Only Your Deepest Fear Will Set You Free
This is an old story dusted off from the secular misinterpretations that wanted to spoil it. Something old, almost timeless comes back renewed like freshly picked fruit. How exciting it is to open your eyes and look! *
We all want to leave behind both external and internal tyrannies that keep us from happiness. That happiness understood as a place of total peace. That is living, fighting to break free. It is an apparently individual battle, but from time-to-time leaders appear who help peoples to free themselves from the powers that oppress them. What is the destiny of those endless daily battles? The Promised Land. What is the secret that the tyrants don’t want you to know? To get to the Promised Land, you first must go through the desert. Why? Because we all are prisoners of the perceptions of psychological and social tyrannies that bind us. To get rid of them you must leave comfort towards the desert, which being nowhere, is discomfort. There are no ties, there are no acquaintances, there is silence and hunger, heat and cold, fights and despair. To cross the desert is to yearn for the comfortable tyrannies of the past life. Why don’t people dare to get out of their preconceptions and tyrannical prejudices? For fear of losing. Losing identity, what has been acquired, what’s already known. To flee to the desert is to lose what loses you. The greater the tyranny of which you were a victim, the greater will be the desert of the protagonist! And the desert is far worse than tyranny. That’s why people don’t dare to go there.
Many of those who leave are lost along the way. They begin to worship false gods, ideologies and lies because they have no known references to guide them out of the ordinary. In the absence of a tyrant to oppress them, internal, fratricidal and illogical fights begin. That is when the venom of the snakes begins to bite. So, faced with this extreme situation, people turn to the leader or to God for help to get rid of that which poisons and kills. The answer is almost always unexpected. What God is expected to do is generally what does not happen.
What are those poisonous snakes that attack? The most primordial fears. Before the supplication God says: “Meet your fear face to face, the enemy even more powerful than any known tyranny: your deepest fear, the most real fear of your life. Willingly look at what terrifies you and you will become brave, strong and free. When you look at it you will no longer be affected by its poison. Your fear will not go away, but you will have become braver and will no longer fear. Bravery is better to safety. It is the most reliable cure against panic.
The archetype is the model par excellence, it is the source or origin, it is the mold in which the clay of human lives is deposited. It is the exemplary pattern from which other objects, ideas or concepts are derived. It is the perfect model, the limit where reason can go. That mold exists and is called Jesus Christ. His Passion is the most tragic true story, the quintessential paradigm that defines what is humanly possible. The sum of everything that people fear exists in the Passion. There was no greater torment than crucifixion. There is no greater evil than being abandoned by your friends. There is no greater pain than being betrayed with lies by a friend. There is no more majestic injustice than being killed while being completely innocent. There is no more colossal hypocrisy than freeing a criminal to convict an innocent.
This borderline story asks you who you are, what you are doing with the tyrannies that oppress you, where is your courage, where is the truth, who did you betray, who did you give up. What do you see when you see the Christ? Death, abandonment, destruction, pain, terror, tyranny, fragility, betrayal. Keep looking, deeper. What do you see? Death and resurrection. If you look straight into your abyss, you will see the light.
Jordan Peterson during the broadcast of episode #1769 of The Joe Rogan Experience on January 25, 2022.
