A Viral Contagion
It’s important to understand how we respond to fear as human beings, and how we can use our capabilities of mind, body, and spirit to navigate a culture of fear.
Fear was admonished in ancient tribes.
They thought of fear as a sickness that would crawl into the soul of anyone who engages it.
Contemplate fear as a sickness
In the realm of self-healing (germ vs terrain theory), it’s known that if you’re in fear, anxiety, or depressed mindset, your immune system becomes vulnerable.
If you can visualize something and believe it 100%, you increase the probability of that outcome; through the application of your will, your energy, your soul, and your connection to the universe. Your power.
When in a state of fear, one gives away that energy and outcome to something outside their control.
The goal is to improve the quality of your mindset and direct your will towards what you need, as opposed to what you fear.
When you expend your energy on a negative future outcome (visualizing it in your mind repeatedly until it’s real to your mind), you increase the probability of that specific outcome occurring.
We know our intention. We know our will. This is our power.
Fear as a Control Device
Humans can be controlled through fear, generally based on lies and delusion.
The veil of fear limits your pattern recognition and sends out different hormones and chemicals in the body, altering your brain chemistry and robbing you of your best capacities.
You can observe this when witnessing a person give up mentally.
Fear revokes the fight from their heart.
In these moments, it’s best to direct your will and energy towards a precise solution; guided by your best intentions.
Only then can you clear the overgrowth on your path towards resolve and healing.
Acquiring Sovereignty
Fear increases the probability of being controlled by exterior factors.
Fear is generally induced by a litany of societal complexes that can have a fair amount of clout in dictating our day to day decisions.
A complex is a core pattern of emotions, memories, perceptions, and wishes in the personal unconscious organized around a common theme, such as power or status.
If we want to be free, to be in alignment with spirit, nature, and the universe, we need to be courageous and attempt to gain hold of the complexes that induce our fears. (more on this later)
It’s ok to be afraid.
Recognizing fear and dismissing it as only a distraction builds courage.
Training, proper preparation, incremental improvements/gains, and connection to self, build sovereignty.
Overcoming Manipulation
If you begin to feel the creep of manipulation, you’ve got an uphill battle ahead of you.
To overcome this obstacle, you must gain insight on each side of the argument, weigh the evidence of each side, and accept the side that presents the most logical and critical evidence.
Evidence against each argument must also be considered to gain insight of the matter at hand.
Freedom is life-affirming and empowering.
Anything that inherently defies life is conversely defying freedom.
Mandating policy based on fear is totalitarian and is tantamount to projection.
Being human incurs inherent risk.
Without that risk, there would be no liberty.
It is our duty to operate at our best capacities in service of others.
The moment you engage in fear and defeat, you are acquiescing your agency, and failing to do so.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” - Sun Tzu “The Art of War”
The Way of The Warrior
The greatest samurai understands when a battle is coming.
With their calm preparation and tactics, and by not engaging in fear, they ensure victory.
Have a clear mind and heart.
Question things.
Test your knowledge through healthy debate.
Swallow your ego.
Apply the socratic method to your convictions.
You may find your convictions are not as strong as you’ve been told.
Be on the side of the scientific method, trust the process.
“If it’s truth, it can stand the pressure…”
Iron Sharpens Iron
The challenge is, there is the need for mental debate, but some prefer to monologue and engage in ad hominem or logical fallacy in order to maintain feigned superiority.
If you have no rebuttal, you have no argument.
Fear is ignorance, delusion, and darkness.
We need to have the courage to test our beliefs and our knowledge if we wish to escape the darkness.
Be humble. Be open to being wrong. Communicate.
This is the only path to resolution.
Shift Out of Default
Most people go through life in default; lacking a will to create or just following the leader.
These are the actions of a non-player character.
A person referred to as a NPC is an individual who has acquiesed their agency to social complexes.
Understanding the world is a stage, we must avoid this behavior at all costs, for it is only allowing those complexes control over your being.
It is our responsability to engage in our creative natures when yearing to make the world a better place.
We must figure out who we are, what we want to do, and how we can contribute to the world.
Wake up. Be open to differing world views. Be open to more information.
The average adult must now actively engage in their own research to be properly informed.
Systems (government, corporate, and financial), must be observed and examined through a healthy scope if they are to function.
When not properly examined, these systems can project an array of fear inducing complexes.
You can know you’re in a complex by feeling the weight if it.
Begin to ponder what triggered the complex.
What are it’s associations?
Plato’s Allegory of The Cave
How does one actively combat the array of fear complexes projected upon us by society?
Your Focus Determines Your Reality
Although you may not realize, you are actively influencing the whole electromagnetic field around you.
This is studied in Bioelectromagnetics:
Bioelectromagnetics, also known as bioelectromagnetism, is the study of the interaction between electromagnetic fields and biological entities.
Understanding bioelectriomagnetics can speak to how we sense emotion from one another.
Or when we know we’ve walked into a space flooded with negative energy.
It can be felt. It’s palpable and undeniable.
We each generate an energetic field from the core of our beings that radiates and interacts with all other living things.
Your waves of energy project out and either attract or reject another being based on that wave’s positive or negative charge.
Master Your Psyche
Complexes envelop our lives and to overcome them, we must attempt to know and understand them.
Of Carl Jung’s key psychological concepts, a complex can be surmised as:
The repressed organisation of images and experiences that governs perception and behaviour
To better understand and visualize this concept, lets bootstrap our psyches with the three-story model of the egg.
Think of an egg shape divided into three parts.
The top middle and bottom are divided by a line formed by a series of dashes.
Through this permeable line, complex material can flow in and out of these three different aspects of the psyche.
Top level - Consciousness
The primary dynamic within consciousness is the ego.
This is the command center - what calls the shots.
Mid level - The Personal Unconscious.
The primary dynamic in the personal unconscious are complexes.
The personal unconscious is constantly flooding, through that permeable membrane, to inform the ego.
Bottom level - The Collective Unconscious.
Here, the primary dynamic force would be Archetypes.
The ego’s two biggest fears are overwhelment and abandonment.
Archetypes and complexes can converge into overwhelment of the ego or abandonment through social exclusion.
Knowing and understanding how complexes inform the ego assist in controlling them.
Jung’s Ages and Stages of Development
For ages 0-7, the parents are the authority. They tell the kids what the norms and boundaries are.
For ages 7-14, authority transitions to peers. Peers have a grand impact on the ego. This is why your friends say so much about you.
For ages 14-21, peers entirely inform your ego.
For ages 21 and on, the authority is up for grabs.
The ego’s job is to sufficiently develop itself so it can become a worthy authority.
Those who are ready choose to take on the authority, rather than relinquish their authority to other systems.
Those who are not ready, throw themselves into hierarchical organizations, relinquishing their authority to superiors.
Developing Personal Authority
Complexes have a lot to do with this.
Darrell Sharp, in C. G. Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts defines a complex as:
An emotionally charged group of ideas or images, its feeling toned ideas, that over the years accumulate around certain archetypes. For instance mother and father. When complexes are constellated, they are invariably accompanied by effect. They are always relatively autonomous. Complexes in themselves are not negative, only their effects often are. Complexes are the building blocks of the psyche and the source of all human emotions.
The goal is to comprehend your complexes to avoid being exploited by them.
Complex Psychology
Before it was called analytical psychology it was called complex psychology, and is commonly referred to as Jungian analysis.
The fascinating thing about complexes is that your ego staves off the understanding of your complexes as an act of self-preservation.
A mood is a synonym for a complex. Anytime someone is in a mood (good or bad) they are in a complex. Angry, brooding, or happy.
Overwhelment and abandonment are the key instigators (triggers) of a complex.
What sets us off?
Someone walks out on us, abandons us, ignores us, or they overwhelm us with their sheer personality, chaos, and neurosis.
Complexes are split off parts of the personality and they need to be integrated because anything split off from the personality/ego structure has the potential to run our life without us knowing it.
Ego, The Grand Victim
The ego often lives in a victim complex.
If shows itself anytime were sick or wounded, feeling victimized, pitiful, or pathetic.
A complex feels like an emotional undertow that reaches up out of the ocean, takes over consciousness, overwhelms the ego, and brings everything down into the subconscious; smothering the consciousness and ego to death.
Complexes may look like different energies, frequencies, traumas that get built up over time.
They feel like a storm of little feelings, emotions, or trauma surrounding a given archetype.
These built-up energies can take their toll on our physicality and self-respect.
It’s the Ego’s position to wallow as a martyr.
Exercising Complex Posession and Becoming Whole
Complexes can manifest as posession by an alternative or different aspect of the personality that we really are not quite familiar with.
Complexes are split off parts of the personality that, if we integrate them, allow us to become whole; making us complex in an much more interesting way.
Think Vanilla vs Rocky Road.
The vanilla is impressionable.
While just fine on its own, vanilla relies on the addition of exterior factors to boost its appeal.
Whereas the rocky road understands it’s turbulent nature and transforms itself into a new experience by perceiving it’s differences as assets rather than liabilities.
This thought process enables us to become invincible in a way, as we can no longer be able to be exploited by a complex.
Recovering from a complex involves engaging in vulnerability, joy, and laughter.
Break the routine of the complex.
The Shadow Complex
A complex generally goes into shadow. never to be addressed.
However, they must be taken out and thoroughly examined.
“In short, the shadow is the unknown side.”
There is something about naming the complex, understanding it’s value system, and taking it out of shadow which is key to apprehending it.
The value system of the complex is “I’m right!”.
The complex fights to retain self-importance.
The complex is generally telling you something that seems true.
In this way it becomes self-reinforcing.
This is why most avoid having this conversation with their own egos.
The ego turns into a bully, owning the conversation, unable to admit fault.
Life Can Be Complex
Complexes are contagious when constellated.
When you are in a complex, it pulls others into that complex as well.
Most people live complex to complex.
For many people, even as they age, complexes make up the bulk of their world view.
It’s the complexes that make most of their decisions for them: who they marry, where they live, the type of job they can and cannot have, or if they are or aren’t enough.
We don’t have complexes. Complexes have us.
The Nocebo Effect
Avoid Complicating the Ego
Do not allow your complexes to overwhelm your ego.
The goal is to develop a mature ego that is capable to go toe to toe with a complex rather than being overwhelmed by it.
If you label or name your complexes, you have a better chance of recognizing them when they occur.
We need to learn to depotentiate the complex.
The best we can hope for is to lessen the intensity, frequency, and duration of the complex slowly over time.
Every time a complex hits, do not waste it, take a small bite each time.
Find out what it wants from you.
Provide what it wants and needs.
Form a relationship with the complex.
Integrate it.
Complex Alterations
Consuming alcohol and drugs has more to do with soothing an unnamed/unknown complex, looming in the unconscious, more than anything.
All neurosis and psychosis are really impulses within, seeking wholeness.
When contemplating complexes, understand that different aspects had to be put into shadow because they were not welcomed in youth, and now they want to be integrated and part of the whole.
This is Individuation
In Jungian psychology, also called analytical psychology, individuation is the process where the individual self develops out of an undifferentiated unconscious – seen as a developmental psychic process during which innate elements of personality, the components of the immature psyche, and the experiences of the person's life become, if the process is more or less successful, integrated over time into a well-functioning whole. Other psychoanalytic theorists describe it as the stage where an individual transcends group attachment and narcissistic self-absorption.
The health of the psyche depends on the relationship between the consciousness and unconscious.
What modern psychiatry calls disease, what it pathologizes (makes us bad and wrong), is actually the psyche trying to get whole and heal.
A break down of a person’s ability to function in a sick system, ie an inability to follow orders by a corrupt authority, are signs of a healing and wholeness seeking psyche.
We become so fragmented because the authorities we are exposed to are boarder-line crazy.
Our parents, teachers, baby sitters… they are all dealing with their complexes as well.
Fragmented people need a higher authority. That higher authority comes from within.
The more oriented towards external authority someone is, the more susceptible they are to being fragmented.
Projection
At times, conflicting complexes can manifest as projection.
If you’re projecting, understand your ego is not doing its job.
It’s not mature enough to stand at the gates of your mind, in guard.
The battleground for the soul is the mind.
If we learn how to integrate our complexes, develop and mature our egos, we will have that guard standing at our mind’s gates.
We must give that guard tools of discernment to know what shall and shall not pass.
The Path to Becoming Incorruptible
Becoming incorruptable requires integrating and owning our complexes.
Without doing so, we leave ourselves vulnerable to mental exploitation.
Integrating complexes renders us incorruptible as the process refashions us indivisble.
You cannot be divided against yourself when you’ve done the work of integrating your complexes.
Watching the media and witnessing all the chaos in the world can trigger the overwhelment complex.
When you are not in an overwhelment complex, you’re focused, you pay attention, you notice everything, you’re present.
You do what needs to be done. Doing the work in front of you.
Keeping humanity in a state of stress and complexes is exemplary of divide and conquer.
You don’t have to divide a people, you can divide their minds and keep them at war with themselves.
War at the fork in the road, getting us nowhere.
Engaging Active Imagination
Anything that gets a dialogue going between the ego and the self results in a win for the human being.
This is not about just getting rid of poor traits, this is about creating a stalwart and magical personality.
Take back Sunday. Use the complex to rest and become more conscious by engaging in your highest priorities.
Transform the inauthenticity and misery to authentic joy and love.
Conclusion
Fill your mind with positive mental nutrients.
Live a positive healthy and inspired lifestyle.
Eat good food. De-stress your life. Get your blood pumping.
Focus your time and energy on what you want to build and grow in this world.
The only way to solve the bigger problem is collective, through each of our individual efforts.
If you find yourself in one, the best you can do is just become aware you’re in a complex.
Pledge to take no action until you bring yourself out of it.
We are so infinitely expansive.
We are incredibly powerful.
We can and do influence our reality to an immense degree.
When you recognize this, you vibrate and share that frequency with those around you.
But if everyone is in fear, delusion, ignorance, shame, and guilt (the lowest of possible vibrations), no one is being helped.
Your individual effort is incredibly powerful, and the more of us that engage in this mindset can shift the Overton window and create a future united and engaged in peace, love, and harmony.
We need to walk outside the cave together, stand in truth, and engage in solutions.
Engaging in fear as a society will only tear us apart.
We’re more powerful than that.
The more you can stay in a mindset of courage, your existence will persist.
Learn how to stay empowered by being calm and centered, with spirit and force, determination and will, and understand the risk of death is ever present and should not rule our actions.
“Don’t fear the reaper.”
Especially when he’s built his horse on a house of cards of lies and illusion.
Freedom, sovereignty, connection, peace, community, goodness, life-affirming actions, and virtues are truth.
They just are. We can choose them. They are more powerful than fear.
Once we wake up to this, we will be free.
The only opposition to oppression is the courage of the individual to deny fear - spit in it’s face and run it out of town.
The key is consciousness.
When you become conscious or aware of your complexes, you integrate them; taking them out of the dark shadow and into the golden light.
They become part of what makes us mature, more developed, and interesting.
Have empathy for people, and know your anger solves nothing.
Fear vs The Frightened
This post was inspired by Rachel Conerly’s appearance on the Aeon Byte podcast.
