Why is it that some people go out there and do most things that they want to do and, by and large, succeed, whereas you seem to be in a rot, blocked and not moving forward or back, left or right? What is it that makes you live a circumscribed existence, in Abraham Maslow’s terms, not actualizing your potential?

One must do something to realize ones potential. If one is just sitting around and doing nothing, one is not going to realize whatever innate potential one has.

Each of us seems to have aptitudes and interests and is expected to put them to work and, in so doing, enrich the human condition. But something can prevent the individual from doing something to actualize his potential.

In the Bible, Jesus talked in parables, one of which says: a certain rich man was going on a long journey. Before he left, he gathered his servants and gave them talents (money, in those days). He did not tell them what to do with the talents. After some years had elapsed, he came back. He asked the servants to account for how they spent the money he gave them. Some said that they hid theirs under mattresses, not wanting them stolen, so that when the master came back they would give him back his money. Others said that they invested their monies and made profit on them. The master praised those who invested their monies and put them to work, benefiting the community. He rewarded them with more money.

Why give to the rich more wealth? It is because they understand the need for investment, so they had to be given money funds to invest, so that it yields dividends for the entire community. (The Igbos say: ji ye uru, ya abara ndanda.) Those that had not invested their money had it taken away from them and it was given to those who understand that money is to be put to work. Money is useless unless it is put to work, producing fruits for the betterment of the people.

This parable of the Jewish rabbi, Emmanuel Ben Joseph, whom the Greeks called Jesus the Christ, Jesus the anointed Son of God, is meant to instruct us on a critical lesson. The master, the man going on a journey and gathered his servants, is, of course, God. The servants are the children of God. The talents are the mental aptitudes each of us is born with. God gave his children natural aptitudes and interests. He then left them alone on planet earth. Sooner or later, each of us returns to our maker and is asked to account for how he employed his time and energy while in that place called planet earth. Those who, while they were on earth, put their aptitudes to serving humanity are blessed with peace and happiness; those who hid their aptitudes, afraid to use them lest they make mistakes and displease God and man, did not yield results that served human interest, are not blessed with happiness and peace.

Those who refuse to use their abilities to serve humanity tend to reap poverty. They are like those talked about in another parable of Jesus (that Jesus chap was full of Parables). He said that a lamp lit and hid under a bushel is no use to anyone. The purpose of light is to enable people to see. If you hide your light, you are not using it to enable people to see. Your light, then, is as good as darkness and you might as well not have light.

When you have light, it is meant to be used to see in darkness. The world is a dark place and we need light to see in it. If you place your light on a hill top, those in the valley would see their way around. But if you hide your light, no one would see from it.

If you hide a lit lamp under a bushel, it is most likely to make the bushel blow up. Instead of showing the people light, a hidden light creates problems for the people. Africans are hidden light, they create troubles for themselves. Those people who recognize that each of us is a light and use it to show the people the way to live good lives tend to generate abundance in our lives. Those who hide their light, those who do not employ their aptitudes to do good work, live lives of poverty.

Bill Gates gives the world his computing light. He gives the world material abundance. Africans hide their God given talents or use them to seek ways to do each other in, to steal from the public. Each of us is salt. Salt is meant to make food taste better. If one does not add one’s salt to food and the food’s flavor is bland, what use is one’s salt? Jesus said that that salt then must be thrown away, for it is like the fig tree that did not bear fruits and had to be cast off.

Nigerians ingenuity seems to lie in figuring out ways to cheat, not to produce wealth, peace and happiness for their fellow human beings. No, their specialty is to rip people off and feel very important person from doing so.

(Please note that I am consciously stereotyping people. A writer is permitted to use hyperbole to make cogent points. Not all Nigerians are thieves. My secondary school principal, Mr. Ajayi, is a saint, if ever there is a saint in this world. This man took interests in all of us; it did not make any difference to him whether the kids were Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Urhrobo, Edo, Ishikiri etc, and he took care of us, as if we were his own personal children. When any of us got sick, this man personally saw to it that we were given good medical care. He visited our parents. He came to my parent’s house, in the poor parts of town, to talk to my parents about my progress, or lack of it, at school. He was, is, an angel. The point is that there are outstanding Nigerians. Thus, when I make generalized and global negative statements about Nigerians, I hope that the reader puts it in perspective.)

The man Jesus also said (please do not blame me for borrowing from the man, I couldn’t help it, though currently an apostate Christian, I was raised a Christian and my little head was filled with sayings by the man, I spent my childhood reading the bible, over and over and over again, and my little mind practically memorized the damn book) that each of us is like a new wine. He said that a new wine should not be mixed with an old wine or poured into an old wine bottle.

If you mix new wine with old wine, you dilute their tastes: the new is no longer new and the old is not itself. If you pour new wine into a bottle that had contained old wine, the residue of the old wine would distort the taste of the new wine. To have the full flavor of the new wine, you must place it in a new wine bottle.

Clearly the old boy was trying to say something here, for parables are idioms and do not literally mean what they say. Parables are metaphors and figures of speech, they represent something else.

A parable can be interpreted in several ways; moreover, it can be interpreted to suit different situations and that is the beauty of parables. So what was the man from Nazareth, a place, where, hitherto, nothing good comes from (the rejected brick has become the pillar of the temple), trying to say with this parable?

Traditional Christianity interprets the parable to mean that the new wine is Christianity and that the old wine is Judaism. The New Testament and the Old Testament are not supposed to mix, or one dilutes the other. Jesus diverged from Moses. He brought a new wine, a new religion, a religion of love as forgiveness.

Alas, Christians have not learned the import of this parable and are still mixing the teachings of Moses and Jesus. Moses taught punishment for sins; Jesus taught forgiveness for sins. See the story of the woman caught in adultery. Mosaic Law insisted that she be punished, but Jesus forgave her, for those who live in sin, all of us, have no right casting stones at sinner. The entire gospel of Jesus can be summarized as forgiveness. The New Testament is a gospel of forgiveness. Do we do that, do we love and forgive one another our sins or do we punish each other for the wrongs we do?

And a man was going to worship God and remembered that a neighbor had wronged him. Jesus said that the man must first go home and forgive his neighbor before he prayed to God. That is correct; the wronged must forgive the wrong doer before he expects God to hear his prayers.

Of course, God does hear our prayers. In fact, God knows what his children want before they pray for it. He has, in fact, given us all we need to live on earth. But before we can receive the gifts of God, we must do one thing: we must love and forgive each other.

Forgiveness is the condition for receiving God’s grace. And he taught them a prayer: “Father, forgive us our sins FOR WE HAVE FIRST FORGIVEN THOSE WHO SINNED AGAINST US”. Please think about the import of the “Our Lord’s prayer”. It implies that we had entered into a covenant with our creator and the provision of that contract stipulates that he forgive us only when we forgive each other. God is law abiding and as such keeps the provisions of a contract he entered; he does not make compromises. So we must love and forgive one another before he forgives us our own sins.

Jesus taught that the meaning of love is forgiveness. He said: if someone slaps one of your cheeks that you should turn the other one for him to slap too. He said: love your enemies, do not feel grievance for wrongs done to you by others, do not seek vengeance for what others do to you; as a matter of fact, give those who wronged you your last cloak. (See the Sermon on the Mount, the so-called beatitudes.)

And Jesus walked his talk. They can to arrest him. Peter brought out his old and rugged sward and attacked one of the High priest’s police men that came to arrest his master. Jesus looked at him, as one looks at a child who had been taught and did not understand what he was taught. He said: Peter, I brought a different way to solving problems. The old way, grievance, anger and revenge, produces conflicts and wars. Those who live by the sword die by the sword.

Finally, they took him to Pontius Pilate, to the Courts of this world and falsely accused him of doing what he did not do and found him guilty. He was sent to be crucified. Before he died he said: father to forgive them for they know not what they are doing. If they knew that they are love and forgiveness, they would only do that. But they think that they are ego and attack and do that.

Any which way you look at it, Jesus taught love as forgiveness. Do we practice love and forgiveness? A Christian is a person who loves and forgives all people. By this definition, I did not see Christians in my world; hence, at age 14, I parted ways with the Catholic Church of my upbringing. I read Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, fell in love with biology and have not looked back since.

As observed, a parable can be interpreted and is meant to be interpreted in several ways. In this context, the new wine speaks to our individuality. You are a new wine. You are a unique human being. There is no one else in the entire world that is like you. You must bless the world with the talents that you were born with.

You should not try to give the world old, and tired philosophies of how human beings ought to live. You should not repeat old unproductive religions that retard, rather than make for progress. You should give the new to the world.

The new brightens the world. Spring time is the best time of the year for newness is everywhere.

Winter is the worst time of the year, for, in it, things are old, tired, withering and dying, or stagnant, to be reawakened to life in spring.

So do you give the world a new you, do you bless the world with whatever talent nature and nature’s God gave you? If not, what is preventing you from doing so?

To be at peace with yourself and to be happy, you have to give the world something.

Giving is receiving. If you give something to make the world happy, the world will give you something in return to be happy with. Use your talent to enrich people’s lives and you receive from the people what makes you live your life more abundantly.

Generate wealth and you become wealthy. Hide your talent and do not give the people wealth and you live in poverty, as most Africans do. Africa sits on tremendous natural resources yet Africans are poor. Why this abnormally?

Africans, in Africa and in the Diaspora, talk the talk but do not devote themselves to working, at least, twelve hour days, doing something that blesses all Africans. In so far that they try to work, they work negatively. They seek ways to steal from the public treasury. Their expertise lies in bribery and corruption.

Only the discouraged, those in despair, the dispirited, steal and take bribes. Many Africans are so discouraged that they think that the only way to become rich is to steal and pretend to be very important persons. They do not recognize that one can become rich by making it the old fashioned way, working for it. (I believe that colonialism instilled this discouragement, this lack of belief in ourselves as able to make money in the right way; colonialism made Africans feel powerless so that some of us believe that the only way to become rich is to steal from the national treasury. Stealing from the public ought to make a healthy person so ashamed that he would rather die than do so. It is better to give than to take.)

Figure out what people around you need, a product or service, and produce and sell it to them and they would buy it. When they buy it, you make profits. This way, both seller and buyer benefit, and life become a win-win one, a joy.

Steal and you live a life of spiritual poverty, even if you are materially wealthy. I have interacted with so-called rich Nigerians; I would not trade my humble place for theirs. In many instances, they are not as good as my dog, Ebony. They are nothing, refuse, really. At least, my dog gives human beings joy. Nigerian leaders give people poverty.

The man, Jesus, told a lot of parables. Read his parables and bless your life with them. It does not matter whether you are a Christian, an apostate Christian like me, or not, you would benefit from this Jewish rabbi’s extraordinary wisdom. This man articulated the perennial wisdom of mankind like no one else has ever done.

Unfortunately, Jesus did not do one thing: he did not tell us what prevents people from living their lives as fully as they could. He did not do so, not because he could not tell us, but because he had to leave something for those who come after him to do. He just could not be the only one with wisdom; he had to leave something for other teachers of God to teach. Mohammed had to have something to teach and, by all accounts, improved on aspects of the Jewish rabbi’s insights. (I am not a Moslem and cannot speak on matters Islamic. However, let it be noted that I have taken the trouble to read the Koran. In fact, I read it regularly as I read the Bible. I am a strange non-religious person.)

Brother Jesus and all the past teachers of God left us something to teach our fellow human beings.

I have something to teach you. A person teaches only what he needs to learn. I needed to understand my screwed up life. I am Igbo but, in fact, more Yoruba than Igbo; I am black but, in fact, more white than black. I am at home in the world of philosophy and, without thinking about it, can tell you all about Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, Origin, Tatulian, Montana, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Anselem, Martin Luther, Calvin, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, David Hume, George Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Blasé Pascal, Jean Jacque Rousseau, Leibniz, Henry Bergson, Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Bukanin, Trotsky, David Ricardo, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, William James etc. But I am an African. There in lay my confusion. A black man spouting the best of the West but lacking understanding of whatever Africa has contributed to knowledge. (Could someone please write on African philosophy and psychology, so that I can read them?)

I believe that our encounter with the West has created identity confusion in our minds. I believe that, like me, you, too, have problematic aspects to you. Therefore, my mission is to teach you something about your personal psychology, your individual personality.

I spent over twenty years working in the mental health field, working my way to running a few mental health agencies. I became an executive director of a large mental health agency (over 200 staff, mostly whites) at age 34. (I always taught a class or two, each semester, at local state universities, so, I had a foot in academia.) I must have learnt something along the way and want to share what I have learnt.

Nigerians take pride in calling themselves professors. Strictly speaking, they are not professors. A professor is a person who professes what he personally believes to be true and could care less whether he makes a living from doing so or not. Instead, Nigerians tend to think that the term professor, which is French for teacher, is one that gives them prestige. What poor fools. It simply means a person who has conviction and teaches that conviction to other people. A professor has found knowledge, at least, an aspect of it, and teaches it to the world. He says, in effect, this, I believe is the truth; I stake my life on it, I give you my truth; this is my gift to you and to mankind; take it from me, it is good for you.

A person should not be teaching at the university until he believes that what he is teaching is true. Until one can truly profess some thing as truth, one ought not to teach it. Upon completing my doctoral dissertation at UCLA, still in my mid twenties, I obtained a teaching position at California State University, Dominguez. After a while, I decided that my young head had been filled with Western ideas, much of which I did not believe, so I quit my position and sought to work with real people, to understand the mentally ill, as a way of understanding the so-called normal person.

When we have learned the nature of our problems, solved them, in as much as problems are solvable, then, we can share our solution with other people.

I had tremendous fear in my life. You can say that my middle name was fear. I was afraid of everything. I developed a personality characterized by fear, avoidant personality, aka shyness. (Please pay attention, if you are shy or know any one who is shy or have a child who is shy. Nigerians have personality issues but because they do not take the time to study these things, things that make them less productive, they do not understand what is keeping them down.)

All I did, as a kid, is keep to myself and read, I mean read. I must have read most of the books at Lagos Central Library. During holidays, I used to get there in the morning, and leave when it closes at night. I checked out books and read under an electric lamp. I had very few friends, for I was afraid to talk to people; I feared that if they got close enough to me that they would see me as not good enough and reject me.

The avoidant person is full of fear. He uses his imagination to anticipate other people’s rejection. He does not want to be rejected. He believes that as he is, that he is not good, that he is flawed. He thinks that if other people get close to him, that they would appreciate the fact that he is not good enough hence reject him.

To avoid being rejected by other people, the shy child withdraws from other children (and later, adults). He keeps to himself most of the time.

But since in life we must interact with other people, we are social animals, after all, he finds a way to relate to people without really relating to them. He develops a wall around himself. He is emotionally detached from other people. He relates to people from an emotional distance. He is around you, but is really far away from you. He does not let you into his life; he is afraid that if you come too close that you would appreciate his assumed inferior and inadequate self and reject him. Thus, he pushes people away with his well defended ego self.

He keeps to himself, while yearning for social interaction. But, alas, he does not know the first thing about social interaction: you must welcome people into your life. You must invite people to psychologically come into you and get to know you. You must be psychologically naked and let people see you, as you are, not as you pretend to be.

Generally, the shy, avoidant child waits for other people to approach him for friendship. Usually, one or two caring children would do so. Thus, he has one or two friends, those who took the initiative to approach him for friendship. When I was in elementary school, during the 1960s, at Ladi Lak School, Randall Road, Apapa, two boys, Alexander and Chima, used to come and play with me. They were the only friends that I had. I don’t think that many people knew that I even existed, for I hid my self, afraid of people coming too close to me.

In social isolation, the avoidant, shy child, person, uses his fertile imagination to imagine himself an important person. He visualizes himself doing whatever it is he could not do in real life. His fears prevent him from getting into the field of life and playing a part in it, so he sits around imagining himself becoming the best player in whatever field of life he sees people playing.

As a kid, I avoided sports. I would sit by the side lines, imagining how I could be the best player in whatever game I saw other kids playing. I visualized myself an Olympic athlete, winning several gold medals. But the trouble is that to win those medals, one had to participate in sporting activities and demonstrate that one is, in fact, good at them. One cannot win the kudos of life by sitting on the side lines.

I was destined to be a loser in life. And, in fact, I was a loser in life. I wind up poor, not because I do not have what it takes to make it, but because I did not invest my talents, as the big boy told us to do. I was too afraid to get into the arena of play and play fully, play my little heart out.

It takes playing 100% to become a winner at whatever field one is engaged in. If you are half assed in whatever you are doing, you aren’t going to become a winner in it.

Brother Jesus did not quite tell us about what prevents us from playing fully; he did not tell us what prevents us from investing our talents. He merely told us about what happens to those who did not invent their talents: they did not make profits.

Apparently, Jesus has finally done what he did not do. He did it through an American clinical Psychologist. He has now told us what holds us back from being the best that we can be: FEAR.

It is fear that is holding us back from investing fully in life, hence reaping the full benefits of peace and joy, the gifts of God. Helen Schucman, a Jewish Clinical Psychology Professor at Columbia University, New York City, tells us that what is preventing us from living fully is fear.

It is not that most psychologists do not already know that fear holds people back, it is the manner she said it. In her book, A Course in Miracles, she mixed secular and spiritual psychology. Most psychologists tend to dwell only in secular psychology. In fact, many Psychologists would resent it if you associated their field with religion and what they call the “God hypothesis”. To them, God does not exist and should not even be mentioned.

Psychology, as a field of inquiry, feels inferior for it is mainly speculative; its conclusions are difficult to verify. In his seminal essay on the nature of science (scientific methodology) Karl Popper cavalierly dismissed Psychology as nonsense.

In science, an idea, a hypothesis, must be verifiable by any one following the scientific method: observation, experimentation, replication and the idea must be refutable. (You can neither prove nor not prove the God hypothesis; it is not refutable hence not a heuristic subject.)

Behaviorists like B.F Skinner, in fact, rejected Psychoanalysis primarily because it is speculative. Instead, they concentrated on observable aspects of human behavior. Classical and operant conditioning was all that Skinner and company were interested in; they were not interested in knowing why you did what you did, for as they saw it, no human being, in fact, knows why he does what he does.

(Do you know why you do what you do? Are you just guessing or are you sure that your understanding of your motives is correct?)

While academic psychologists were too busy denying the reality of God, Sister Helen came along and claimed that human beings are spiritual beings and that they cannot live, as the old boy himself said, by bread alone. Apparently, man needs the word of God to live fully.

Sister Helen found a way to give fear a spiritual interpretation. However, her efforts tended to be too much on the side of metaphysics and too little on the side of physics. Human beings live in physics, in body. You must, therefore, take into account their bodies, as well as their minds, not in an either or manner, but both. Sister Helen’s thesis, in effect, was problematic. (I have addressed her mistakes in my writings, elsewhere.)

SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION OF FEAR/ANXIETY

All human beings have experienced fear and anxiety. If you have not experienced them, you are probably not alive on planet earth.

Fear is considered objective, whereas anxiety is considered not so. One can be in the safety of ones room and feel all the symptoms of fear; this is called anxiety disorder. In fear, on the other hand, there is an actual cause for it, for example, someone is threatening your life. In my experience, anxiety also has objective cause, though that causal factor is not immediately apparent to the eyes. For example, I was born with two medical disorders, Spondilolysis and Mitral Valve Prolapse. The first produced pain in my body and the second made my heart pound upon the slightest exercise. Those underlying physiological disorders contributed to my apparent anxiety disorder. But since most parents do not even know anything about those medical disorders, their correlation with anxiety, no one knew the cause of my anxiety. I had the worst separation anxiety in the world. At age five, when I began school, I simply refused to stay at school, expecting my mother to be at school with me…she did for almost a month. (Many black children have undiagnosed medical disorders affecting their learning abilities. This probably accounts for their tendency to find ridiculously easy schools difficult. I found American universities so easy, boring, unchallenging, really, that I cannot imagine any one saying that it is difficult to succeed at them.)

There are some children born with fewer propensities to pain hence to fear. Fear is usually a product of pain. Human beings live in body. Body does experience pain. Fear enables them to anticipate whatever could cause them pain. They, then, avoid whatever could cause them pain.

Fear is a means of avoiding pain. Those children who are born with deficient capacity to feel pain (ANHIDROSIS or CIPA, congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis), tend to not anticipate pain with fear and avoid it hence tend to be hurt and die from the injuries they sustain. Such children seldom live to adulthood.

Fear is what keeps us alive in body for it alerts us to what could hurt our bodies and cause us pain and eventually destroy our bodies. Fear is very critical for our physical survival. Without fear, no human being can survive into adulthood.

Unfortunately, or is it fortunately, some children are born with propensity to more pain hence to more fear. I was such a child. The shy child tends to have more pain and fear in his life. This is so due to his inherited body. (If you are interested in the academic literature on this subject, see Professor Jerome Kegan’s efforts at Harvard University. Also see the writings of Professor Isaacs of Oxford University.)

On the other hand, there are children who tend to feel less pain hence less fear. These children tend to develop antisocial personalities. The criminal type, generally, feels less pain and less fear. As a matter of fact, he tends to engage in high risk behaviors in his quest to excite his body, to feel a little fear, for after all fear is sign that one is alive in body. The antisocial criminal seeks thrills, to excite his “dense” body. (Psychotherapy generally aims at instilling some anxiety in criminals. These people have less fear and anxiety hence engages in the incredibly hurtful activities that they engage in; therapy attempts to instill anxiety in them, so as to make them amenable to socialization, to internalizing, interiorizing and introjecting pro-social norms.)

The shy child has an over aroused soma (body) and tends to seek reduction of his somatic excitement. (See the writings of Hans Esynck. He rewrote Carl Jung’s psychoanalytic postulations of introversion and extroversion in behaviorist categories.) The introverted, shy child feels over aroused and seeks somatic calmness, whereas the extroverted, antisocial child tends to feel under aroused and seek thrills to make him feel some fear. The criminal actually enjoys stealing for there is a prospect of him being caught and that makes him feel a little anxiety, which stimulates his seeming over calm body.

Kegan has definitively proved that temperament is inherited. If one is shy, one inherited it, one inherited an easily arousable body; if one is extroverted, and one inherited a less arousable body. Temperament is stable from day one of ones life hence is not a learned variable. If you are shy, you can manage it, but you cannot eliminate it, for your body is easily aroused.

The physical environment is always impersonal. It hurts the human body without regards to our desire to not be hurt. Any number of factors can hurt our bodies. Our bodies, therefore, evolved a mechanism to alert us to whatever could hurt us and give us pain. That mechanism is called fear response.

All animal organisms that survive on planet earth tend to experience fear, some more so than others. Those with less fear tend to be called bold persons; those with more fear tend to be called timid persons.

EXAMPLE OF FEAR RESPONSE

A car nearly runs into you, a mugger points a gun at you, demanding your money, or he kills you. Without thinking about it, your body goes to work, in an involuntary manner, to defend you. Your nervous system urges your adrenal glands to release more adrenalin into your blood stream. That excitatory hormone is released and speeds up the workings of most of your organs.

Your heart pumps faster, sending blood to all parts of your body. Your body releases stored energy (sugar) and your blood carries it to all parts of your body, particularly to your muscles, giving them energy to do additional work, work demanded of them to enable you survive. In fear, even if you are obese, you could run the hundred yards in 10 seconds, an Olympic time; nature does everything to protect your body when it is endangered.

Your lungs beat faster, enabling you to inhale more oxygen into your body. Your body needs that energy to do its additional work. That oxygen is carried to all parts of your body by your blood. Your body uses the released glucose and inhaled oxygen, burns them up fast in doing the additional work it is doing to find a way to defend you when you are under attack. In doing so, your body produces enormous heat.

Too much somatic heat could destroy some of your visceral organs, so your body finds a way for you to exhale that heat. The air you exhale, when in fear, is hot. You also sweat, because blood carries hot carbon dioxide to your skin and tries to get rid of it through the pores in your skin. When a person is in fear, his skin tends to feel hot, for his body is actually eliminating heat.

Your nervous system works very fast, sending messages from all over your body to the central nervous system (spine and brain). The CNS makes decisions as to what you should do in response to the threat to your life. If you could defeat it, out wit the mugger, your brain asks you to call his bluff, to challenge him to a fight and take the damn gun away from him. (Criminals are always cowards, I have already told you that they are merely seeking thrills for they have under aroused bodies; they are not courageous persons; courage lies in overcoming fear and doing what benefits all of humanity. All those Nigerian politicians that steal our monies are, in fact, cowards; if they were courageous, they would, if necessary, go without food to help develop their poor country.)

If your past experience believes that you can defeat the person endangering your life, your brain urges you to stay and fight him. In that case, your fear is transformed into anger. (The same neuro-chemicals are involved in fear and anger response; in fact, the two affects are the same, physiologically. A fearful person tends to be an angry person, for the same physiology under lays both response.)

If you cannot possibly defeat the attacker, your CNS urges you to flee from him (and if you cannot run away, to beg him for your life).

Fear response is characterized by fight or flight. You fight back and remove whatever is threatening your life or you run from it. Either response is done involuntarily; they take place in seconds, when your life is threatened. You do not pause to think about what to do when a car approaches you, you simply run from it…your adrenalin pours itself into your blood stream and the fear response mechanism described above takes over, and in a split second you jump away from the path of the oncoming car. If you fail in doing so, well, you are hurt or killed.

(This essay is meant for the general public. Therefore, I will not go into details on the actual physiology of fear; that would require some courses in biology, physics and chemistry; you would have to understand the nervous system, the electrical system of the body, biophysics/biochemistry, how messages are transmitted from one neuron, synapse, to another; the role of the electrical ions of potassium, calcium, sodium, magnesium, phosphor, nitrogen etc; the nature of neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, neuropiniphrine, GABA, endorphin and so on. I will keep it very simple.)

Now get this fact into your brain. If fear is holding you back from living fully and from doing whatever you want to do, you probably inherited a body that is prone to quick fear response.

I know this truth for I lived in fear from day one of my life. Make a little noise and my body is aroused and goes into fear mode. My heart pounds as if it wants to jump out of its chest cavity, my lungs flap; my nervous system goes fast and I experience the fight-flight response to fear. If I am sleeping and you switch on electrical light, I immediately wake up; that is how attuned to changes in the environment that my body is. Raise your voice, and I jump. (I should point out that some psychologists have speculated that persons who inherited such extreme tendency to fear, who generally tend to have very high IQ…over 130… were those who, in primitive societies, became their people’s shamans and prophets. My philosophical mental, Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, described his body as being as I know my body to be. He struggled to avoid people for their nose making jarred his over sensitive body. He said this almost two hundred years. He helped me understand why I avoided people for their idle charter made my body want to run. When I am with Nigerians and they begin to talk loudly, as they do, I run away. I go read. Reading calms me down. Reading is probably the best way to relax the mind. If you are stressed out, try reading good books. )

I have been fearful from day one of my life. In fact, all persons in my family are fearful. My father was fearful; my grand father was so etc. Our over fearfulness is due to our inherited hyper sensitive body. Since my ancestors were their people’s Amadioha High Priests, I have often wondered whether there was a correlation between their hypersensitive bodies, high intelligence and their social function.

There are advantages and disadvantages to everything in life. Fearful people tend to develop introverted, introspective personalities. Fearless persons tend to develop extroverted personalities.

The introvert thinks a lot and the extrovert thinks less. It is introverts that give us our philosophy and psychology. Extroverts do things and give us our food.

If life gives you lemon, make lemonade with it. If you are born with an over aroused central nervous system, hence compelled to introspect, you might as well read books, think about them and contribute to the world of ideas.

FEARFULNESS AND SELF CONSCIOUSNESS

Human beings are self conscious animals. In fact, what seems to differentiate them from other forms of animal life is their self consciousness. The Canadian Psychiatrist, Richard M. Burke, in his book, Cosmic Consciousness, observed that what differentiates animals from human beings is human beings self consciousness. He seemed to think that that quality makes us spiritual beings. However, he also seemed to think that we must lose that self consciousness to return to our assumed spiritual origin. As it were, we separated from unified spirit and each of us feels conscious of his separated, in Carl Jung’s categories, individuated self. Therein lays the problem of human existence. We must relinquish that sense of separation and its allied self consciousness and return to a state of what Buddha called “no self” to regain awareness of our true self.

In meditation and mystical experience folks claim to have given up awareness of their separated self and regained awareness of unified self, hence entered what they call God state. Hinduism calls it Samadhi, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism calls it Nirvana, Zen Buddhism calls it Satori. Here, the separated self is let go and the individual’s mind is whipped clean of all self concepts. In a mind made void of all conceptual categories, emptied of all ideas of self and meaning, an open mind, the real self, which Buddha thinks is unified, dawns on one’s mind. One feels at peace and is happy. Hinduism calls this experience absolute bliss.

The fearful person tends to be extremely self conscious. What is going on here? Briefly, self consciousness is the awareness of one’s self as different from other selves. Human beings are conscious that they are individuated (See Carl Jung on Individuation) and separated from other people and from the rest of the world. As Eric Fromm pointed out in Escape from Freedom, human beings have a sense of being detached from the world they live in.

It is said that other forms of being feel as if they are one with their environment, whereas human beings feel apart from it. As a matter of fact, we do not know how other forms of life feel, so the statement that animals, for example, do not feel separated from their world is speculative and untenable to science. But the point is well taken, man feels cut off from the rest of being, he feels all alone in the universe.

I believe that self consciousness is an ego variable. To feel self conscious is to see ones self as different from other people, as not the same as other people and as unequal with other people. One either feels superior to other people or feels inferior to other people, or vacillates between the two.

Self consciousness is an effort to make one’s separated self seem real in one’s awareness. Here, one is keenly aware that others are looking at one, that they observe one, evaluate and judge one’s every behavior. The self conscious person feels like he is in a fishbowl, is the center of other people’s attention. He feels like all people are judging his every behavior and deciding whether they are good or bad. Of course, he would like to be judged as good, so he does whatever he could to make him seem good and avoid being seen as bad. (As a child, I was conscious of other people judging me and tried my best to conform to accepted social norms; the prospect of doing the wrong thing hence be negatively judged and possibly rejected filled me with anxiety. Behaviorally, I was a model child and never engaged in anti social behaviors. I dutifully went to confession every Saturday and confessed sins I had not committed.)

There are clinical terms for these issues, such as ideas of reference, ideas of centrality etc. But this is not a paper for mental health professionals, so I will stay away from those terms. If interested in the literatures see David Swanson et al, The Paranoid; William Meisner, Paranoid Process; David Shapiro, Autonomy and the Rigid Character; The American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, relevant sections.) The salient point is that the fearful person, who in extreme form is a shy person, tends to be s a self conscious person. Whereas all human beings are self conscious, shy, fearful persons are extremely self conscious.

Contrary to the general perception that shy person are timid, actually they are very egotistical. They have grandiose self concepts. They secretly feel superior to other people. Their shyness is, in fact, a strategic withdrawal from other people so that their imaginary big self is not exposed as the sham it is. Alfred Adler explicated this phenomenon better than other psychologists. He observed that the shy, neurotic person feels inferior and compensates with a fictional, imaginary superior self concept. He wants to become a very important person. The important self concept and its pictorial form, self image, is not real; it is a conceptual self and does not exist in the real world.

In the objective, real world, all people are the same and are equal. But the neurotic wants to seem better than other persons. He uses his imagination to invent an imaginary big self. However, the neurotic is aware that that self is not real. He then feels that if other people come close to him that they would appreciate that his grandiose self concept is make belief and not real. In a futile effort to protect his imaginary big self and make it seem real, he avoids other people. In effect avoidance behavior is an effort to preserve a false neurotic big self. (Please note that every human being is a bit neurotic. The clinical term for normal persons is normal neurotics. Therefore, in talking about neurotics, we are talking about all human beings. It is all a matter of degrees.)

In psychosis, such as schizophrenia and mania, the individual, in fact, believes that he is his imaginary important self, hence he is insane. The neurotic person, like most Nigerian big men, wants to be seen as an important person but knows that he is not, hence is able to test reality and, as such, is normal. On the other hand, the psychotic person, in fact, believes that he is more important than other persons hence has lost touch with reality. He now lives in his own world. The psychotic actually believes that he is god, Jesus, Napoleon or whatever big self he constructs for himself. Reality is awareness and acceptance that all human beings, man and woman, child and adult, black and white are the same and equal.

The neurotic detests his inferior feeling self and wishes that he were superior but knows that he is not superior to any one else, he is able to distinguish between wishes and facts. The psychotic has lost the ability to distinguish between wishes and facts, hence believes that since he wished that he were superior that, in fact, he is so.

It is impossible for one human being to be superior to other human beings. The same life force, unified spirit, which is the same and equal everywhere, manifests in all people hence all people, in their essence, are equal. Of course, in the temporal universe, there are apparent differences in people; some are black, others white, some tall, others short, some smart, others not so smart etc. But these are appearances and appearances are deceiving. Look beyond human appearances and behold the sameness and equality in all human beings.

For our present purpose, shyness and self consciousness are efforts to defend the separated, ego self. The shy person is attempting to have a big ego and must accept that his ego is the same as other egos. Therapy for the shy person includes shrinking his swollen ego. If your child is shy and avoidant, he or shy has a swollen self concept that needs to be shrunk. The shy child’s approach-avoidant behavior is rooted in his misguided efforts to seem a very important person.

The moment you feel better than other people, you have interfered with relationship, and can no longer relate well to other people. Good relationship requires that people be equal; only the equal can relate well, the unequal have conflicted relationships. Give it up, give up the neurotic and or psychotic wish to be better than other people and relate to all people as your equal friends. All God’s children are equal. (I have developed these ideas in more clinical papers.)

MYTHOLOGY

In the beginning is God. (All metaphysics must have a story of creation, all of them myths; so bear with me as I narrate Sister Helen’s myth of creation; as long as you understand that we are now in the realm of mythology, not science, you are safe; do not always accept what people tell you is the truth, as the literal truth; no human being knows what the truth is. Where objective knowledge ends mythology begins. Lest you are cavalier, myths are necessary for living. Please pay close attention to this myth, for it has an element of truth in it; all useful myths have some metaphoric truth, but not the whole truth in them.)

God is one. God extended himself into his Son. God gave his son his ability to extend himself. The Son of God extended his self into his own son.

There was no time when God did not exist. Since, by definition, God is creative and is always creating his children, there was no time that the children of God did not exist. As it were, the son of God is as old as God, for if there was a time that God did not have a son, since to be God, one must be a father, God did not exist. Creation has no beginning and no end. (We are talking in metaphors, but we are also talking truth, so pay attention and learn.)

Creation begins in God and extends outwards to his Son and to the Son’s children, ad infinitum. In concrete terms, God created your father. Your father has the power to create given to him by God. He created you with that power. He gave you that creative power. You create your own children, who, in turn, will create their own children, ad infinitum.

God is creative and is always creating his children and his children creating their own children. This process has no beginning and no end.

God and his creation are one. God is his creation. God is in his creation. God is in his children. The children of God are in God. The children of God are in each other. Where God ends and his children begin is nowhere. Where one child of God ends and another begins is nowhere. There is no space or gap between God and his children, or between the children. All creation is unified as one. God is in you and you are in God; and you are also in all people, as they are in you. (When you sleep and dream, you project out the entire world. You see a world that seems external to you, yet when you wake up in the morning, that world no longer exists. Why so? Because the entire world is inside you, as you are inside it. You project the seeming external world out and seem to live in it.)

In eternity, aka heaven, there is no you and not you, all are you. One God is himself and simultaneously his infinite creations.

(Do you think that this is fiction? Have you had mystical experience? In mystical union, you suddenly know yourself to be you and simultaneously all people. See William James, Varieties of Religious Experience; Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism. Also see the writings of Catholic, Protestant and Moslem mystics, such as Meister Eckhart, St John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Hilton, Boehm, and Sufi Moslems.)

According to Sister Helen, eternity is unified. There is no you and not you in it; no seer and seen, no subject and object; all are one. All share one self and one mind. All share the self of God and the mind of God. We do whatever we do with the spirit of God in us; without him, we can do nothing. The son of God can do everything with the power of his father in him, but can do nothing without his father’s power. We are nothing without God; but with God we are everything.

Sister Helen said that in this unified state, eternity, she called it (traditional Christianity calls it heaven) entered the spirit of division and rebellion.

Each son of God, each part of God, wanted to separate from God and from others. Why this desire?

Separation is a means and must have an end. So why did we seek separation from God and from each other? Sister Helen said that we resented the fact that God created us and want to create ourselves. We are like God except in one respect. God created us and we did not create God and did not create ourselves.

Each of us does help create other people, our children, but we do so with the creative power of God in us, but not by our own powers. God is the creator and we are the created and we sorely resented this fact.

We wished to create ourselves and to create God. In other words, we wished to replace God. For that to happen, God had to be killed and die. We wished the death of our father. (This desire to create God, create ourselves and create each other Sister Helen called special-ness; I call it narcissism. The world came into being in pursuit of special-ness, in our vain effort to be narcissistic.)

We wished to drive our father out of his creatorship throne, usurp it, and create him and ourselves. (Please remember that we are now in the realm of metaphors, not facts. Nevertheless, we are articulating what, in fact, seemed to have happened. Please pay close attention.)

God is eternal and lives for ever and ever. Therefore, much as we wished to kill him, we cannot kill God. For one thing, God does not have a body that could be destroyed.

God is spirit. Spirit is that which is not in form, in body and in matter.

In eternity, heaven, we are spirit, not bodies hence we are in each other and in God. Spirit is eternal, permanent and changeless and could not be killed by his rebellious sons.

But the wish for self creation is powerful. So what to do? We contrived to tune God out, and, as it were, seem to go to sleep, and in our sleep, dream that we are separated from God and have now created us. We invent our self concepts, our egos, and our personalities as our replacement selves. Our real self, in heaven, is unified self, but our current self, on earth, is separated self. The separated self is a substitute self; the real self is unified spirit.

(Cross reference Hindu story of the origin of this world. See Veda, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Upanishads, Bagavad Gita, Patanjali’s Yoga, Shankara and Ramanuja’s philosophies, Guru Nanak’s writings, The Gospel of Ramakrishna, and Vivekananda’s writing. Hinduism believes that the world is a dream. Western solipsistic philosophers like George Berkeley and Arthur Schopenhauer built on Vedanta, the philosophical aspect of Hinduism; Hinduism has two aspects, the intellectual part, Vedanta, Janna Yoga, and the emotional aspect for the masses, Bhakti Yoga.)

Fifteen billion years ago, we all went insane and attacked each other and attacked God (the Big Bang of physics), and in doing so, seemed to separate from each other. That much attack made the loudest noise you ever heard, the big bang. (Please see Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth. Also see his series on a Hero with Thousand Faces.)

As it were, we shattered unified reality and in nanoseconds invented space. Space gave us separation from each other.

The moment space came into being, time came into being. Draw a line between two separated points and it takes time to go from one point to the other.

If I separated from you, in space, then, it requires time for me to reach you. Space and time came into being almost simultaneously, with space preceding time by nanoseconds.

As soon as space and time were invented, particles had to be invented. Space invented time and matter. Thus, in seconds after the big bang, particles were invented. Quarks, protons, neutrons, electrons etc were invented.

Particles, in time, unified to form atoms. First, hydrogen atoms. In time that atom and its isotopes differentiated into the 104 elements (and counting) in the universe.

The elements, in time, unified into biological organisms; first, into plant life and then into animal life and finally into human beings.

(Are you enjoying this creation mythology? I told you that Sister Helen was the best myth maker of the twentieth century. And that is good for all the old creation myths, like Genesis in the Christian Bible, were invented by men. I say that it is about time we had female myth makers. Right on, Sister Helen, this brother is with you. But he must necessarily correct your problematic aspects. That is his contribution to what Aldus Huxley called the perennial philosophy of mankind.)

As Sister Helen sees it, none of this has actually happened. God and his children are still unified. What seemed to have happened is that the children of God seemed to have fallen, metaphorically, asleep, and are dreaming that they are in a place called this world. But, in fact, they are still in God and are with God.

This may sound spooky to you. When you experience mystical union, all you feel is like you merely awakened from a sleep, momentarily remember that you were in a place called this world, and quickly forget about it; as we tend to forget our dreams. You quickly know yourself to be at your real home, unified state, heaven, call it whatever you like; it has no name. You know yourself to be a part of God and God to be your creator. You know yourself to be immortal. You know everything (excluding information on material things, for matter does not exist in eternity). You know yourself as formless unified spirit.

Sister Helen tells us that our world does not exist and that it is as a mere dream. Good gracious, what does she mean that this apparent solid world is a dream and is not real? It sure seems real to me.

George Berkeley wrote his Dialogues, philosophical solipsism, and claimed that the world is in our minds. Boswell, Dr Johnson’s side kick, told Dr Johnson, the old English wit, about it, and he struck his toe on a rock, felt pain, and said: that is the answer for Berkeley.

A few years ago, I was living at Alaska. I told a bright Yupik Eskimo boy about Sister Helen’s story that our world is a dream and he said, and I quote, “Dr Osuji, if I strike my toes on a rock, I feel pain, so this world is sure real to me”. This thirteen year old boy had never heard of Dr Johnson, yet his response to solipsism was exactly like Johnson’s. This goes to show you that all human beings are the same.

(As an aside, Dr Johnson was so afraid of death that he clung to life and died a miserable death, fighting death. Apparently, he did not want to go to that oblivion which, as an atheist, he preached. He was scared shitless of death. On the other hand, Berkeley, a Catholic Bishop, who believed in God, died gracefully. The atheist that talks volubly that God does not exist is usually afraid to die and go to that finitude that he talks so much about. In an emergency, in the fox hole, the most vocal atheist prays to God.)

God exists. In fact, God is the only thing that exists. Nothing else exists. But your concept of God may not be God, for God is beyond concepts. God is not anything that you can conceptualize or think about. God is ineffable; you cannot understand him with earthly ego, intellectual categories.

God is unified spirit and only those in spirit can understand God. Since you are in body, or think that you are, you cannot understand unified spirit. Moreover, the intellectual categories of this world are meant to help us understand a separated world. For example, language is adaptive to separated people. One is apart from you, so one talks to you. But if people are unified and there are no others to talk to, language is redundant. You cannot understand eternity with our earthly language, for language adapts to the separated realities of this world, not to the unified reality of heaven.

Sister Helen wants you to give up this world, to awaken from the dream of special ness and separation and return to God. She reinterpreted the Gospel of Jesus to tell you what you have to do to awaken from this dream.

Jesus taught people to love one another. He said that true love means forgiving one another. If others do bad things to you, forgive them. He forgave those who destroyed his physical body.

On the other hand, on earth, we invented matter and body and seem to live in it. Matter, body, gives a sense of boundaries, separation. One is in this body and other people are in different bodies, so one must be separated from them. We experience attacks on our bodies as pain. We do not like pain. We fear pain. We defend against attack by either counter attacking those who attacked us or avoiding them. On earth, we survive to the extent that we avoid attack.

If attacked we tend to be defensive. Jesus, on the other hand, tells us not to be defensive. He asks us to be defenseless, to not fight back when attacked. But you think that if you are attacked that you would be killed, so, you defend yourself when attacked by counter attacking the attacker, or if weak, running from the attacker.

Fear is a means of running from attack and anger is a means of counter attacking your attackers. Fear and anger enables you to protect your body hence to survive on earth as a separated self.

Jesus asks you to forgive those who attack you hence to be defenseless to attack. He must be crazy; your earthly ego intellect tells you, for you know that if you do not fight the bully, that he could hurt, even kill you. If you re a boy-child, you quickly learn that if you seem weak that other boys would, for no good reason, come and push you around. You must be assertive to avoid being messed with.

As a shy, quiet boy, I was pushed around a lot. One day, after school…I can just see us at Point road, Apapa… three boys, my class mates, the three stars, as they called themselves, confronted me. Other boys immediately circled us, cheering them to beat that “know it all” Tommy. Well, I suddenly found the strength to fight back. I fought like hell and in fact inflicted a lot of physical harm on the three ten year old boys. They had attacked me in the presence of other boys, to humiliate me and to seem powerful. If I had allowed myself to be pushed around, I would have lost social face. I gained prestige by attacking to kill. (Up to the present, though I seem gentle, if you mess with me, I attack you with such verbal fury that I might, in fact, destroy you.)

Please note that none of the other boys came to my rescue. They just circled us, expecting to have fun from Tommy having the crap beat out of him. The lesson here is that when push comes to shove, no one will come to your rescue. You are all alone in this wide universe. Defend yourself, as much as you could. Ces’t la vie, such is life. Life is, as Charles Darwin told us, and Herbert Spenser popularized in the philosophy of social Darwinism, a struggle where the fittest survive and the weak die. Don’t give me that emotional bull that others are looking after my self interests. That was the lesson I learned in my childhood. (To the present, I tend to look at people with cynical eyes; I expect them to do nothing for my survival. I survive by my own efforts. To me, those masquerading as very important persons are no more than clowns. I do not rely on them for my survival therefore they are superfluous human beings. Why should I see you as a socially important person when you play no role in my survival? No Nigerian, other than my parents, has contributed to my physical survival, so Nigerians seem no more than empty vessels making a whole lot of noise.)

From that moment of whipping three boys, no other kid at my elementary school messed with me.

The salient point is that in our world, you got to defend yourself, to be alive. And here comes a chap called Jesus telling you not to defend yourself. He must be a crazy. See, he did not defend himself and his enemies killed him.

Defenselessness and forgiveness is a recipe for death. So if you want to die, then forgive your enemies.

(By the way, I am engaged in a serious philosophical discourse, so you might as well pay attention. I am trying to tell you that if you practiced true Christianity, which is love and forgiveness, that you would be destroyed by this world. My fellow thinker, Frederick Nietzsche, said as much, in his book, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Christianity had to be practiced in the breech, for people to survive. This accounts for the fact that those who call themselves Christians do not practice it. If they did, they would die off. The question then is whether they should bite the bullet, practice what their master, Jesus, told them to practice and die? Think about it. Stop being emotional and use your freaking mind, for once in your life. If you are a Christian, as Nigerians run around telling us that they are, how come you do not do what Christians are supposed to do: love, forgive and serve all people? How come you only look after your self interests and not public interests? I am yet to see a true Christian in Nigeria or any where else, for that matter.)

If terrorists attacked you, and you want to live in this world, you must defend yourself. If you are defenseless, they will kill you or convert you to their violent religion. Simply stated, forgiveness and defenseless are antithetical to survival in this world.

Nevertheless, Jesus taught that message and Sister Helen rearticulated it. She asks us to forgive those who harm us. As she sees it, they harm us because we harmed them hence we must forgive them.

In her view, nothing could happen to one unless one wants to experience it. One must have attacked other people, for them to attack one. To separate from other people is to have attacked them; it takes attack to split unified reality and thereafter seem apart from other people. Apriori, we have attacked other people, hence are guilty.

The three boys who jumped me believed that I attacked them by being haughty. I was not an innocent boy. I used to consider the boys primitive. They just came to town from their villages and seemed uncivilized; it was like they came from a different planet, culturally speaking.

In the here and now, the fact is that defenselessness leads to physical death. Sister Helen tells you that therein lay your problem: that you believe in death. She said that when you think that you are dead, that all that happens is that you awaken in unified state. To her, there is no death. This world is a dream and when we die in it, we merely awaken from a nightmarish dream.

But you have no way of knowing whether what the Jewish sister is telling you is true or not. Clever religious charlatans and quacks have been known to deceive gullible people; so your ego intellect asks you to defend yourself, which is what most of us do.

See also, Overcoming the Fear that Holds Africans Down, Part 2