Sensitivity and the Effects of Fear

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In my view, the rules or ideas that apply to Earth life and set it off from other realms are those concerning relationships. Earth life is primarily about creating and experiencing relationships. A person can be creative and adventurous and religious whilst on Earth, but he can also be these on all the other realms.

Without a physical body on Earth so consciousness can dream its dreams, but they remain dreams. In order to experience our dreams we have to become housed in a physical body having physiological necessities. Even so, if the body were simply androgynous then we would experience life only as self-contained monads. The importance of sexuality is that it ensures that the monad has to enter into personal relationships, at least for most of its development.

Relationships begin from the moment that the infant begins to create its ego, so they form a major part of consciousness. [¹]. Relationships bring issues of power and dependency, of morality and ethics, and of social concern. The factors of morality and ethics are the issues that are most central to Earth life. If we were self-contained monads, we would not need any moral practice, since we would not care about anyone or anything else. But once sexuality brings us into relationships, then sooner or later it becomes necessary to establish moral rules or boundaries to control our inter-actions with other people (and with animals).

A successful resolution of all emotional and psychological issues requires the person to move in the direction of accepting equality as the basis of all relationships. Equality is the sublimation of love. [²]. Hence this attitude enables a person to respect others naturally, without needing to fear them. Once fear can be dispensed with, then the propensity to violence (either to others or to oneself ) can gradually be eliminated.

Within a commitment to equality the person has two traditional choices. He can decide to define himself within social relationships, or prefer to be an individual. Or he may oscillate between both choices to suit his needs as they change. Each choice has its own summit of achievement. [³]

• If a person seeks to be an individual, his code of ethics needs to be such that it will lead him to the acceptance of life and the attainment of detachment and equanimity.

• If the person prefers to be socially defined, his code of ethics needs to be such that it will lead him to the acceptance of life and the realisation of harmonious relationships. [4]

Importance of Daydreaming

A modern problem that can easily crush the development of a well-balanced sense of individuality is that of the desire of a parent to submit a child to high-pressure education at the infant and primary school stages. All early education should be relaxing and low-pressure. The child needs to create its own world of phantasy.

The child needs to day-dream. From phantasy will arise the child’s creativity and individuality. If phantasy and day-dreaming are discouraged and prevented because they are considered to be ‘escapist ’  then the child’s emotional growth will be stunted.

An example that demonstrates this view is the life of John S. Mill, a brilliant intellectual in the Britain of the nineteenth century. His childhood intellectual growth was stimulated by high-pressure coaching from his father, resulting in Mill’s emotional growth being crippled in the process.

For a person of less ethical restraint than Mill, high-pressure demands on the child are likely to stimulate the production of confusion and internal violence in that child. Phantasy will now become destructive. The child may develop hateful thoughts about the external world, or develop hateful thoughts about himself.

I was fortunate in the parents that I had. They allowed me to spend much of my childhood in my own dream world. Even as an adult, I still need to give as much time to my dream world as to the world of social reality.

The external world is objective. But objectivity does not necessarily convey reality. Nor does objectivity alone create reality. The subjective world of phantasy is just as necessary to the evolution of consciousness as is the objective world of social relations. High-pressure education can be left till adolescence, when the energy of puberty allows the young adult to cope with it.

Sensitivity and Fear

In the sensitive child, phantasy and creativity can work together as he explores the external world. Materialism can seem a wonderland of fascinating delights. However, as sensitivity begins to develop rapidly in intensity during adolescence so materialism may begin to lose its grip on the young ego. Now sensitivity can move phantasy and creativity into new directions. Phantasy can become the creative exploration of oneself.

The emotional dynamic of sensitivity is fear, with self-pity as a secondary factor. Fear de-stabilises the young adult, the stranglehold of materialism slips, and creative insights into oneself and the world arise in the ‘gap’ of uncertainty that opens up.

If a person is too sensitive for his time, if he is too vulnerable to fear of the social pressures, then he may romanticise the simple life of  ‘noble’ peasants who have little sense of guilt or fear (but who also have a much lesser degree of personal development).

Sensitivity initiates the development of individuality – the person begins to understand that he has responsibility for himself. He becomes aware that he does not have to act simply from social compulsion. Now peripheral awareness of fear comes into consciousness. This fear may take many disguises, such as fear of authority, fear of society, fear of relationships, fear of the unknown. These disguises colour the drama of personal life, but they are not the primary source of fear.

The root source of fear in a sensitive person is the feeling that consciousness is trapped within a material body. In the higher realms of heaven, consciousness is not restricted by form ; in its nature, consciousness is formless and mutable, it has no boundaries. But the physical body has a defined form or shape, and sexual polarisation. Rebirth into a physical body imprisons consciousness, so fear is born. This fear remains mild and unnoticed whilst the person is oriented to a social reality, but begins to develop in intensity and influence when social reality loses its glamour and attractions.

I re-phrase this view. Sensitivity is rooted in the subconscious feeling of being trapped, of being trapped by something that is indefinable and inexplicable, a nameless fear. When introspective thought is deep enough, this fear is felt to be the fear of the body.

When a sensitive person is socially-orientated, like the writer D.H. Lawrence, then jealousy camouflages the fear. But when jealousy is restrained then subconscious fear produces timidity, which becomes the emotional dynamic for the switch of consciousness away from prosaic realism into creative imagination and phantasy. The timid person becomes self-absorbed in his own world of the mind.

The Problem of Rebirth

Two primary emotions that are involved in a person's journey through life are jealousy and narcissism. Jealousy is the emotional basis of most relationships, and narcissism is the emotional basis of individuality. These are compound emotions, consisting of two other simpler emotions; I call these simpler emotions the factors of the compound emotions.  The factors of jealousy and narcissism are :

jealousy = love + self-pity
narcissism = love + vanity  [5]

As sensitivity develops in a person, he tires of the problems caused by jealous love. He seeks a different kind of love. So sooner or later sensitivity leads to a focus on narcissism and self-absorption. The person seeks love as a way of offsetting his fear, and usually finds it as the love mode of narcissism. Within a perspective of reincarnation, absorption begins to create possibilities of experiencing the heavenly realms (in states of meditation and mysticism). The introvert becomes absorbed in himself. The mystic becomes absorbed in his visions. [6]. Unfortunately, absorption also creates possibilities of experiencing the hells.

Hell arises when the next rebirth to Earth occurs. The introvert or the mystic, as an infant, becomes excessively identified with (or absorbed into) the personality of the mother. Identification enables the infant to focus on the love mode of jealousy. And if the mother cannot cope with this identification, if she does not generate enough love for the infant, then the infant experiences psychological distress or trauma. [7]

My line of thought implies that :

The mystic rises to heaven, when an adult.
And sinks down to hell, when an infant.

The problem viewed over many incarnations is that self-absorption increases the individual’s sensitivity and turns rebirth into a nightmare. On the path of developing self-consciousness and self-awareness, sooner or later everyone has to run the gauntlet of dying as a very sensitive adult, and then incarnating as a very sensitive infant. The degree of sensitivity that a person experiences whilst on Earth relates to his degree of personal growth and evolution – the more evolved he is, the more sensitive he becomes. [8]. This sensitivity lays the foundation for trauma in infancy, which in later life can cause the production of madness. [9]

The intensity of any infancy trauma can be gauged from the intensity with which social forms of rejection affect the person once he has become an adult. Trauma arises primarily because the infant feels that he has been rejected. This feeling continues into adulthood ; it is not dispersed by the passage of time. So the adult is as sensitive to the experience of being rejected as he was when a child (the adult may try to cope by creating defensive mechanisms to deaden his sensitivity).

The children most at risk of infancy trauma are those who will be introverts, romantic or spiritual idealists, or mystics, and those who have high intelligence, since high intelligence is often developed as a means of switching attention away from emotional problems. Rationality is sometimes used as a defence mechanism against the power of emotion.

Rejection and Desolation

Infancy trauma produces confusion and turmoil in the mind. This ‘darkness’ will eventually produce effects in the mind of the sensitive child once he becomes an adult, leading him into a search for something he knows not what. This is the traditional ‘soul search’ that every advanced sensitive person will sooner or later undertake. His confusion will eventually propel him into a search for love and meaning in life.

One traditional interpretation of the mind’s darkness is the religious one – it is the dark night of the soul ; the mystic interprets darkness as the rejection of himself by God. The philosophical interpretation of darkness is that it is an expression of nihilism, the absence of all meaning, the absence of all meaningful use of the will. [10]

Rejection is experienced as the desolation of feeling. The mystic is swallowed up in self-pity. Love is denied.

Nihilism is experienced as the desolation of will. The philosopher experiences the dis-integration of his will. Meaning is non-existent.

The standard method of handling childhood problems, once the person has become an adult, has usually been the concentration on developing will power. All emotional problems (even all forms of madness) can be kept at bay by a sufficiently strong will. This is why traditional ethics often centred on theories of the will, that is, traditional thinkers were attracted to theories of the will by the subconscious influence of their infancy problems.

The inadequacy of this method is that the problems are never solved, but merely repressed. Therefore they recur life after life, and have to be repressed life after life. This procedure is a very inefficient method of spiritual development. The understanding and practice of psycho-dynamic psychology now offers a different approach.

Effects of Fear

Sensitivity is just one kind of response to fear. I look at the effects that fear produces in more detail.

Consciousness is imprisoned in form, so fear is the dominant emotion of the tender emerging ego of the infant. This fear generates self-pity and sets in motion the response that separates humanity from the animals – the infant yearns for divine love.

This yearning is the primary distinctive feature of the human and not rationality, since rationality is an aspect of mind that has to be cultivated and developed. Rationality is not innate in the animal world, and neither is it innate in humanity. The higher animals develop rational ability, and humans have to do the same.

In my view the yearning for love is a subconscious memory of the experience of love in heaven. However, pure love is a rare attribute of parents, so the infant evolves strategies of compensation for its aching desire.

Four of these strategies are:

1. The infant switches to vanity
This is its way of neutralising the self-pity (vanity and self-pity form a binary pair, hence they are mutually exclusive). Then vanity inaugurates the mechanism of the loop of projection and introjection, which continues all through the person’s life. [11]

2. The infant switches into sensuality
Now the wonders of materialism and Nature sweep away the self-pity. But Nature is not sensual enough. As the child grows up it diverts self-pity into the sensuality of sexual desire, so now jealousy (mode of self-pity) becomes dominant. Sexual forms of jealousy continue to shape the person for most of his life.

3. The child develops sensitivity
When this attitude begins to emerge then the ego has begun its slow journey into ethics and personal and creative development.

4. The youth desires intensity of experience
This strategy seems to offer the best of all worlds. Self-pity is switched to vanity, which then becomes the base of idealism. Idealism is raised to a passion. Such impassioned idealism requires a base of love. The three modes of love – narcissism, jealousy and pure love – generate intense ways of living. At its most intense this strategy creates an attitude of  All or Nothing to all forms of commitment. However, such idealism has a built-in penalty clause – failure to achieve one’s highest goal leaves one with Nothing except a mind wrecked by an intensity of resentment and bitterness that is beyond belief.

Any of these strategies can mix together, producing conflict as to the person’s aim in life. For the ordinary person the most interesting strategy is strategy (2). Animal sexuality is purely instinctual and physiological. Human sexuality adds the psychological factor of sexual desire, which represents jealousy in self-pity mode and is derived from the primary self-pity. Hence the desire for sexual intercourse is only a sensual desire and not one of love.

Without self-pity then sex, for humans, would be a purely instinctual and physiological mechanism in tune with Nature, that is, at the onset of Spring the younger population would gather in groups for courtship and impregnation of females, no different from the way that ducks do it. Self-pity provides the emotional root for the psychological extension of instinct and physiology into sexual desire, a desire that is now independent of Nature. [12]

In Summary  –
Fear and self-pity are the bedrock of human nature on Earth. Fear and self-pity give rise to sensitivity in the infant. Then the yearning for love arises. The intensity of the fear, self-pity and yearning relate to the degree of evolution of the child. How the yearning is directed determines the destiny of the child.

Unfortunately, fear and self-pity, if too intense, predispose the infant to the possibility of trauma and madness.

The number in brackets at the end of each reference takes you back to the paragraph that featured it. The addresses of my other websites are on the Links page.

[¹]. In my view, the ego is created in the first few months of life. For an analysis of this period, see the article Creating the Ego. [1]

[²]. See the article on Sublimation. [2]

[³]. The two choices, whether to be an individual or to be socially-centred, lead to two different identities  – a person has both an individual identity and a social identity. See the article Confusion. [3]

[4]. Acceptance is analysed in the fifth article on Abreaction : Forgiveness and Acceptance. [4]

[5]. My definitions, descriptions, and analysis of emotions are given in the three articles on Emotion. See home page.
For a description of absorption, see the article Self-Absorption and Identification. [5]

[6]. There are articles on reincarnation on my website Patterns of Spirituality. [6]

[7]. For a description of identification, see the article Self-Absorption and Identification. [7]

[8]. There is an article on Personal Evolution on my websites A Modern Thinker and The Strange World of  Emotion. [8]

[9]. Infancy trauma is my name for psychological trauma that occurs in the first years of childhood. An article on Bonding focuses on some problems of a sensitive child and explains an unintentional source of infancy trauma.

There is an article on Infancy Trauma on my website The Subconscious Mind. 
In addition, infancy trauma is explained in two articles on my website Patterns of Confusion. The first article, Vulnerability of the Ego, focuses on the origins of violence. And the second one, Guilt & Meaning - part 2, centres on why trauma can occur unintentionally. [9]

[10]. The dark night of the soul is analysed in the articles Conflict within Idealism, on my website Patterns of Spirituality.
There is an article on Nihilism on my websites The Strange World of Emotion and A Modern Thinker.
The ultimate expression of loss of meaning is the state of catatonia. There are two articles, Guilt and Meaning - parts 1 & 2, about this on my website Patterns of Confusion. [10]

[11]. The binary nature of emotions is explained in the first article on Emotion, section Influence of Value.
The loop of projection and introjection is explained in the article Projection and Introjection. [11]

[12]. The relationships between sexuality, self-pity, and sorrow are described in the article Nihilism on my website A Modern Thinker.[12]

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