My Human Condition

Pain

The road begins with ignorance. The path begins before you know it exists. Ignorance is where we all start - without exception. Ignorance is reprieve: it is not yet doubtful as it has nothing to doubt, it is not yet brash as it has nothing to fight for. The pains and the pleasures are unmeasured and futile. Disturbance is necessary; but only when nature deems you ready for admittance - to pull back the cloth, to unmask purposeful living and purposeful suffering. Pain is not without passion, not without dread or hope or care. It is fuelled and swelled and even compelled by these things. But it needs to be real: to a mind in sleep the clatter has to resonate, the ardour has to reverberate. You need a why? for where you are going.

So Nature, the Universe or God, in how ever many ways you want to understand this force of hypertrophy in life that compels you to swim against the tides and strengthens you to this end, will feel this pain with you and all the same as you. What I am saying is that, when you are ready, every one of us will be called to suffer, to struggle, and to hurt in this lifetime. You need this to bleed from you, your ignorance. It is not something to be manufactured artificially; it is something that comes to you when you do not know that you are waiting.

There are those who will choose, disdainfully, not to answer the call. There are even those who may never be ready for it; and it is not a process you need to, or probably will be aware of at the time. But this is cleansing, if arid. It is water to the seed; it is air in the lungs.

Pain, when it becomes real, will start with a question: why is this happening to me? When you can answer this, that is when you are awakened to a greater purpose. Pain can be angry: pain is the touch of all the failings you have ever known, the crimson tide, the visceral lows of life all imbued with a severe sort of apathy. It breaks all around you when it is there; the tide of pain only seems to wash out and away from you so that when it comes in again you will feel it all again, all at once, and with a re-invigorated immediacy. And it is coloured with ignorance so long as you do not see a purpose for it - a need for it. This is the pain of the soul awakening. This is the pain of emergence from the comfort of solace and, not misdirection - no direction at all.

This pain is necessary, at first this is all that you need to realise. This pain is purposeful and awash with the most real form of meaning that we may experience. It may seem cruel; it cannot be manufactured within our conscious processes from some desire to feel. It comes at you and not from you. We face it all in our own way, in our own time, and manifested in a shape that is real for us. Caustic as it may seem from your vantage point, from your step on the ladder, it is driven by some greater force that needs you to move forward.

You are not alone in life; you are called to hurt and awaken to a sombre and terrifying reality. Your successes are not yours alone and your failures are not yours alone - they are shared. Realise this and you will step lighter and feel deeper, with empathy for every living thing. This swelling, blooming potential - you will learn it. And this presence and magnitude of greatness that fills the deeds of many can be your greatness too. First accept pain as part of the package - as an artery of life that brings blood and power and virility to your deeds.

And then, when you have succumbed to feeling, you will come to realise a new meaning to this life of yours - an honest, uncompromising, and unfiltered reality - that you are here, and that means something. Life was given to you, breathed in to you so that you could give something back and not just toil away the vapid hours. Life is not just some lonely stretch of existence - it is purposeful and direct. Every moment you live is alive with meaning and you should take some meaning from it. Pain is the conduit and the lightening rod. And your soul will contract to the tone and note of this new understanding. You will begin to live as you are supposed to live.

In the long run, of course, you will learn that every step has a meaning: every footprint you leave behind in the pursuit of growth will leave its imprint and these ghosts of meaning - of journey and destination - may invariably be read by others and so point the way to a clarity and crystallisation of hope. Your purpose will give others purpose. Pain is pushing our evolution, is pushing the growth of the species. You are answering a primal call heard through pain, and through your action in moving out against this - this resistance of atrophy and fear - you will allow the echoes of your deeds to sound a realisation in others.

Pain is the call - the primordial screeching force. It is thunderous and dreadful at times, soft and numbing at times, and will eventually lead you to question yourself and your meaning. If you feel it deep enough - if it is resounding, if it penetrates to the marrow of your bones - it can ignite a change.

Then there will need to be a separation. It will always ignite passion but not always resolution; that is something you need to call out of yourself. Pain is something you dwell in: it does not take any effort on your part. It can shine a light on the darkest passages of your mind and the lightest. It can shame you into action but it will always, always take force of effort to step beyond your own apathy. This will need to come from you. Pain is the why, it is not the how. This is the point from which you begin the application of conscious, focused effort to overcome. This is where you address life from a new perspective: discipline.

Why Pain?

Before we move on, however, we must ask ourselves: Why pain? Why must change be instigated in this form? Well it is simply our self-consciousness, our laziness, and our self-obsession. We are born into an environment that naturally enforces ignorance. We are social animals and encouraged to reciprocate mediocrity and to follow the well worn trails of life. We become so deeply invested in our environments that we lose our individuality. Everything becomes this vast drive towards mass appeal. We are just the product. There is no goal, there is no point: you are not required to add anything but simply to breathe and meet these structural obligations. And for a time this is acceptable - it is natural. Eventually, however, we come to need something more.

It is the evolutionary drive, the re-purposing of intent that comes to us. We were lost to a mild sense of delusion, branded by the universal desire for sameness. But that is fading and you are coming into some other desire that you cannot comprehend. It is not measurable; it is an expression of need in the same way you need to eat and drink and love. But you continue to live in this way to which you are accustomed - giving nothing but simplicity. So a depression begins; you are vaguely aware of an ebbing purpose that sits clenched and impactful in your psyche, but you live to expectations. You are your conscious mind and the rigours of circumstance. Beyond the borders of circumstance, of expectation, you are pure, un-wilting apathy; and why not? This is the way we live, the way we have always lived. The pain of this - of self-enforced ignorance - will mount, will grow and spread like a living thing. It will be the cause of change. The further you push yourself into ignorance, when you are nearing the point at which you can strive for purpose, the more focal and eviscerating the depression.

This is cause and effect. There is something beneath your skin and bones, something ethereal that is not simply selfish wanting - that is never enough. There is something you cannot understand: the simple necessity for an emergence from ignorance; this is the cause. The effect is experience, a breaking point, something that will push you beyond apathy and into discipline. It is not that you caused this painful experience, it is that you became aware of it. You were able to take something from your pain; the way it fell, the passion and heat and terror of it, the seeming uselessness, the tragedy - whatever it is or was, whether it was slow or fast - will hit you intimately, will be focal, will force you to escape from the listless state.

And that is why there is pain - that is why there must be pain - because it causes you to wake up. There is this underlying evolutionary verve that grows in the subconscious mind - that is our gift; that is evolution. And then there is the feeble conscious mind. And it is so exposed to circumstance - it is so affable and malleable. It wants to rest, it wants to live unencumbered. It wants simple existence in the distended chambers of thought. So it disconnects itself from the subconscious to the extent which is possible. It mutes its capacity for elegance and dominance.

But as the pain of ignorance - the psychological depression - pushes itself further into your experience of life there comes that need for change. And the need always begins internally. We need to connect to a purpose beyond ourselves. The conscious mind has come to command its own existence. But you push into the subconscious; you seek to know the pain and understand it; you look inwardly and eventually you bridge the gap; the conscious mind becomes more controlled and can see into the powers and pains of the subconscious mind. We become entire and not separated - or at least we begin to do so. We see our purpose and start to re-order our lives. We start to feel and think and thrive in a way that is innately different. Everything that resides in the subconscious mind - all of the wonder and all of the distortion - is more accessible. And with the distortion you know that you are not running from it anymore and can begin to re-align - can make your peace. And the wonder is both the design of evolution and the means by which it is achieved.

All of this is change. The normal human mind is a machine of expectation. It has worked hard to form a blueprint: an active understanding of the world in which it lives. It can make small alterations, simple deviations that do not change the plot lines of life. But its fundamental understanding remains and is immobile. In many cases this is the transference of an ineffectual worldview that demeans progress because it is adapted to a situation to which it is no longer suited. You may cling to infantile structures of understanding that are delaying you. You may relate to the world in a way that is drawing failure or disdain. In any case you are stubborn; you relate to the world through a rigid pre-formulation. Regardless of what that pre-formulation brings you, you stick to it because you have survived thus far. Pain forces you to see inside the subconscious space - see both the purpose and the internal denigrations. Once you see that, you can work towards your purpose and slowly alter your blueprint. You will begin to learn and love the growth involved in that. You will begin to seek out the opportunities of expansion which previously terrified you because they could shake your world-view.

This change needs to take place. But the greater mass of us are so resolute, so obstinate in our resistance to alteration that the natural human means - the evolutionary channel of adaptation - is this self-same pain. When you live with pain, without accepting its pronouncement, you push yourself into psychological turmoil. When you listen to it, you begin this journey of alteration. Pain of the mind can come to you through any source - through external or internal provocation. It can be something as visceral and deadening as loss, or something as immutable as disease, or something as entire as existential fallacy and redundancy. Whatever the source the message can be the same: grow from this. Push into your mind and see what is there. It can reach a critical mass, it can tear at you and leave you hopeless, but it is the most common, most ideal means of communication and alteration that exists in the highly sophisticated cerebral framework of development.

Could we as a species - with our understanding, with our capacity for analysis, for rationality - evolve without pain as an origin? Would there be evolution at all without the instinctual knowledge of pain at some level - be that visceral or ethereal? There is something to it, in self-actualised forms of life that have the right of choice: pain is a force of instigation, initiation, and a continual way-point. Pain is our origin and the duality of that is that we can choose to efface ourselves; we can choose to only see the pain of life but not what is behind it. It can crush the meek and unwilling. And the nature in us will seek a balance: that it does not become too great; that you can handle by degrees all that life has for you. But still it needs you to understand, to have context, to have a why?

So there exists the fallible and originally small conscious mind. And it sits within the filigree of society and culture. And the influences of such extol the commonality of succession without an emphasis on virtue or depth. It is not actively encouraged to be great or to seek purpose: it rings out in small pockets but that can get lost in the pure static of universal bewilderment. What is more valuable to the masses is that you perform a role which you begin to craft for yourself - that you are the good and reliable minutiae. Underneath the conscious mind is the mysterious and formidable sub-consciousness. And there exists, within the subconscious mind, the very material and driving force of life itself. It is the origin of problem and solution. It contains the prehistoric evolutionary drive, the basic energy of existence, and the fetid or prideful blueprint of life. And the more the unmet evolutionary drive picks up voice in the mist of sub-consciousness without response from the timid conscious mind, the more there is depression and disease. And the external world seems to wax and whirl and spin around this, becomes entwined with this negative subculture of mental existence. Eventually we come to that point at which we must explore the internal world - must open this connection. The more we open this connection, the more we can find the energy for change, read the evolutionary instinct, and adapt our blueprint to the extent which it needed adaptation.

The pain will pass, will mute or resolve to a certain extent as you bridge the gap between conscious and subconscious. But a mind resisting is an ignorant mind. And when you witness someone acting out of their ignorance - with their antiquated blueprints still enforced - remember they are in pain. Remember they are like you or who you were. The only difference is greater or lesser degrees of ignorance. We can never understand the real meaning behind everything, but we give our energy to a specific cause we possess and be open to change. That is the best we can do. So feel empathy, work for purpose, and always remember the value that pain holds or once held for you. And, beyond this, step out of apathy; listen to what life is telling you and begin a journey that invariably starts with discipline.

Chapter 2

Discipline

Discipline is what drives progress. Progress, without question or exception, is never ill-disciplined. When you begin, however, you will learn that discipline can seem monotonous - excruciatingly so. It is not fever, fits, frantic lows, soaring highs, and ambiguity: it is ever-present; it is even. It is something you will need to learn to trust; in doing so you will begin to trust yourself.

You will feel weak in the sight and presence of expected action. The feeling of it is cumbersome and immense. At first you may expect a great deal from yourself but you will be weak - weak in deed but strong in spirit. And it is the tenacity and shape of the courage you have learned (through pain), that will allow you to grow. The heart of you will grow; you will ingratiate yourself, over time, to a more cerebral and painstaking reality: discipline.

Discipline is in everything and it is continuous. This continuity of deed and impulse that it asks of you is the very manifestation of discipline. Do not fear the failings of ill-discipline that may seem to float about your thoughts and work in the beginning. You were not born strong-willed. You grow in an expansive vision of who you will become. You grow in will and persistence. To get there you need discipline. You know this in truth and that is what drives you.

Discipline is driven by a seeming lack of acceptance at the current mould of things. Discipline is a striking out against mediocrity, an embellished sense of calmness in action, a reserve and poise that belies an immensity of spirit. Discipline is not the current or flow of life: it is the paddle that allows you to traverse the tides and the tempest - to push beyond reprieve and redundancy. It is the weightlessness of intent and the strokes of action that always follow, as your attainment of progression becomes unquestioned. You no longer wait with baited breath until an updraft propels you to success; you move forward in silent focus, not waiting one more second to take control. Discipline may seem boring at first but when you suffer for it, you will see the truth - no longer clouded and opaque - discipline is power. In every manner it operates there it grows and you grow.

Discipline is wide and expansive; it is consuming and ever present - embellishing every deed, defying doubt and fear. The resistance of life is a conquering blow to action. With discipline you overturn this. Everyone who has ever attained greatness first had to attain mastery over themselves, over the basic aspects of their life: their cravings, their weakness, and their sprouting doubt - every avenue of themselves that contested progress. Discipline to the greatest extent, is of the same composition as discipline in the smallest ventures. Train yourself in everything; inspire discipline as a code of action. See it seethe and swell in your daily ventures. You will prepare your mind for success and you will construct a faith in yourself so deep rooted, that will not only serve as the tools to harvest this success, but will absolutely refuse anything less.

Because life, at its heart, is not about compromise and compensation, it is about a contribution to unity and understanding. Life is about the soul of you and seeing that revel in a powerful understanding. It is also about connection to others and the truth of yourself. Every success begins and ends with this type of discipline.

Acceptance

As with all things, discipline has a beginning. The beginnings of discipline lie in acceptance, specifically acceptance of your current state. This is not an acceptance of dwelling within your current boundaries, nor accepting mediocrity; this is acceptance of the current power you possess to make a defining change.

It is the most common, blunt, and hard-hearted experience in life: intention, followed by failure. We intend change; we strike out in verve, in vigour, and in action; we repent our past weaknesses and become resolved to alter who we are - what we are. Then we are struck back. It seems as though life is at odds with our breaking the current mould. In fact, we are compelled towards the normality of our current circumstance through the survival instinct that seeks to maintain comfort. It is a primal and purely biological under-current that is very real in the beginning: homeostasis, lethargy, failure, and finally inaction.

The enormity of the entire challenge we are facing then emerges in our mind, as a ghost rippling in the shadows. The whole vision of who we may become seems so daunting and so unreal. Mind and body recoil at the prospect and so we revert. This is a lapse and it is common. We invite change but not the suffering of change. We see only the road ahead and not the small steps of which it is composed. We stumble where we have begun. That can leave you feeling broken: as if change and growth are only meant for some and you weren’t lucky enough to be chosen. That is false. It is the spectre of mental opposition and it is something you will have to overcome many times along the journey. You need to bring yourself back to the present moment, the next step only - nothing else.

Once we allow ourselves to see the truth of this, once we accept our current level of control, we begin to operate with a certain degree of realism that quickens our actions and prepares us for each new step. Once we begin to accept the point in the journey at which we currently reside, and focus all of our intent and strain of effort on each small advance, we can become wholly subsumed by a singleness of purpose. We forget doubt, cast aside the placations of fear like some skin we were destined to shed. The way forward becomes real.

Then we become centred by this acceptance and things become lighter - gentler. It is a process you are pouring yourself into. It is not realised in a day, a week, a year. It is your life: it is the road on which you travel. Acceptance allows perspective. You begin to drop the excuses, the exaggerations of your virtues and, more critically, your faults. To rework the map you have to see things as they are. We lie to ourselves as this seems easier. A distortion allows excuse and alibi. To see things shrouded in doubtfulness allows you to circumvent the hurt. If you never really know yourself, you feel less of a responsibility to that self. I’m not really trying... but I don’t want to know what could happen if I did try… maybe I’d come up short and would have no scapegoat - no way out… I don’t want to be left alone with failure, so I won’t really try.

To overcome you simply accept yourself, exactly as you are, and then add to it.

Hard work

For this, there is no substitute. It is blood in the arteries of success and progression. Hard work is nothing if not difficult. The only word that adequately describes it is toil. This you must do - everyday. Even as you don’t feel that the hard work you are doing is bringing you what you want or to where you want to go; stick at it. It circumvents all shortcuts. The distance makes you wise, steadies your hand, allows you perception to feel the weight of an emerging possibility in your future and provides the resources to meet such a possibility.

Toil each day. Wake up to the struggle. Go to sleep with the mist of that fatigue resting on your skin, in your bones. You will grow. Your conscious mind may storm but your subconscious will keep you there, will keep you balanced. It will carve out from your own mind what your purpose is to be. It will give you that if only you will give in to it.

Some people may spend a lifetime running from it. Some may accept it at times but be dominated by emotion and turn their back on it when they feel spent. Do not live life with half a heart. Commit to yourself; but be patient in this. Let yourself grow in this, a little more each day.

Hard work is the heart of discipline. If you are not willing to define it, to capture it, you will not go far. Avoid it and you avoid yourself, or the longing in yourself for something better. The purpose of your journey is a derivative of hard work. What is really miraculous, however, is that hard work will bring you peace. The peace of the whole once the mind and body lie spent is the validity of your existence.

Hard work is also immaculately and unashamedly simple: simple to fathom, simple to grasp, and simple to retain - simple, not easy. Of course, for everyone hard work may qualify itself differently. But it is where we start. It will shape your nature.

As the days, months, years, stretch like elastic, you will grow to like and then love hard work. You may despise it in the beginning as it has the powerful distinctness of a stranger. You will grow accustomed to it, so accustomed that you will accept it as one of your own qualities. It will fill your days and become a friend to your hopes. You will begin to understand it, to thank it for its initial extravagance of position. That is what alienates it from some, endears it to many, and, for the brave few, denies nothing.

Patience

Of course, this is a composite of hard work but indeed has its own distinct qualities. Patience is at the core of your deeds and not the driving force. It is the poise and the regulation. It is how you greet the world. Put simply: patience is intelligence. Do not confuse me: I am not condoning sluggishness, much less procrastination. They offset patience. Patience, however, is the nature with which you apply yourself, and this is important.

Hard work replete with patience is the gold standard - the critical function which sets us apart. Hard work devoid of patience is spasmodic and unreliable.

To light patience within you do not argue: you simply accept things as they are. Accept those around you; accept the pace of your development and then rely on your own cunning to feel out the correct trajectory and define the flight of your goals. If we are not patient we have nothing.

Following from this, it is important to realise that how you treat others is linked to how you shape your development, as patience is kind and affectionate and above all wise. It has nothing to fear and everything to gain.

Persistence

Persistence is seen in every success. You achieve everything with persistence and nothing without it. You don’t stop - no matter the obstacle, no matter the threat, and no matter the fear. These things will shrink where persistence develops. Persistence is the grind.

Persistence is plan and action continuously - there is no in-between. I cannot understate this. Even when you are slowed to a crawl by the burden of your passage into greatness, make sure you keep moving - always keep moving.

I am ingraining this point however I believe that a persistent nature develops quite naturally - once you are sure that is. Then you will burn the boats which may allow you to flee and move forward commandingly. Command from life what you want with persistence.

Persistence is un-erring. It is this to the core as you cannot err if you never stop - if you are always willing to strive for yourself. Under the shattering pain of humiliation, the intoxicating lure of addiction, the snare of ill-fated reprieves and hollow cumbersome hours of doubt and wretched confusion, into the unknown and past it, if nothing will stop you, if everything will feed your desire to grow.

So persistence is not numb, though it may seem it: a simple veil that will betray the discontent of those who aren’t willing to simply push. With persistence there is no real failure. No need for perfection. Being persistent is, in itself, perfection. With time and knowledge it rights every wrong, learns everything, knows everything.

It really is the most miraculous thing; perfection is not so delicate, so fragile: it is the grind. Those who never stop, those who are unreasonable, those who lie awake each night, some flickering thought of possibility reflecting in their mind, like the luminous gleam of a water droplet as it catches the light, those are the people who achieve something resembling perfection, built on a lifetime of failures.

Persistence will envelop the idea, wrap it into the temporary sanctuary of the conscious mind, nurture and keep it alive through repetition. It will then be passed down into the subconscious where it is ready to grow unsupported, take on a life of its own, become a part of you, shape your character. It will bring you to a place where you are altered slightly, wherein success won’t seem so alien and so estranged from possibility.

Conviction

When an idea passes over into your subconscious mind, what transpires is an emergence from disbelief. It does, as I said, alter your character slightly - in a necessary way. For an idea to really take hold it has to change you. It will emerge from this embryo - this delicate thing that a moment’s distraction could wipe away - persistence will allow it passage into reality - add steel to its existence. Then, when it has the strength and composition, it will pass into the subconscious - as simple as a piece of knowledge being committed to long term memory. From there it can proceed in an exponential manner and extend itself to your action: synthesize, grow, and manipulate the fibres of which your life consists.

Conviction, of course, and very naturally, is born out of one simple singularity: the decision.

The Decision

Please, please, just decide. Don’t change your mind. Don’t double-back. Don’t transfix on doubt and fear: what if it doesn’t work out for me? What if I fail? Put simply: you will handle it. Every success is built upon a glorious empire of failures. In fact, they are not real failures: they are tweaks to the design, but you know that. Take evolution for example: you did not come into being without effort. The perfection of your genetic coding was embellished by failure. It was the process of natural selection that showed the many failings of certain organisms to survive - to thrive. So there were tweaks made to the primordial chromosomal recipe. This process proliferated over time until the organism was enhanced to the point of decadence and fury, immune to impotence and resolved to break the relegation of its presence in the physical and cerebral vestiges of existence. The decision here was survival.

Whatever it is you are struggling towards, you need to decide that you will achieve it - before the fact. You need to decide that you will engender yourself to every type of failure that can wreak its havoc on your mind and body in the process. There is no around there is only through - even if it kills you. Then, when you make this decision, when your soul inhales this abrasive but beautiful reality, then and only then will you change. It is a commitment and you can move forward in anything, in everything, and always back yourself. After all, there is nothing else - is there?

Chapter 3

Courage

Courage is a topic and an understanding of things that is very difficult to get your head around when virginal, when your soul is not yet coated with the tragedy and drama of defeat and resurrection. Up to this point every development has been intrinsic. But every great mind first needs to sharpen itself before it slices to the core of its existence. A proud, powerful tree that scrapes the clouds of heaven cannot be formed from shallow roots.

While discipline is progression in the face of resistance - to overcome your own laziness, lethargy, and general lack - courage is moving out against fear. Courage is similar, in this way, to a highly concentrated form of discipline. To put it another way - from a physiological perspective - there are two types of muscle fibre: type 1 (or slow twitch muscle fibres) and type 2 (or fast twitch muscle fibres). Slow twitch muscle fibres inform your physical body’s ability to purely endure. They act at low amplitude and over an extended period of time. Fast twitch muscle fibres, however, provide explosive power for short durations. In this way, it is possible to imagine discipline as being slow type 1 and courage being type 2. Courage, then, is a more driven and powerful force of alteration that is impacted over shorter, more resolute periods. It requires an immensity of effort within a narrower circumference of time. The change it elucidates then, is similarly more dramatic.

In discipline you cultivate servitude to the processes of growth. Courage connects growth to your successes in life, successes that will always and without exception require grit and vulnerability. These qualities may only be harnessed through the cultivation of courage.

Acting through Fear: An Objective Response

The Sympathetic Nervous System

I feel it is important to discuss the biology of fear: where it comes from and how it exists. I know this may be a somewhat notable divergence from the above line of discussion, however it is necessary in order to create a robust ideation of acting through fear. Our discussion then, takes us into the organic infrastructure of the body.

The central nervous system consists of the brain and the spinal cord. The peripheral nervous system is the outgoing nervous tissue that sends its fingers into every corner of the body for uptake of, and response to, every form of internal or external stimulus. This feedback is then communicated to the central nervous system for digestion and synthesis of information.

The peripheral nervous system itself has two further subdivisions: the somatic nervous system, which is responsible for voluntary control of movement and feedback of sensation, and also the autonomic nervous system which controls involuntary function and maintenance of vital processes of survival and regulation (largely below the level of consciousness). The processes of the autonomic nervous system include: maintenance of heart rate and blood pressure, respiration rate, digestion, kidney function (urination), pupil dilation, sexual arousal etc. The autonomic nervous system is therefore concerned with the automatic processes of living over which we assume minimal control. It again has two further sub-divisions: the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous systems.

The parasympathetic nervous system is termed the rest and digest system and is responsible for the automatic regulation of function when the body is at rest or in a relaxed state. The sympathetic nervous system is also termed the fight or flight system, and governs the process of automatic regulation in moments of perceived stress. In the discussion of courage, this natural biological trigger is what we are primarily considering. The idea is that we have a natural impetus towards action or revolt that is coded into our system of response in moments of stress. When we perceive events as threatening (and it is the perception in many cases that carries more weight than the reality), we are naturally inclined towards a specific brand of response. Of course, the roots of this response are found both in our genetic formulation (nature) but also in our formative experiences (nurture). From the combination of our inherent state and our breeding within the context of rigorous or loosened environmental constraints, we will accept or decline risk to greater or lesser extents. It is our uncertainty response.

The sympathetic nervous response, of course, possesses a natural disposition in forged genetic lines that manipulate our make-up on a sub-textual level: we are pulling our response, to an extent, from our gene pool, our wiring. This may create difficulties in some who are excessively timid and cannot untangle themselves from examining any ounce of uncertainty. In others this creates feckless and brash behavioural patterns which, without a positive filter, are simply tracked toward violent and disruptive patterns. Whatever your natural inclination, you must utilize a certain degree of cerebral overhaul to dilute the natural response, and filter it into positive outcomes.

The reality is that, although the parasympathetic nervous response emanates from a source below the level of consciousness, and we cannot fully over-write the feeling of fear, the action itself is volitional. The fear feeds the action and causes us to flee (or to advance recklessly given the disposition), but the action itself is commanded by thought-based response. We choose to act and can therefore overwrite the fear response. We cannot, or should not attempt to belittle the feeling of fear. It exists as a prehistoric trigger to avoid bodily harm and bubbles up from our nature; however the actual derision and distortion we undergo, how we subjugate ourselves entirely to this prehistoric feed, can be manipulated.

The idea of choice here is particular and important. We need to understand that we undergo a certain level of fear as is inherent in our nature, and it is not the fear that defines us but the response - the choice. This may seem to provide little comfort as you have always consciously understood, in those moments of descent, that it was your choice to withdraw. But the important conclusion is that, so long as you actually possess choice, you possess the capacity for alteration. It is necessary to understand that events do not need, as a rule, to follow this path indefinitely. That there is choice signals the capacity for emancipation.

Nature vs. Nurture

In our discussion of the nature of fear we have viewed the source of fear as a biological cog: a fundamental lever of action whose size and strength of distribution is directed by our genetic formulation. We have also integrated the idea of volition: that our response is directed by choice but that choice is so heavily impinged at times, that there is nothing but the flooding contractions of fear that rise through our bodies and force us to walk away. Yes we have choice, but we have always consciously understood this; it was that our choice was to digress that caused us so much pain. But it also leaves us with the space for potential.

However, we have not created a systematic or comprehensive picture of the role of nurture. That we can manipulate our response to fear and the governance of stress is evident through our growth within specific environments. We have come to be who we are not just because of the genetic blueprint, but also because of the environment in which it ebbed and pulsed and found vertical life.

So there is the coaxial strut of genetic form and