The Future of Fear

One hundred years ago, the Austrian born philosopher Rudolf Steiner spoke of the evil we would have to face in the future. He said that we must strengthen the highest, most noble and profound aspects of ourselves so that we could sustain the rush of blood to the heart that accompanies anxiety. Sustain this flood of blood to the heart without fear. Some years ago, as I swam in the depths of a year-long panic attack in which I regularly fell prey to the symptom of fear caused by my anxiety over so many aspects of the future, I read this from Steiner. In my memory, he also claimed that this feeling of anxiety is the natural state of the modern human. We are living in a world that leaves us continually unsure of the stability of our surroundings or even of our very perceptions. This gave me the permission to explore my anxiety in a new way, to observe it as it approached, like a train appearing on the horizon around a distant corner as I stood waiting at the station hearing the bells chiming, then hearing the engine of the train and its rattling upon the tracks- watching it coming but without being afraid of it-knowing it would stay on the tracks and not run me over. This was also helped by several trips to doctor's offices for fear I was dying, feeling my heart certainly was malfunctioning and could not sustain much more of its aberrations and excessive beating, and being sent home time and time again assured I was indeed in quite fine health--physically. So, between the doctors and dear nurses and Steiner I began to watch the attacks as they approached out of the future- watch them each time with lessening fear. Here was the future alive and kicking in the present. I do not think it is possible to have anxiety about something that is currently happening. It seems to me to be a state of being precipitated by the looming of the future, by the presence of the future impressing itself on the present. This is another gift from Rudolf Steiner: the idea that we can recognize not only the past as a shaping force in our present consciousness, our present joys and pathologies, but the future as well. As the past is a river pouring its silt into the delta of our today, so too is the ocean of the future crashing its waves upon the slowly shaping beach of this moment. Fearless sandcastles, a Tibetan mandala, meticulously crafted in a windstorm.