The Angel of Fear

[Saarah]

Hey everyone, I recently heard someone read this excerpt out from an ancient astrology book on fear which I transcribed, it's quite an enjoyable read on fear and it helps you to understand why in religious texts you are told that the religious one fears God:

Quote

What is the importance of fear? And why is it lodged in the human soul to begin with? What is its soul status, it’s cosmic significance, it’s ultimate legitimation? My maxim now comes from a contemporary poet and novelist, Mermer Blakeslee who has studied fear concretely, very closely as a senior ski instructor of national and Olympic ski teams. Those individuals who hurdle themselves downhill to victory or devastating injury. She writes in conclusion to her study of fear at the brink, that fear presses from our limitations the aged wine of humility as we face the implacable givens of the world. Fear is implanted in our hearts and sinews, today we must say ‘information in our genes’, as a kind of knowledge, the knowledge of humility. In face of the implacable givens of the world, the aged wine of humility was the essential wisdom taught by both the Hebrew and Hellenic traditions. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” says Proverbs, demonstrated as well as a principle message of Classical Greek epics and tragedies. Fear urges human humility that saves from human hubris. The relation with the implacable givens, the Gods, was not love but humility. Staying within mortal bounds, drawing back, that primordial physical motion which initiates reflection, reflectere; to bend back. Let us say fear is primordial prudence, the wisdom of animal foresight at a cellular level. Shrinking of the perimeter equals staying within limits, and this primordial prudence is given with life as are its implacable facts. The instinctive, wordless counsel of fear acts like a guardian angel. Jewish legend says, as there are angels of grace and angels of love, so too there are angels of fear and dread. Fear as an instructive angel has been elaborated by Kemp Smith in a sort of summation by this modern philosopher soon before his death. This angel seems to offer understanding of life in the world, or what I am calling fear’s cosmic legitimacy. This understanding presents itself most clearly perhaps in Buddhism and its disciples of ritual, gesture of the hands or Mudra, one of which most widely recognised is called ‘Fear Not’, enacted because as a Japanese practitioner explains, fear is innate. Not only in man but in everything which exists; the birds, animals of every sort, men, the sun, the moon, the worlds are continually in dread. It is this that one the Buddhist calls ‘world filled with fear and dread’. If fear is a potential given with the facts of the cosmos, then it is latently present anywhere, everywhere, worlds are continually in dread. When you, or I or any creature suddenly feels the presence of fear, we are placed in unmediated connection with the cosmos, engaged by the truth of reality. The truth that all things change, all things pass away, and the reliability of nothing can be assured. The keys to security lie less in calculated predictability than in small omens of fear, for we are consumers of and consumed by the great conflagration of existence, Heraclitus’s fire, riding the slow imperceptible tremors of a quaking Earth. Consequently, platforms of security appeals to moral courage, repressive combativeness to hold fear at bay, sheer our wits away from the actual protective angel who keep us, in Kierkegaard’s phrase ‘in fear and trembling and in freedom’. Freedom, how curious. We each know all too well that fear imprisons, paralyzes even the simplest movements as when we vainly call for help in a nightmare. Yet that frozen instant presents the first freedom: awareness of that complete negation humans have named death. That we are bound to nothing whatsoever except death, the unknowable unknown. This negation death is the only necessity, there is no ontological obligation whatsoever but to die. The awareness, the recognition that one’s ultimate obligation is negation by this universal implacable given is exemplified by the death-defying hero and the suicide bomber, figures of radical extremity. In other words, we meet the fear of terrorism or catastrophe by understanding the psychology of freedom, the freedom tied to negation, bestowed by negation and paradoxically freed from fear of negation. As Spinoza famously wrote, “A free man thinks of death least of all things” and Kierkegaard proposed that one should live as if one were already dead. Angels are fantasies, winged voices, messages, they are more powerful and intelligent than a human being. We may conceive angels as the configurations of imagination that accompany emotions. The images that fly into the mind during moments of fear. When Kierkegaard connects dread with revelation of human freedom we may revision this connection as the freedom given by dread’s angel, the winged messages of imagination.

Fear is an angel because without its guidance we’re likely to forget the limitedness of form and engage continually in more delusion thinking that we are limitless. Human hubris is the person constantly trying to accumulate and expand themselves with and as form, and human humility is being reflective of limits. Religious people are told to fear God and be humble before him so they can recognise God more than they recognise themselves as all there is. The person who is constantly trying to combat fear through false security for example, is like someone combating an angel who is there to guide them towards freedom.

I like how angels having wings, being flighty and made of light is likened to the nature of the imagination, foresight and built in intelligence/instincts, the wordless guidance we have.

It seems like when you see the typical cartoon of an angel and a devil on the shoulders of a person, that it's obvious which one they should pay attention to even though usually the person gets seduced by the devil and the audience thinks they're stupid.
But actually, angels can sometimes look like fear and dread, so no wonder no one likes the angel's messages!
In real life angels will often look like devilish fear  and devils look like shiny light beings  Lol!! 

[Anton Rogachevski]

Thank you for sharing unique and diffrent material I'd otherwise miss.

I like to think of fear as the calling of god to hear him, through prayer and meditation.

Cheers!

[Saarah]

@Anton Rogachevski

Glad it resonated, i once heard a story of a woman who had an awakening glimpse when a gunman confronted her, i think it illustrates how a normally fear-inducing experience can act as a shock catalyst to recognising yourself beyond the usual story of it - she probably thought i have no choice but to NETI NETI through this! haha