In his book on the Emotions, Sartre left us with a striking image.
Sartre said there was a difference between fear and horror. As I remember it, he illustrated that difference by describing the experience of being startled by a leering face on the other side of a window.
Fear, Sartre said, is when we are concerned that the grinning face might break the window and harm us. Horror, on the other hand, is the irrational dread that the face is somehow magically affecting us through the window. Sartre’s window has been a helpful image for me in realizing when I have become unmoored into fears born of my imagination.
I have also been helped by the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment. We are told in that story that, just as the young seeker was approached awakening, he was beset by fearful demons. We are told the Buddha dispelled the demons by simply taping the earth.
Both of these stories have been helpful to me over the years. Fear is a necessary emotion for our survival, but when fear lapses into to irrational horror it can be helpful to come up with our own version of “touching the earth.”
Studying science can be a way of touching the earth. Actually science can be invaluable in developing a love based on reality, not imagination. We cannot share the world as we each imagine it, we can only share the world as we both experience it. Science can be a bridge to bring us both to a common understanding.
The Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote an extremely loving book on science entitled, “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.” In it, he wrote:
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
If I understand Sartre, he was describing the difference between fear and horror by illustrating a situation were our perception becomes untethered from our real experience and floats off like an untethered balloon into the demon world born of ungrounded imagination.
When it feels like our world is melting into terror, salvation can be found in “touching the earth” in our own way. When we are lost in our fearful imaginings simply wiggling our toes or fingers can bring us back to our bodies. Touching a tree, looking into a human face, working with our hands- these can all be ways of remembering that however afraid we may feel, we are always cradled in reality. We are not abandoned observers of indifferent fate. We are the universe that has become aware of itself through us. Heaven does not lie if finding another, better world. Salvation is always awakening more deeply to where we are in the here and now.