The Fear of God and the Power of Making Difficult Decisions
There's this idea in the Old Testament, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. It's a pretty harsh idea, but there's something really useful about it. One of the things you see with people all the time is that maybe they're trying to stumble forward towards their ideal, as poorly defined as it might be, but then they're afraid. They're afraid about what they might encounter, and that stops them. Fear does stop people. It freezes you like a prey animal. And so people move ahead, but then they get afraid and then they stop moving ahead. And that's not so good because negative emotion is a really powerful motivator. We're more motivated by negative emotion than positive emotion, quantitatively speaking. You can measure that. And that's because we can only be so happy, but we can really be suffering. So we have to pay more attention to the negative, and that's bad because the negative can stop you.
In my clinical practice, I often talk to people who are trying to make a difficult life decision. They're weighing out the costs and benefits of making the life decision. One of the things I always talk to them about is that's an incomplete analysis. You have to weigh out the benefits and costs of doing this, and you have to weigh out the costs and benefits of not doing it. That's not the same as the zero that you assume you're starting with. To not make a decision, it also has a cost. Sometimes the cost of not making a decision is far worse than the cost of making a decision, even if the decision is risky.
One of the things you can derive from that, and this is very useful, is that it's so useful to contemplate your mortality. So to speak because you're screwed no matter what you do. You have path A that has catastrophes, and you have path B that has catastrophes. You don't get to have the no catastrophe path, but you get to pick which one. And that's really something because if you know that there's terrible risk associated with everything that you do and don't do, then you can afford to take some risks. You can make a covenant with the highest ideal, and that will take you through it the best way possible.
When you're trying to make a difficult decision, you may think, "Isn't that terrifying?" But what's really terrifying is not doing it. Think about the cost of not doing it. In the Future Authoring program, we have people do a meditative exercise. They think about their insufficiencies, the things they know they should do but don't, the bad habits, the unresolved conflicts. They think about how those things will get the upper hand and take them to the worst possible place in the next three to five years. You don't want to go there. So the next time a temptation comes up, you think, "How about no?" Not just because a higher good would be obtained if you avoided it, but because a terrible catastrophe would be averted if you didn't.
You want to get your fear behind you, pushing you forward instead of in front of you, where it's stopping you. You get your fear behind you by thinking through the consequences of not putting your life together. The least of those is that you waste it and suffer. Maybe if you're going to suffer, you can at least do something noble, glorious, upright, powerful, honorable, admirable, helpful, and difficult. That's just so much better. And maybe that's good enough, so you think, "Little suffering is basically worth it. At least it's a way forward."
Beauty is one pathway towards God, and it's insane if you can't find another pathway. Why don't you use beauty? Music, for example, is something that modern people can't be cynical about. Music speaks meaning to people. Cleaning up your room and making it beautiful is also important. It's hard to make something beautiful, but it's worthwhile. If you can make one thing in your life beautiful, you've established a relationship with beauty. Then you can start to expand that relationship with beauty into the world, into other elements of your life. And that is so worthwhile.
You have to be daring to do that. People are terrified of it. They're terrified of color, of art. But you have to develop it. Yes, you're going to stumble along and make mistakes at first, but you're stumbling towards the kingdom of God. When you try to make an aesthetic decision and put something beautiful in your life, you're stumbling towards the divine. You have to be sharp to survive properly, orient the world properly, and not destroy things, including yourself.
