forgotten dreams, painful life experience, or the imposed pain of others who have too long lived under the dictates of fear.
The principles and practice of the Deconstructing Anxiety method are designed to help people rediscover this potential, this truth that can be known beyond all relative truths. As per the postulates, once anxiety is out of the way, transcendence is inevitable. No matter how indoctrinated we may have become by the social conditioning, the mass hypnosis that would have us believe such thinking is a fantasy, I invite you to listen deeply to see if there isn't still a call for this kind of freedom and this kind of fulfillment. The three postulates set the stage for a genuine pathway to its discovery. Let us not close the door on the possibility before finding out if it might just be attainable.
This is an edited excerpt adapted from Todd Pressman's Deconstructing Anxiety: The Journey from Fear to Fulfillment (2019), published with permission from Rowman and Littlefield Publishing. All rights reserved.
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