LOVE vs. FEAR is the essential struggle within me.

I know FEAR. I am something of a specialist in it. My childhood was marked by trauma, and this designated me the likely heir to the legacy of my female forebears on my father’s side: panic, anxiety and agoraphobia.

But modern American life didn’t offer me the option of staying home and cooking elaborate family recipes all day, so I battled back, or else it seemed I would fall off the face of the earth.

I refused meds but tried some mainstream behavior therapies. I made what was called progress, but I have to say that much of my adult life was a white-knuckle ride, with me endlessly struggling to “overcome my fears” and coming away from both victories and defeats with the same raw, battered, exhausted feeling that told me I was just too fundamentally defective to deal with the world.

Basically my life was shaped, circumscribed and defined by FEAR.

Somehow, though, another way of thinking unfolded in my consciousness. It started with 11:11 and the chain of synchronicity that I began following at that time. The Kybalion came my way, and through it I learned of the Principle of Polarity and its conscious manipulation: To change an undesirable mental vibration, concentrate on the opposite pole. For me this was a profound revelation. You don’t overcome or otherwise eliminate the darkness. You let in the light.

So that’s path I’ve been traveling. It has been a transformative period. A period in which I’ve come to realize that the way is not to eliminate my “defects” or to adopt “ideal” behaviors as they are defined in American culture, but instead to fully become who I am.

I also came to understand that the opposite side of FEAR is not courage – it’s LOVE.

But while I’ve been moving toward LOVE and away from FEAR, the dominant culture around me has been moving sharply, aggressively, emphatically in the opposite direction. I happen to live in a stronghold of the dominant culture, so I am swimming in waters that are cold, dark and inhospitable. The contradiction is intensely painful – I long to find my Right Place in the World, but that is another story. The point now is simply that the culture in which I live does not support heart-centered living. Instead it is like Michael Corleone’s Family – it keeps pulling me back into my own negativity.

So the LOVE/FEAR polarity is a dynamic opposition within me. The Global Catastrophe dream is a gift because it dramatizes my contradictions and gives me an opportunity to resolve them.

Two points stand out for me:

Although my intention is to choose LOVE, I have trouble actually receiving it. Case in point: the dream opens with me moving to the place I love most in the world. I have longed to move to Maine for almost twenty years now. And there I am in the dream, in the early stages of buying a house there. I went out into the backyard and took a handful of earth, breathing it in deeply because that’s how overjoyed I was. The opening scene is LOVE LOVE LOVE.

Sadly, my dreaming mind could not allow me to receive this abundance. It recoiled from LOVE and put me in a place many people I know FEAR. I lived in Newark for several years. I know better than to react to it with knee-jerk FEAR, like the average white suburbanite around here. Nevertheless, it was not the most pleasant place to live, not back then. It is currently undergoing a renewal, but then it was grim and dilapidated — and very inconvenient in terms of access to reasonably priced goods and services. It had still not recovered since the time of the Rebellion. Newark history and politics aside, when I lived there, my life was circumscribed by scarcity and FEAR.

So my dream consciousness turned from LOVE to FEAR. It diverted me from my ideal place to a place of grim limitation. I need to think more deeply about the ways in which I am not accepting LOVE and instead living in self-imposed scarcity.

The second point concerns my anxiety about how I might react in a crisis of horrific proportions. Up until now, I have been assuming that – in the event of a global catastrophe – evolving might not mean surviving. I guess on some level I was thinking that a global catastrophe would involve a quick exit from this plane. I was not prepared – mentally or otherwise – to live in a post-catastrophe world of slow death by radiation, starvation and mob violence. When faced with that world in the dream, I reverted back into base-level FEAR, absurdly wishing I had stashed cash so that my family and I could somehow finagle our own little way to some semblance of safety.

Clearly I have work to do. The question is not which energy I am carrying because I have both LOVE and FEAR churning within me. I don’t have the answers, but I do know the path lies in the heart. I will continue to work on the heart chakra and on expanding the LOVE that flows through me.