Don't Fear Love-2

Last week the Sun crossed the Equator. And, for the next six months, the days will be longer than the nights. Spring has sprung - and traditionally it's a time we can finally banish the winter blues, and turn our fears into hopes for new beginnings.

But in our part of the planet the spring equinox has arrived to see winter linger with surprise snowfall causing death and disruption to make March 2013 the coldest in 50 years, while other areas of the world, like Israel, have been caught in the grip of a locust invasion this month, as if harking back to some Biblical parable. Nature, it seems, is coming to our doorstep to call like an uninvited guest determined to stay.

Most climate scientists say extreme weather events - such as floods and droughts - are likely to become more common. They have said that there is already enough CO2 in the atmosphere for there to be more floods and droughts over the next 25 years. Whether it's due to climate change, population growth or conservation, contact between wild animals and humans are on the rise, too. Meanwhile, studies suggest commonly used pesticides are damaging honey bee brains, and the warning signs are clear that the polar bears of the frozen north face an uncertain future - as do we all.

In the first part of this series on "fear" and how it affects our lives, I touched upon the clashes between paganism and Christianity in medieval Britain, and when I read such damaging news reports about the state of the world as it stands in 2013, it makes me think that rather than having religions worshipping the dominance of humans, worshipping nature might not be such a bad thing. History is not just a litany of all the things that happen, it is about what did not happen, about the road not taken. Had we done so in respect to nature, we might have taken better care of the Earth's welfare.

Some say, as there is more demand to consume from less and we turn this planet into a waste ground, we should expect some fireworks. Alarmists warn that it is not just warmer days but the increasing months of cold we should fear, because more people die from cold than warm weather. Others say we shouldn't be oracles of doom; a cold March happens, weather happens, it's nature. We shouldn't expect nature to run in a set order, and that we have become programmed to a world that doesn't reflect the workings of nature.

The economy is tanking, the weather flits between terrible and atrocious - what's a person to do amid all this near-Armageddon? We could shop for warmer clothes to cheer ourselves up, but no one has the time or cash for designer labels to pep up our world or our wardrobe - and defeat the insanity of this British "spring" weather. But so what? Climate is chaotic and "climate change" is the key phrase. It's changing, not just warming.

In some scientific models, the United Kingdom will go into an Ice Age if the general world temperature increases. It's an odd thought, but a couple of extra degrees on the world average could lead to massively different temperatures in some places. Some experts are even sceptical that this weather is associated with climate change. Climate change was not human made for the last few million years, and scientists are at the infantile stages in their understanding of climate, so the jury is still out for some.

Proponents to this view say that because the climate change cause appears to have become the new religion - and none of its believers will be ridiculed - there is no room for worthwhile discussion. Religion often makes us see what we believe, or hear what we want to hear, while science is about believing what can empirically be seen or heard - but is there a universal middle ground that we can live on?

While religion looks constantly back, science usually looks forward - and, more importantly, you can challenge scientific orthodoxy. There is enough belief in the scientific method to question past research when necessary. Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, in as much anything can be known, because nothing is known absolutely. There is no definitive scientific explanation for everything, but some believe the ancient questioning and tolerant open mindedness of human curiosity has been taken up by science. Like religion, it's a way to handle doubt and uncertainty. Unlike religion, science teaches us what the rules of evidence are, and that we mess with that at our peril.

The fear of the other

Doubtless there are many things that seem obscure to us - the origins of the universe, the nature of consciousness, the possibility of time travel - that will seem obvious in the future, but what is certain is that a healthy curiosity for what we think to be the "other" or unknown is what will help us master our fear of living a life in uncertainty.

In the first part of this series, we saw how beliefs were points of contention that divided us, filling past lives with fear. We are in the baby years of the 21st Century, where we still fear people that appear different than us, physically, culturally or in their views. It is this human factor in the equation, which means we bend religion, science and history to our will, or tribal nature. All three can be used by any side to back-up their story - that's why unified theories in science are so elusive, and cannot be attained without collaboration. Whether something or someone is seen as a hero or a villain - or something in-between - is coloured by personal experience, and, too, often we prefer to believe in caricature stereotypes of others, rather than accept the truth that we are all have the potential for good and bad in equal measure.

In The Flesh, a three-part zombie drama that aired on BBC Three this March is a quintessential slice of British telefantasy, which tackles contemporary issues in a dystopian setting. Zombies, once mindless murderers, have now been cured and are being integrated back into the communities they affected. The philosophical concepts dealt with are complex: How we accept, or don't accept, the things we don't understand and the consequences of that. The concept of nature versus nurture, and even our attitude towards honesty - how we deal with the truth when it is often so hurtful. But it's really story of identity. How do you fit in when you're completely different and people are labelling you? It centres around the allegory of how others treat people different than them. In The Flesh makes the caricature monster of zombie horror films human.

And when film makers look back to this time in our history, most will discover how American and European films had a tendency to demonise Muslim characters, portraying their image of Islam on screen, or at least putting in Islamic symbols at the most darkest moments of the scene, as to almost subliminally feed fear into the Western audience. It's not just films, either, fantasy war games placed in real life settings in predominantly Islamic countries with caricature enemies such as Assassin's Creed has millions of our young in the West "killing" those different to them on a daily basis.

The visuals of these games are becoming so advanced, that they wouldn't look out of place in a film. The BBC series In The Flesh makes a play on this in one scene where a girl is playing an action game shooting zombies, and her own brother - who is a reintegrated "rotter" (the derogatory term for a zombie in that world) watches her mindlessly killing on screen what are in essence racist portrayals of himself. This "fear" we have of people different than us is so prevalent, we rarely notice it on when it is fed to us on screen. Oscar-winning movie The Hurt Locker is filled with such instances, while in Europe almost every French film that currently tackles an Islamic character taken accumulatively is almost akin to the anti-Semitism propaganda of the Nazi Germany.

That might seem like a powerful statement to be made by certain critics, and naturally films pervert reality into a heightened state of a creative team's imagination - it doesn't generally reflect political policy - but it does show what the public in that country are being exposed to, especially the minorities in that society. Some say, that if all minorities see are demonic versions of themselves on the screen, how can they aspire to anything else?

Some minorities that make films about their own communities are guilty of this, too. Early movies about same-sex couples, although helped raise awareness, did so by imposing how "different" they were, as though they were all promiscuous party-goers choosing some unholy, alternate lifestyle; but being gay doesn't change you as a person, it is part of your genetic inheritance. Some scientists have even put forward the theory that we pass on sexual preference through the generations, too.

Who you sleep with doesn't (or shouldn't) define you; gays can be racist, discriminatory, just as religious conservative as the average Republican in America. They are not all tolerant, not all effeminate or macho in turn, not all corrupting; they are all this and none, because they are human. But if mainstream thought is exposed to such "differences" via visual media, then it will have an effect.

As written literature is believed to form our thinking, some describe film and television (and their online variants) as the new literature, albeit by teamwork rather than a single mind. Greek myths, Bible stories and classical fairytales, what you might call the DNA of Western literature, has formed our thinking for a long time - and these are all models based on fear and dominance. And we continue to teach our children these "classics", rather than write new stories for a new future. There are some that say Ralph Waldo Emerson's works alone can teach you everything you need to know about living with grace and happiness. But first we need to reframe the stories of our past, in which, after all, lie the origins of our present understanding of ourselves. Self-examination is the only path out of misery.

Sometimes this can be personal, where our greatest triumph is over our own past. Like the late actor Richard Griffiths, who transformed the appalling violence and misery of his upbringing into inimitably angry performances that were sheer gold, illustrating the ultimate victory of talent over tragedy - and how, while we should analyse and pick apart the negative, we shouldn't over analyse the positive, but just enjoy it. And as personal stories can become public, stories of national interest become personal, too.

Sometimes facing up to our past needs to be a national thing. The French film "Days of Glory" follows the lives of Arabs in the Second World War that volunteer to fight Nazis to liberate France. The film depicts France's discrimination towards foreign soldiers serving in the French army, and for a long time the history of Muslim soldiers fighting for France had been "whitewashed" and hidden from the French public. Indeed it is a controversial story that no French film maker would make, and it was made by an Algerian director of France citizenry.

Despite France committing acts of genocide against Algerians during what has been called the "pacification", a law was passed in 1959 to freeze the pensions of infantrymen from former French colonies about to become independent. And it was only after this film was released in 2006 that this really came to public attention. French president Chirac cites this film as the sole reason he immediately rectified the pension plan for indigenous veterans, offering them the promise of equality under the law for the first time, after the valour of Muslim soldiers fighting in a Western war was hidden from their history for over half a decade. History, like religion, is written by the victors - and it often takes adding a different perspective to the conventional one to see the real picture.

Some critics believe French political policy in 2013 is running a crusade against it's Muslim citizens and against Islamic countries; and that there is precedence for it. The country has a history of trying to impose its own Napoleonic version of human "equality" on other nations - but the world is changing. Fifty years ago, French troops could carry out mass exterminations of Algerians, but today it's not that easy. Security has recently been stepped up across the country amid concerns about threats to France over its military campaign in Mali, including at the Eiffel Tower in Paris which has been constantly threatened with an attack.

Don't demonise, humanise

Currently in England, politics is demonising migrant workers because they believe the public is against people from other countries coming to use up resources best spent on the country's own citizens. In times of hardship, we cling to our fear of the "other" - finding some group to vent our frustration with life out on. But immigrants have long provided beneficial contributions to the UK. For a certain kind of "global citizen", London today feels like the new capital of the world - while, for people living in other parts of the UK, it all too often feels like another planet. The rest of the UK might be living through the toughest squeeze in a century, but it doesn't feel like it, walking around many parts of the capital. And in many ways, it hasn't been like that either.

London had a recession, but it didn't last long. Its economy grew twice as fast as the rest of the UK between 2007 and 2011, and the property market barely stopped either. It's revealing to note that the 2011 census showed fewer than half the people of London are white British, and the success of London escaping the recession is because of the huge vibrancy different nationals have brought to the city - and yet the government is constantly talking about closing the country's borders to students, workers and families from countries that are about to enter the European Union to relay the public's fears of "immigrants" stealing their jobs and houses, or worse placing extra burdens on the social welfare system.

But wealth isn't simply about money, it's about wealth in biodiversity, culture and spirituality. When we fear a loss of money, then that is all wealth becomes, a fear of loss, and even when we have it, we can't enjoy it properly - if we have the fear of its loss hanging over us. Sometimes gaining good energy and good knowledge to help ourselves and others can make us richer than than the "wealthiest" people in the world, because we know that we can be satisfied with the material possessions we have - they don't give us value, we given them value.

Naturally some of these are pertinent concerns especially as March makes way for a new month. We need food to eat. We need food to pay our bills. According to the poet TS Eliot, April can be the "cruellest" month, and his description may ring particularly true in 2013 for millions who will see a series of price rises. From the start of April, many of us in England will be paying more to travel by plane, more to have a bath, and in some cases, more to post a parcel. All this takes no account of other increases in the price of petrol, heating and food, which are not limited to any particular date.

Money is tight, and it's certain we have lessons that need to be learned; however allowing our fears to take control to make us "overcompensate" only means we run the risk of making decisions that seem irrational or go "too far". When a society becomes so estranged from each other that they lose their deepest self in pet fears and hates, we should realise that something is tragically wrong. Demonising people from different backgrounds, and trying to apportion some blame to a certain ethnic group is not going to help us discover a solution to our current woes.

I am not advocating we censor anyone's views towards certain groups, either - fears should be voiced so then can be faced. It's how we voice our fears which matters. It's important for society and democracy that people can chat and live without fear that they might end up being published or prosecuted, but more than that, it's about removing fear from our lives where possible.

To this end, de-radicalising people is about getting people to accept fear, and show tolerance for the things they fear, and to make the best of where they live. But what if the place where you live turns against you? When rampant profiteers financed by the markets continue in their old ways, even as the economic decline continues to strike fear at the heart of most hard working families, it is easy to see how this fear can turn to destructive anger.

Cutting public spending means we are getting less adept at looking after the needy in society. Government reforms of the National Health Service in England have come into force and health leaders warn of a tough year ahead. Recession fears, fears over the climate and our energy resources (will we even have enough power in the future to warm ourselves?) all creates a domino effect, impacting on a larger scale further afield. Fear is addictive, and hard to contain; once let loose, the more it runs, the more it increases.

Arguably, politicians are polarising the voting public with their one-size-fits-all policies, when it should be unifying them, allowing fringe, extremist parties to fill the vacuum instead. Some say history is just as important as science when it comes to helping people to think analytically, and history warns us that the most obvious solutions aren't always the best - today we have reached the point where weapons should be silenced, and peace be given the platform to speak.

And this seems more relevant now, than ever before. The month of March has been very intense; its been a spiritual shaking up for us individually and for the world as a whole. Some believe that although we are reading about aggressive posturing between countries and in politics, because we have gone through a spiritual shift these past years, and indeed in the past month, we shall see people begin to handle things differently.

There is a change in energy in the world in general - we are shifting our consciousness from one of fear, to one of not fearing to love. That doesn't mean there won't be people who'll cling on to old ideas, or old ways of being. And it may feel like we sense a lot more instability, but underneath that people will be questioning more, joining together more to raise our consciousness together. We all need to wake up our intuition, see what our fears are, break down any illusions that we have and tune into our sensitivity in our one consciousness, and open up our heart to genuine love for ourselves and each other.

Spring is a new cycle of being, of consciousness and spirituality. It can be scary, it can be emotional; people can feel very sensitive at such times. A lot of suppressed fears may come to the surface, but once we challenge them and love ourselves and love each other, then these things will come up to be washed away from our darker consciousness. Astrologists also say that all the spring energy in the earth can also be a great time to recharge our batteries. If it is bitterly cold where you are, use it as an opportunity to get warm with a hot drink and just relax. Its also a conducive environment for new ideas that might have been lying dormant to rise, or a chance to look for new ways to communicate with ourselves and others.

This form of pragmatic or grounded optimism allows us to be fearless; because if we are not in touch with the new shift in conciousness we'll find ourselves rejecting any new ideas that come to the fore. It needs us to be balanced, so we can see things in a new way. Thus we can shift the way we individually and communally see the environment, or people from differing cultures - start to move away from linking our minds up to modems of fear. Because we are not just consciousness, we are here on a physical planet - and what we do and how we spend our energy affects and impacts that planet.

The universality of science

No where is this more evident than with traditional religions that are struggling to make a place in modern society - they feel marginalised, and Catholicism has had a hard time especially with paedophile priests and its medieval stance on women clergy and same-sex couples - and putting faith in a discriminatory God that seems to fly in the face of what science tells us seems foolhardy. True faith should not blind us, it should open our eyes to the truth.

One advantage of science is that we can trust a true scientific prediction in ways that we cannot trust religious predictions; British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explained that there was nothing wrong in having faith in a proper scientific prediction. From Dawkins' Christmas Lectures, the cannonball experiment is a classic example of how we can trust a true scientific prediction in ways that we cannot trust religious predictions.

Showing his faith in science in a now famous example of proving your beliefs, Dawkins faces an on-coming swinging heavy cannonball to an inch of his face without flinching in front of a lecture class. Where his instincts told him to run in fear, his faith in the scientific method which told him the ball would not hit him was enough for him to stand firm.

Yet, science, too, when it pays into the belief of the dominance of the human species can be dangerous, and the powerful knowledge it gives us brings great responsibility. When we work on technologies on the outer edge of any experience base, we need to be careful we our experiments and the ethical implications they may bring. History has taught us that advancement for advancement's sake is not always a good thing. Simply on a point of ethics alone, for successful science and and working technology, reality must take precedence because nature cannot be fooled.

This point is brought home strongly in the factual drama The Challenger, the dramatised story of how Richard Feynman helped to discover the cause of the Challenger disaster. American theoretical physicist Feynman became popular with students and the public because he would cut through scientific jargon. The exuberant Feynman was one of the first great popularisers of science and the accessibility of science by the everyone. For him, seeing science at work was to understand it, and believed that any scientific concept could be demonstrated to ordinary people, people with no specialist knowledge or even much scientific education.

The film The Challenger suggests starkly that our science is only as pure as our nature – which is to say, not very - that there according to Feynman there was "good" science and "bad". Good science creates nuclear energy, bad science the atomic bomb. And although it was not religion that invented the atomic bomb, it might have helped prepare the mindset to use it - a mindset that the Earth was created solely for our pleasure. It often beggars belief that religious groups were so quick to be affronted by stem cell research and its ethical implications, yet were happy with animal testing for decades - even experiments done on primate cousins - because to them, say their critics, any non-human species is somehow seen as lower life, and simply put on Earth for our use and domination.

Studies suggest, however, that like us, great apes experience a "mid-life crisis", and that the connection between age, well-being and happiness in humans is similar in chimpanzees and orang-utans. Even if this were not so, the fact remains that if we are to bring animals into captivity, then we have a responsibility to them. There is nothing humane or responsible about animal testing; it begins by putting an animal in a laboratory and goes downhill from there - and the generations of fear we have projected out into the world by the disservice we've done to every species with a soul and a capacity for higher conciousness has actually been a disservice to ourselves. And every time I watch nature documentaries of wild animals in their natural habitat, I realise that animals have a state of grace and understanding of nature that we must have lost, because we are animals, after all.

The biological and evolutionary fact is that we are "still" animals with animal instincts, very loosely concealed behind so-called "civilisation". It is evident that even the most outwardly "normal" people can turn into megalomaniacs and mass murderers in certain situations. Religion and science both tell us we have unlimited potential for compassion and violence. While some of us donate our lives to saving animals in harm, others don't think twice about murdering their own parents in cold blood. Some even use their own pets as dangerous weapons, and so we set laws that hit hard at the animal, rather than at the human owner and the usual irresponsible ownership that causes a domesticated pet to harm others.

Science tells us we were once on the same evolutionary path with other species of life before we branched off and became capable of manipulating our environment. Today we can change things, make our external environment more like we want it to be, rather than accept it as the way it is. Case in point, we've evolved to prefer high fat and high sugar foods. Although in nature it never occurred to put them together - bananas are high in sugar but fat free, avocados are the opposite - it has occurred to us. We can put fat and sugar together in the same thing - like a confectionery sweet - and make it widely and easily available.

Moreover, the speed with which we changed our environment means we haven't evolved to deal with it properly. The endless supply of food is a good example; we don't have to scavenge for food, but we never evolved a barrier to protect us from eating too much, because there never was a time in our history when we had too much before. And now countries in the West are struggling with an obesity epidemic, with some saying that 5,000 people die of obesity every day in America alone.

Read more about diet and exercise.

But even if nature's external barriers no longer affect us, at the heart of our understanding of what it is to be human, is the essential dignity of the human being, and at the same time we must extend this to all species of life. Not only do we have to give people with differences the chance to shine, and condemn or applaud them (if deemed necessary) on what they do - rather than what they look like, or where they come from - we also have to provide animals under our care the dignity we would wish for ourselves. We should not extend out our fists because we fear to extend out an open hand.

Wisdom dictates that we fear the wrong things; we should fear ourselves and the potential for destruction we have, instead of fearing nature and needing to exert our control over it. Since Charles Darwin established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, it is said 200 species have become extinct. Some believe Darwin should have called his "survival of the fittest" theory "the ascent of man" and be done with it.

Yet, "survival of the fittest" is a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation - so why do we find it so hard to show compassion and forgiveness? As humans, our excessive requirements have become paramount - we destroy anything in the way of what we want, we exist at the sake of our habitat rather than in harmony with it, and to this end we don't even act as a species should, some critics say.

We are, in the end, all part of a common quest for greater knowledge and understanding. Life is a source of energy, and if shaping it were a craft, then it would need the perfect balance of soul and science. We need to know the working parts of this craft, and have total trust in the intuitive part of it. It's a balance between the head and the heart, and when there is a lot of intense, impulsive energy about, it is best to make sure you ground yourself with wisdom.

Do positive impulsive things; approach issues from your heart, awaken your responsibility and love for each other and the planet. Everything that will ever be in the world is here. There's a brain for every future invention, and a germ of every new baby in a man or woman. We in the present are the future, the future is here now, and what we want more of - and deserve - is enlightenment. And that comes when we open ourselves up to love.

Read more in this series: -1 -3

Yours in love,