Fear and I share a deep relationship.
My heart skipped a beat every time I looked at my eyes while tripping on LSD. The plethora of emotions I had experienced all my life struck me in a single instant. I realized my perception of this world is a manifestation of these emotions. And the most dominant emotion was pain.
Not pain caused by physical injuries or tragic events, but pain caused by watching life through spectator eyes.
What are spectator eyes?
You consciously choose not to act, yet you attribute the consequences of not acting to the workings of fate. This deceptively relieves you of the responsibility to ignite change, and you become a victim of your own perpetration. Your thoughts dwell in the realm of what could have been, constricting your control over the present moment.
It makes you wonder — wouldn’t it be the same if you were a corpse? A corpse would be better off, unable to feel the torment of its ineffectiveness.
How do you take them off?
Even though your conscious mind is aware of the havoc they wreak, spectator eyes aren’t easy to remove. Since you grew up wearing them, they’ve deeply infiltrated your subconscious mind. The first step to removing them requires internalizing the belief that you are solely responsible for how you feel. When you do this, your mind lets go of past regrets and future expectations. It gets to only thing that matters: Getting shit done.
To quote the stoic philosopher Epictetus, “emotional problems arise for two reasons: trying to control things you can’t control or blaming fate for the things you can control.”
You can only control your actions and beliefs — not the universe’s response to them. If you severely limit your actions based on preconceived ideas of success and failure, you are living an imprisoned life.
The second step is overcoming the greatest obstacle to adapting this mentality: The fear that grips your mind. This fear has shaped your entire life’s trajectory. Facing it is a daunting task indeed.
The truth is this fear will never dissipate instantly. Rather it will gradually lessen its grip over you if you incrementally indulge in unnerving challenges.
Slowly start doing the things that scare the shit out of you.
Fear and I have always shared a deep relationship. We still do. But my LSD trip imbued a powerful lesson: Fear can only be overcome by embracing it. By letting it creep through your toes, surge through your legs, and strike your heart — beating it ferociously through your chest.
I could write stories of great valor amid insurmountable odds, I could list endless techniques to be more brave, but they would not even provide an iota of help compared to just fucking facing the real thing.
If you keep waiting for this fear to dissipate, you’ll be forever imprisoned by spectator eyes and will become trapped in a perpetual cycle of misery. The same things will happen to you all over again in different settings.
You will remain a mere spectator inside your own body, waiting for death to put you out of your misery.
