Fear of the New

Transcription of a lecture by Avi Grinberg to students of the professional studies during their 2nd week of Year B (Switzerland 1992)

In order to really know how you’re doing, I’d ask you how much “new” is in your life. I wouldn’t ask you about good or bad things, but about new ones. For the young people among you, “new” is not such a big deal, because except for symptoms that keep returning, everything is new—the world is still new. For most people above 30, the world starts to look old. Every town is just another town. You’ve seen snow many times, so it’s just snow again. To bring something new, to a life that is usually a repetition of the old, is magical.

One of the questions you have to ask your clients is how much “new” they have in their life. The more “new” there is in one’s life, the less old there is. Remember that a big part of the work we’re doing with people is with their past—to make sure that it is completed and that “new” can enter into their life. This way you teach them to renew themselves.

Let’s look at a box and say that this box is the usual me—my name, my habits, all my unfinished history, what people say about me, what I believe or not about myself, everything. I live inside this box and I see the world from there. If something inside the box tells me that I always have to be important otherwise I’m not alive, then I’ll do everything as if it were very important. As I’m doing it already so mechanically, I don’t even realize that this is what I’m doing—because this is “me.” And I believe that everybody else is doing the same, because if I am like this, then everybody else is also like this. That’s the way I see them. If I’m trying to be important and you’re trying to be important, I’ll have to fight you so I will be the important one. And it doesn’t matter with whom I’m doing it. Even if the other person tells me that it’s okay, that he doesn’t mind that I’ll be more important, I don’t believe him. Because I know that to be important is the most important thing. My relationships can then be of two kinds—either I’m dominating people so I’ll feel important, or I’m fighting them constantly in order to become important. And it won’t be just with being important. It will be the same with any other stance that the person is stuck with, like being more beautiful, thinner, more intelligent or righteous, etc. If I took the stance that I have to be tough, the world will be a tough place for me. What will happen if I encounter real softness? It will be impossible for me to bear it, I’ll be scared. And if a person with a stance of softness encounters a tough person he’ll also be afraid. It doesn’t matter what my stance is, as soon as something appears in my life that has a different or new stance, fear will come.

Imagine that you meet someone that doesn’t play according to the rules you keep. For example, in a chess game you’re playing with someone that moves his horse in a way that is not allowed for the horse in chess. You tell him this, and he says that according to his rules it’s okay. With that person you won’t be able to communicate in the way you are used to. In chess, you can say that it’s impossible to play with him, and it’s not so important since it’s only chess. But in life, it means that you can’t play with people who don’t play according to your rules. So you’ll meet and “play” only with a limited variety of people. We’re normally trying to meet only people that behave like us. When we meet a person that is strange to us, we try to avoid him because he scares us—we don’t know how to hold onto our old habits in such a relationship. Look at your life and you’ll see that most of the time you behaved in the same way. You had the same relationships again and again with people who were seemingly different people.

Think of people as sitting on an island around which there is the sea of fear. Usually islands are stuck in the same place—Hawaii is always in the same place. But the islands I am talking about are floating and they meet new islands all the time. Each time an island meets another island, fear is arising (or perhaps excitement). Why? Because when you meet people, they tend to look at you as if you were exactly like them. So each time that you’ll be or do something that is new to them, fear will arise. It shows that something new is happening—something that the person doesn’t know how to handle and has to learn what to do with it. Understanding this allows us to look at fear as motivation. If you look at a person as being on an island in a sea of fear, and he is swimming and riding the waves instead of trying to run away or avoid them, you’ll find that he is changing. He is no longer just a floating island.

People are being led by fear through most things in their lives. If I’m a small green island heading my own way and there comes a big blue island, the waves of fear that rise will take me away from that frightening island and from where I was heading. And then, while floating in my new direction, I’ll meet another island, and I’ll be washed by the waves of fear to yet another place. This doesn’t refer only to things that happen around me. For example, most people are doing what they’re doing because it was a less frightening possibility. That is, it was the most convenient possibility since it involved little fear—if at all. (Fear shows that there’s something uncomfortable; something uncomfortable shows that there’s fear in it.) Or let’s say that I’ve found I have a great talent for something. The thought that I’ll have to work and develop this talent scares me, so I’d rather give up. My talent pushed me away from it with the fear that it raised in me.

If we look at the difference between basic potential and actual potential, we’ll see that most of the differences were created by fear. To fulfill my potential means to leave my island and meet other islands, instead of seeing them as too scary for me. Life as an island in the stream of fear means that we’ll encounter fear no matter what we meet. Let’s take for example: an island that longs for love, living comfortably longing for that love. One day a loving island appears and starts creating waves. The island that longed for love realizes that he has to change his life, to give up his habits, his convenience… and his waves of fear push away the love.

Everything we learn that is new is connected to fear. If you learn something that doesn’t scare you, it shows that it doesn’t demand anything from you, and that there’s nothing new in it for you. And then there’s no real use in learning it, as you’ll only be repeating what you already know.

We live our lives trying to run away from fear, living in a way that will keep us safe. Everything we do to guarantee our safety we do with ultimate commitment, like paying the medical insurance. Most of our day is dedicated to holding the structure we built around us, to make sure that it won’t break. So we follow our daily routines—cleaning dishes, cleaning the house, maintaining the same old relationships (whether we want them or not), making sure that we keep our commitments from the past (whether we like them or not), eating the same food, going to our usual places, etc. We leave very little space for new things. Most of us don’t have any time during a day in which something new can happen. Instead, we go on living the same things again and again and again.

If we want a change, we have to be ready to meet fear. I’m sure you think that fear is a big deal. We all believe that fear is a bad thing—too strong for us—and that only very few brave people can overcome it. Of course, it couldn’t be me, since I’m a normal person and fear scares me. Let’s go back to the idea of an island. Imagine that you got stuck on an island, you don’t know how to swim and there are all kinds of animals in the water. Not so far away there’s another island with palm trees. You’re hungry and those dates are just ripe and ready to be eaten. This is the human situation—either you swim or you don’t. Some people never swim and remain hungry all their lives. Some people swim and get eaten by sharks. Some people swim, get to the island and eat, finding one day that the fruits are finished and they have to swim again. It doesn’t matter how many times you already swam—you’ll always have to swim again and meet the fear in the water again. You can’t overcome fear—it will always be there. Each time you go into the water, you’ll know that there are also sharks swimming there. Even if you’ll learn to swim very fast, there’s always the possibility that you’ll meet a shark that swims faster than you. There could also be other hungry animals in the water. And maybe you’ll have a cramp in your leg and you’ll drown. There’s no guarantee that you’ll reach the palm tree. But the other option is to remain the same all the time. Look at most people that grew older this way and you’ll see that their lives are always the same, full of the same things, day after day. It may sound convenient, but if you notice how many chronic conditions they have—which are just getting worse all the time—you’ll see that perhaps it’s not as convenient as it seems. When we swim from one island to another, we leave many things behind us. Some of them are chronic conditions.

There’s a force on the island that keeps telling us all the time to swim. We can call this force curiosity for life. Usually we fight this force because we don’t want to meet the fear in swimming. We don’t let it guide us except in very few moments.

I used to guard my island as if it were the only thing in the world. Today, I don’t mind moving away from it. It’s not that I’m not afraid—I am afraid to swim, and that gives me motivation to swim faster. The fact that I have the experience in swimming doesn’t mean that the sharks won’t catch me. What it does mean is that it’s becoming easier to leave the island.

Your work is to “persuade” your clients to swim to the island with the palm tree. Have you ever eaten dates right from the tree? It’s worthwhile swimming for that.

The room with our working table and client is a very good training ground. In there, we are constantly faced with the decision whether to swim or not—to meet fear or not. And since we have another island with us that won’t be able to learn to allow fear if we won’t, we must consciously choose to swim. It is a training ground for life. When you come back home in the evening and meet the island that is waiting for you there, you can remember that this is another island, and that you can choose to swim to it instead of becoming mechanical again. The working room is a training ground not only for us, but also for the person that is on our table. From this point of view you can understand that there is no difference between the practitioner and the client. Both of them have the possibility to swim and have fear, or stay stuck in the same place.

Swimming means to add something new to our lives—new perceptions, new feelings, new ways of being and sometimes new acts. It revitalizes us and increases our hunger for life.