What is really behind a person's fear in life

AVAlexander Volchek

There is an interesting idea about fear: people say that encountering fear drives us to develop, achieve things, even attain well-being. In effect, fear makes us better, perhaps even more impressive. Saying all this creates an inner dissonance in me because it is so untrue. Many well-known people describe fear this way. It has become a standard model for explaining their success. Someone shows their success and describes not what actually happened, but their own feeling and interpretation. It would be like explaining why I live in California by saying I had a good teacher in first, second, third, and fourth grade, or attended a school specializing in English from fifth grade. “That is why I ended up in California.” Those conclusions would be entirely invented, imaginary, false, far-fetched. There are many such explanations: “As a child, I ate potatoes and onions.

There was no other food, and that is why I succeeded.” Or someone says, “I began sweeping yards and washing cars as a child, and that is why I succeeded.” I am quoting someone else, not describing myself. Or, “I was beaten as a child, so I realized early that I had to be an adult. I left home, started work early, and succeeded.” Does that mean all those people should now treat their children exactly the same way? If you present that connection to society, is that really what people should do? Is that how they should behave? Do you truly want it? Do you want your child to be afraid to go outside and have to fight someone? To fear entering their apartment building or going to school because it might eventually lead to certain results? People construct false cause-and-effect connections. This is very important: understand where your experience or actions actually led to a result, and where the explanation is completely invented. What does an invented explanation mean?

Here is a good example involving experience. To learn to drive well, you really do need experience. You need to learn and then gain experience of a particular quality. That does not mean you will never have an accident, die while driving, or hit and kill someone. Your driving ability is only part of the picture. You may drive well, but someone unexpectedly appears in front of you and you hit them, or another driver drives badly and breaks a rule, and you have an accident. But you do not need the experience of an accident to learn to drive well. So when people say you must be afraid, or live in fear as a child, to have a good life—does that apply only to childhood, or to adulthood too? Ask people who praise fear: “If fear really helps, are we right to think you should be kidnapped now so that instead of a billion dollars you have a hundred billion, or instead of a hundred billion you have a trillion?”

Give you even more fear now, and you will end up somewhere good. Is that really so? Look at the modern world: virtually all political systems, religious systems, and political figures—politicians are nowhere near the scale of religious systems—most communities of that kind use fear as the basic concept for moving people forward. “If you do not follow your horoscope properly, you will have problems. If you do not attend church, you will have problems. If you do not give to charity, help these people, or defend yourselves, you will have problems.” That is the general message. Or, “To live well, we must do this, this, this, and this; otherwise things will go badly.” Fear is placed on the other side of the scale. When future fear is presented, a person feels it right now. My grandmother died in her nineties. When she was young, during World War II, she stood in a lake hiding from the Germans. She clearly formed the idea that war is terribly bad.

Society reinforced that very strongly too. I am not saying war is good; I am talking about a deeply ingrained belief. It was probably not my grandmother's main problem or greatest fear, because her son died in an accident at eleven or twelve. I think that probably outweighed the problem of war. Even so, society emphasized war so incredibly strongly that she always said, “The most important thing is that there be no war.” War was the worst thing that could happen. What does that amount to? At the same time, life in the Soviet Union constantly built up the idea of someone who might attack. Whoever reached space first would attack. Whoever came first in sports would somehow attack—the athletes would run over and attack. Whoever led in mathematics or physics would attack; whoever developed nuclear weapons first would attack, or simply had more weapons. Someone was always going to attack. A standard way of projecting fear.

But the attack is in the future, while the person feels fear now. Is that a real movement of life? Let us look more deeply at what happens when someone feels fear, in their soul and spiritual being. Fear can arise immediately. This matters: fear has different sources. If someone drives a knife into my arm now, I will feel pain and perhaps fear death or a particular treatment. Fear arises as an energetic impulse of my astral body and my “I,” among other things. It does not arise because my brain became frightened or I generated a thought. There is a reason I generated that thought. There is a reason for the energy of fear appearing. When someone cries, their “I” compresses the astral body, and they cry. Without that compression, they would not cry. They do not cry because they saw something beautiful; they cry because their “I” compresses the astral body. It is a clear, direct, understandable pattern. Write what you think about fear, what fears you have, and where you see the root of your question or problem.

When the physical body is directly involved, another process takes place involving that body, and you feel different physical sensations. Some impulses arise automatically as physical reactions, again involving psychophysical processes. But those processes operate because a person has other bodies—

other bodies. The physical body has not simply generated something. In itself, it has nothing to generate. A person dies and their physical body lies there. You can frighten it, shout, or tell it anything; it will not cry, smile, or feel fear. Nothing happens. For a certain period after death, the soul and spiritual system experiences extreme fears, but they are not expressed in the physical body. They exist nonetheless. A person lives through very difficult things after death. Very difficult things. Incredibly difficult things. Many teachings focus exclusively on making the transition after death properly, balancing that transition and its initial period. Balancing the initial period after death. Entering that transition properly. Properly. Ordinary people are not concerned about what happens after death, what pain or fear they may experience, because they associate pain and fear exclusively with the physical body. So here is a very important point: when fear arises, the perception and state of your soul and spiritual system are disrupted.

On one hand, this is a natural process. But it is a problem. It is like discussing ego. The ego, the computer, is a natural presence in a person's life, just as their connection with Lucifer, Ahriman, or other energies is natural. But it is a problem, a task for the person. A task. Some people have lived largely without fear. There are lives in which fear is minimized: a harmonious soul and spiritual system, favorable karma, bodies sufficiently restored and balanced for the person to live calmly. We think it strange or bad if someone does not cry at a funeral, or smiles. But if we study the spiritual world, that represents a very high quality of development. Can there also be inappropriate states? Yes. Whether we can distinguish appropriate from inappropriate laughter at a funeral is another question. Do we automatically regard every good state as inappropriate there? People say, “There are selfish tears, but there are good tears too.” It is like fear—

there is supposedly bad fear, but good fear too. Yet laughter at an event expected to bring only sorrow is always deemed inappropriate. A person supposedly cannot divorce with a happy heart and an open state, die with a happy heart, or witness their child's death with a happy, open heart. Why? How can that be? Is an open state amid problems not true maturity and development? True maturity, purity, real purity. Real purity in what is happening. That is the crucial point. Again, fear within your system reflects an inadequate perception of all the different spaces—an inadequate ability to perceive everything happening. If you perceive everything, fear may exist in one area. It is always there. Every person always has areas that trigger fear, energies that trigger some amount of it. Always. Always. They are always operating; you simply do not sense some areas. We also know a person can be brought psychophysically into a state where they stop feeling pain or fear.

A simple example: I fell as a child and developed an arm contracture. I dislocated my elbow several times, and my arm has essentially remained tense for the rest of my life. At thirty, or twenty-five, if someone had asked, “Sasha, do you feel pain in your arm?” I would have said, “Not particularly. I do not particularly feel pain. I could feel it in my right arm just as in my left.” One day I went to meet someone who could see certain spiritual worlds. I understood none of this and knew nothing about it. I cannot even say I believed in it. We went on the recommendation of a female friend who has recommended and brought many people into my life. A close person in terms of the spiritual worlds; I perceive that clearly. Our lives will connect many more times—probably not in this life for her, though anything is possible. At the meeting, the person approached and said, “There is something strange about your arm.”

He touched my arm. Just touched it. The pain was like a knife being driven into my elbow. Hellish pain. He said, “That pain has always been there; you simply do not perceive it. Your brain has switched it off. When something hurts, you need to switch off.” The muscular and nervous systems work that way: something hurts, then suddenly stops, something else hurts, and compensation occurs. You cannot keep feeling it constantly. The brain says, “I do not want to feel this pain anymore,” and blocks it. Psychotherapy has many techniques that bring people into different states, where they remember something, unblock a part of consciousness, or recall a problem. So much is built on this. An enormous amount. Understand that a great deal of fear is always present, and you do not hear it. You blocked many things long ago and do not want to hear or perceive them because you do not know what to do with them. If you let in that entire stream of truth, you would die in it.

You would truly experience hellish pain. I recently led a meditation on my meditation channel, which is separate from this one. One meditation took place in mid-February; you can watch it, though I do not remember its exact number. I described and showed a particular state, a world beyond the state of freedom. During it, I said that approaching this state involves an incredible amount of pain—transformational pain. An incredible amount of pain. What happens to a person in the spiritual world at that moment is very painful, and no personality wants to experience it. Even the spiritual being does not want to experience it. Some people separate the spiritual world from the physical person and think it is all dandelions, little Luntiks, berries—everyone so wonderful. They also think the spiritual being is some supreme authority over everything that happens.

That is not so. There is hierarchy, development of the spiritual system and of the spiritual being. Believe me, if your spiritual being were a higher spiritual authority—not even the highest, just at the next levels, comparable to an angel—it would not be within your current structure. It would not be human in this present form of life. It could not. It could not. It is impossible. It would immediately realize stillness rather than remain in reasoning and analysis. It would not have reached the particular phase that a human being will reach thousands of years from now. It would not have reached that phase and will not reach that specific phase—of this substance, artifact, process, or being, whatever we call the whole complex. It would not have reached it, but it is in a completely different phase of development in the spiritual world, in terms of that system's freedom. These beings have a different kind of freedom. Freedom of action—no. Freedom of the spiritual being—yes.

Freedom of the spiritual being, yes. The human system in the spiritual world is profoundly hierarchical. Even if you divide the person into parts, the hierarchy is immense. Some people are so mired that they will not move into another incarnation and will remain in lower systems. They will not move to the next level of development. There are also enormous numbers of spiritual beings working to keep people from advancing at all, to keep them mired in the darkness of consciousness. So a spiritual system is no dandelion or Luntik. Many highly specific processes take place within it, constantly affecting your life and actions without your experiencing them. Again, if you experienced all of them, you would fall to your knees and pray endlessly. Endlessly. Simply endlessly. You would burn up from everything happening. Imagine suddenly, truly experiencing all the karmic effects of what you do—living through your entire karmic experience in a fraction of a second. Some films portray this idea. Your whole system would burn out; it could not take it in.

People are always talking about memory and how much we can remember. Yet we cannot recall just forty years of our lives, describing twenty-four hours a day—or at least the eighteen or sixteen waking hours—in detail. Every detail. We cannot remember it all. People study the brain and speak of how developed it is, yet have not even approached using it. That use is not determined by material efforts. When the time comes in the spiritual world for you to use more of the brain, you will begin to do so. That is how it works, not when you want it or invent some trick. The same applies to why people have not flown to Mars or Saturn. Humans do not control whether that possibility exists. They do not control it. Yet people think they are geniuses right now, the greatest geniuses, while everyone a hundred or two hundred years ago was stupid: “They did not invent language models or launch satellites.

What were they? What could they do? Kill a bear, a bird, or catch a fish. That is all.” That is how people perceive the past, without understanding the real process or causes. Imagine a field of fear within your soul system, energies outside you. These are energies of undeveloped systems. Do they help someone move through life? Do they? It is a natural process of movement, but that does not make them the cause of favorable events. They are causes within your life, certainly. Certainly, because they are part of life. But they are not causes of favorable events. Drawing that conclusion is ignorance. Total ignorance. Total ignorance: “Fear helped me survive,” when you simply could not have died at that moment. Someone else had no fear and never even encountered the problem. We know many people who were born rich, felt no fear, and died rich without fear. Many others felt fear and died, or felt it until the end of their lives.

Ask the entire population of Earth how they really feel and live. Truly. How do people truly live, and how does fear help them? Does it actually help them live, or is it simply a fact of their lives? That is the question. Did fear of war help my grandmother live, or was it a fact of life? Did fear of loved ones dying help her, or was it a fear within life? Incidentally, I think she worried more about war than about other people's lives, even given those circumstances. This is an important structure: fear expressed outwardly, then conveyed to others. She conveyed fear to other people. She did. So do enormous numbers of people, endlessly. Sometimes my child is running and people around say, “He will fall!” They begin conveying fear. Why? I was not afraid before they did that. Then what happened? He was not going to fall. Perhaps he fell because you conveyed fear and passed it to the child. Watch this. You are responsible for it. My wife's mother once said, “Whenever I am afraid of something, it happens straightaway.”

Then begin taking responsibility when you fear absolutely everything involving children, for example—everything—and spread that fear around you. Or does the fear really help avoid particular situations? We see two-year-olds wearing helmets in their parents' arms. I remember visitors arriving with a child in a helmet. You look at that and think… It is a failure to understand cause and effect, what is actually happening. If the child is going to be hurt, they will hit their eye on a corner rather than their head, lose the eye, and go blind. What helmet? Will you put one over their eye? You cannot. A helmet usually protects a particular part of the body, not the eye. I am talking about that child, not about wearing a helmet when riding a bicycle. That is different. A different cause-and-effect relationship, entirely different. Do not confuse them; understand which risks belong to which situation. Then ask yourself about famous people, billionaires, who say they achieved so much because they were afraid.

For example, someone sent me this while preparing this topic. I am recording the whole discussion without a script, but they supplied an example. I will read it and fulfill the editor's wish: “Howard Schultz, CEO and former head of Starbucks, often talks about growing up in a poor part of Brooklyn and about his father. When Howard was seven, his father was injured at work. He was fired without warning, leaving the family without income.” I want to ask how many people Starbucks fired or laid off without income, health insurance, or compensation. This supposedly formed the inner belief, “I have to lift my family and myself out of this and never be helpless again,” which motivated action. Did you, in your own company, fire people and leave them without health insurance or pay, or not? What is this story? If a person is driven by fear, that fear is always directing them inside. They are continually in fear. If they say fear helped them, it must have been with them all the time.

We know that when you actively experience and recognize fear, you feel bad. Fear feels bad, does it not? Clearly it does. If you consciously feel fear, you are telling yourself, “I will live badly because this bad feeling will lead me to a certain state.” Which state? A good one? How, when you feel bad all the time? The most important thing is to understand this energy. Your task is not to debate materially, mentally, or socially whether fear is good or bad. Understand the energy itself. Take in that tears are a negative manifestation of your system: it cannot withstand what is happening; it lacks strength. When it lacks strength and cannot cope, you stop perceiving many other things. You stop acting truly. You begin acting through instincts or programs controlling you, rather than acting truly as yourself. It is important to recognize that you continue acting in a way that is not true.

Then it becomes clear. The same process occurs with fear. First, distinguish wanting to look good or be healthy from fearing that you will grow old. Third, there are the actions you take. These are different things. Look at what causes the actions. Why does someone exercise? What are the causes? Why are they afraid of aging? Why does that thought begin? Because everyone in the world will grow old.

Everyone in the world will grow old. Everyone, without exception. Everyone will die. Everyone, without exception. Why did the fear arise, and why do they connect it to this? Examine whether these are really the causes. Many people fear death and do nothing. Or fear death, want to look good, and do nothing. Many want an attractive figure but keep eating ten pastries a day. They do not act on it. Many simply want to look good without fearing being ugly. I am using their word, “ugly,” not my own. There is no fear. Examine specific cases in specific situations instead of imposing that belief. Someone tells themselves everything is clear: “I want to earn a lot, so I work long hours.” It is a serious question whether that is really the cause, and whether fear motivates those actions. Then comes the question: what should we do with fear if it is there?

Someone fears their loved ones dying, being poor all their life, losing the money they have made, being killed, imprisoned, or punished. First, understand that these energies are transmitted endlessly in the world. As I said, a great deal of that energy is also within you. Enormous amounts come through the spirit of the people among whom you live: your country, place, space, family, workplace, and surrounding society. Incredible amounts of fear are conveyed. Look at where the fear originated. That always matters. You are sitting somewhere and suddenly feel anxiety. Why? Do you genuinely need to pay attention because there will be a problem, or is anxiety present in that space? If we go into a psychiatric hospital and sit in a room with the people there, you are highly likely to experience anxiety and a variety of very particular states.

To avoid taking on those states, you need extraordinary awareness of everything happening and all the energies, and to manage those energies in that moment. Understand it all in great detail. Truly understand what is happening. Viruses spread; COVID began. Some people feared it, others did not care at all. Some countries had many people fall ill, others few. It seemed as though there were no causes and effects at all. No patterns. Why did one country have so many cases and another so few? Why were people afraid in one place and not another? One country introduced certain laws and things improved. Another introduced the same laws and things worsened. One introduced none and things improved; another introduced none and things worsened. Some people feared it, some did not. Some were afraid and got sick; others were not afraid and got sick. Some were afraid and did not get sick; others were not afraid and did not get sick.

It varies enormously. Where does fear come from? Separately, why does a person get sick or not? Those are different questions. Sometimes the energies are causally connected: you come under an energy, take on the fear, enter that mode, transform into that state, and become ill. Such systems do exist, but not all systems work that way. Absolutely not all. Each fear needs an individual approach. I also often say there are fears you do not need to fight. Once you realize there is a great deal of fear in your life that you do not even perceive, the question is how to remain stronger than it if it arises. How do you direct your life and manage this? Someone appears on television and says, “There is a problem. War.” What happens to you then? Or you live on one landing and learn there is a drug den on another, where people are being killed. Now you are afraid every day, whereas before you were not.

How do you continue without fear? Sometimes it is supposedly through not knowing. Supposedly. Or because you have dulled your perception. The energy of such spaces can always be sensed. It can be seen. Seen. Do you see it with your open eyes when the door opens, or through the door? The energy is visible. In any case, we live with very particular energies, such as the energy of death. It has always been, is, and will be beside you. Rudolf Steiner described in 1924, at a gathering of Christian priests, how people of the current generation—and the following centuries—would need to learn to live with death's energy nearby and recognize death as a friend. They would increasingly sense and see it beside them, relate to it calmly, speak about it calmly, and see what is happening within themselves, what is really happening to a person. Hear and feel it. It is incredible to know this. People undergo thousands of tests and take medications. But why? To reassure themselves that things are improving and somehow bring everything into harmony—

not to sense more clearly how they are dying, or reach real conclusions where tests matter. Some tests have no significance at all. They show something, but so what? So what? My back often hurt when I was a child—my muscles, nerves, bones, as people usually describe it. I had MRIs fairly often, and doctors said, “You have a herniated disc here, and here.” When I was in my twenties, a friend studying neurology at medical school told me, “Stop having that test. Stop having MRIs. Never have another one simply to get this kind of information, unless it is an urgent case.” I asked why. He said, “You do not need that knowledge. It gives you nothing. You are not doing anything with it and will not. Are you going to have surgery? No. Why do you need it?” That was incredibly good advice in my life. Incredibly good advice. I was simply triggering fear in myself and others, setting off worry and pointless actions that helped no one, instead of doing what was needed.

Afterward, without focusing on it, I did what was needed and only got better. Much better. Much better. The states twenty years ago and now are incomparable. Back then I could not comfortably walk thirty kilometers. Incomparable. Where is the mental logic, then? You want a mental solution, but you cannot find a mental solution to fear. You will not find it. You need to go into the spiritual world; that is where fear is, not here. You can reason about it as much as you like and tell yourself to get rid of it, but you will not succeed that way. If you rent an apartment surrounded by snakes, you can tell yourself there are no snakes all you like; they will not disappear, Olya. Do whatever you want: meditate against the snakes, shut yourself in, sit in lotus position, conjure caves for yourself, fast. Do whatever you like in that room. The snakes outside will not disappear, unless you are a magician or wizard who can dissolve or transform them. But you want to do this mentally, and nothing will happen to them. They will remain where they were.

It is important to perceive and understand this. Then your fear disappears. “Oh, my fear is gone!” You step outside and there are no snakes, simply because there are no snakes. That is why the fear disappeared. Their presence brought death and fear. The snakes are gone, so the fear is gone. An interesting and important point. But you ask, “Why did it disappear? Probably because I stopped eating Napoleon cake, or started eating beets.” People draw conclusions like that. They start eating beets and conclude this. The spiritual world looks at them and says—of course, it does not literally do this; it is an abstract illustration—“What do beets have to do with it? What does Napoleon cake have to do with it?” Yet that is exactly how people reason. The snakes simply lived out their time there and left. Your beets have nothing to do with it. Nothing. Neither you nor your beets have anything to do with that space. The snakes were there if they needed to be there.

The snakes were there because they needed to be there. There are many examples in the world, such as tribes that think packages dropped for them come from space aliens rather than ordinary airplanes. That is what they decided to think. It is a good example of how people draw conclusions about life. They think exactly the same way. Exactly. In fact, even worse. Even worse. At least those tribes can believe in something. But they belong to an older system of human development, another type of soul. We are now in a different type of soul, so it is worse. Still, the comparison I gave is not quite right; it is exaggerated.