The Fallacy of Fearlessness

It is a not uncommon misunderstanding among some “people of faith” (whatever the flavor) that their faith renders them immune to human emotion. The truth is, emotions are essential to our mental health and thus, to our ability to learn and grow… whether here on earth or beyond.

We humans are inclined to adopt an adversarial relationship with our own emotions. We like the positive ones but detest the negative ones. Much of human activity revolves around various schemes to accentuate the former and eliminate the latter. That overall strategy is fine, so long as the tactics employed to achieve it are more sophisticated than simply denying one's feelings... or worse yet, destroying one's ability to feel.

Emotions are tools for learning. When we dissociate from our emotions we only succeed in damaging our ability to learn and grow.

Additionally, when we reduce our capacity to feel one emotion we reduce our capacity to feel all of our emotions in like measure. In other words, when a man gets to the point where he can no longer feel fear, neither can he feel joy… and that is not a good thing.

Ironically enough, while we all have our preferred techniques for downplaying the impact of our emotions, if we were to succeed completely we would only turn ourselves into psychopaths and sociopaths; i.e. people who have destroyed all apparent awareness of their emotions and are thus quite mad. Can you imagine a world filled with people bereft of compunction, conscience and all emotional safeguards? Our negative emotions are all that stand between us and hell. In which case, it would seem prudent to leave well enough alone.

I have often heard a “person of faith” claim (either to me personally or on the news) that their religious convictions have transformed them to the point where they no longer have any fear of death. In the overwhelming majority of cases that is utter nonsense, little more than wishful thinking (as they discover when eyeball to eyeball with the big ‘D’) And luckily so, for destroying one’s ability to be aware of the natural fear intrinsic to life’s transitions is an extremely dangerous state of being.

Our emotions are our friends. They are natural, normal and critical to our continuing growth and development.

Enlightenment does not derive from the ability to deny or destroy awareness of our emotions, but rather, from our skill at learning to recognize and integrate them into our consciousness.

Michael Holmes, R.N.