Lately, I have been thinking a lot about fear. Not the obvious kind of fear, when we can clearly recognize and say “I am afraid,” but a much more interesting kind: the fear that has become so deeply embedded in our values, morality, relationships, religion, and ideas about what a “good” life should look like that we no longer call it fear at all. We call it responsibility, duty, loyalty, morality, common sense, safety, maturity, or simply “the right thing to do.”

How many decisions in my life were truly mine, and how many did I make because I was afraid of what would happen if I chose differently? This is an uncomfortable question! 

This is one of the reasons religion interests me so much. I am not particularly interested in another argument about whether God exists, which religion is right, which one is wrong, or who possesses the ultimate truth. I am much more interested in the psychological architecture of choice that religious systems have created and reinforced for centuries. Because if free will exists, if human beings truly possess the freedom to choose, then I want to ask: can we call a choice free when one option promises salvation, love, belonging, and eternal life, while the other threatens punishment, rejection, damnation, and eternal suffering?

And this is where religion becomes, for me, only one very old and very visible example of a much more universal human mechanism, because we do exactly the same thing to one another all the time. We rarely tell another person directly, “I forbid you to choose.” Instead we say: if you do this or leave me, YOU will destroy the family. If you choose yourself, you are selfish. If you stop living the way everyone expects you to live, you will disappoint the people who depend on you. If you can no longer provide the life I am accustomed to, you have betrayed me. If you tell the truth, you will hurt too many people. If you change your life now, you will lose everything you spent decades building. If you stop being the person everyone knows you to be, perhaps they will stop loving you. If you leave the profession, you lose the status. If you leave the marriage, you lose the house, the money, the familiar life. If you admit whom or what you actually love, you may lose your reputation. If you stop being the “good girl,” the “good wife,” the “good husband,” the “good daughter,” the “good Christian,” the “responsible person,” then who exactly are you? Alternative is horrifying... 

And suddenly we realize that hell does not necessarily have to wait until after death. We are perfectly capable of creating it for one another right here. This is precisely why fear is such an extraordinarily effective instrument of control. Fear does not need to lock the door. It only needs to convince you that something catastrophic FOR YOU is waiting on the other side. After that, you will stay away from the door yourself. You will explain to yourself why you cannot open it, construct perfectly reasonable arguments, call your decision maturity, turn fear into morality, and eventually defend the cage because someone once convinced you that whatever exists outside it is far more dangerous than what exists within it.

Fear rarely approaches an adult human being and announces, “Hello, I am fear, and today I will be making your decisions for you.” It is far more sophisticated than that. It says, “This is not the right time,” “I just need a little longer,” “I need to think,” “I need to understand myself first,” “I cannot do this to her/him,” “I cannot do this to the children,” “I have invested too much,” “I cannot lose everything I built,” “I have responsibilities,” “It would be wrong,” “What will people think?” “I am not sure yet,” “I just need more time.” And the difficult part is that every single one of those things may contain some truth.

Our decisions do have consequences. We have children, money, parents, promises, mortgages, reputations, careers, businesses, people who depend on us, and stories that have been unfolding for twenty, thirty, forty years. Freedom does not mean the absence of consequences. Freedom does not mean that we can simply do whatever we want and nobody else has the right to be hurt by our choices. To me, freedom means something far more difficult: I can see the price of both choices, and I stop presenting my fear of paying one of those prices as proof that I have no choice.

Because “I cannot” and “I can, but I am not willing to pay the price” are two completely different statements. Sometimes adulthood begins with nothing more dramatic than replacing one sentence with the other. I can leave, but I am afraid of losing the house. I can tell the truth, but I am afraid of the reaction. I can choose another life, but I am afraid of losing belonging. I can stop being this person, but I have absolutely no idea who I will become afterward. I can. I am afraid. And that is an entirely different place to stand, because suddenly the person can see their own freedom again... even when they don't act... the person has a chance to see the real choice now... 

Perhaps this is exactly why the story of Nicodemus affected me so deeply. Nicodemus is the tragedy of a person who has already seen the truth but is still unable to build his life according to what he has seen. He is not stupid, blind, or unconscious. Quite the opposite. He sees, he feels, he comes at night, he asks questions, he recognizes something so profound that his old world can never become completely innocent again. And yet, between “I know” and “I choose,” an enormous abyss appears.

Recognizing truth in your heart is one thing, allowing that truth to dismantle the architecture of your actual life is something else entirely. Suddenly there is status, reputation, money, family, obligations, belonging, religious order, and the expectations of people who continuously remind you who you are and who you are supposed to remain. There is a wife who is frightened by your transformation because your transformation inevitably threatens the stability of her world as well. There are people around you who may genuinely believe they are protecting you by reminding you of everything you could lose. And then there is the mind, that brilliant, rational, educated mind capable of producing a thousand perfectly intelligent explanations for why what the heart already knows is impossible, irresponsible, irrational, dangerous, or simply “not the right time.”

A person can live in that space for years. They can search, read, pray, meditate, go to teachers, therapists, gurus, retreats and ceremonies, study another system, receive another insight, have another profound realization, and speak beautifully about consciousness, healing, freedom, God, love, purpose and truth. But eventually life asks an extraordinarily simple question: Fine. You understand. What are you going to choose?

Eventually we have to accept something both brutal and beautiful: a human being must be allowed to say no even to their own truth. They must be allowed to say no to love, to the life they once said they wanted, even to the doorway they themselves once asked to be shown... 

This is one of the deepest forms of love: refusing to drag another person across the threshold simply because you believe you know where their happiness lies. Otherwise we return to exactly the same mechanism we were criticizing in the first place: control, only now disguised as love. We want to rescue people from the consequences of their fear, we want to make the decision for them, we want to convince them, explain it one more time, show them one more sign, offer one more argument, because watching someone stand in front of a door they are terrified to open can be excruciating. But their fear belongs to their path, just as their choice does.

And this is why what began for me as a question about religion eventually became a much more personal question about fear. Because perhaps the most sophisticated form of unfreedom does not happen when someone physically takes away our right to choose. It happens when we have been taught to fear a particular choice so deeply that eventually we stop recognizing it as a possible choice at all. At that point, prohibition is no longer necessary. Neither is an authority figure, an institution, an external threat, or a guard at the door. We become our own guards.

We maintain the cage ourselves, repair it, decorate it, explain why it is necessary, tell other people how dangerous life outside it would be, and call the cage responsibility, stability, loyalty, morality, destiny, common sense, or love... Or the Law of God as pharisee told Nicodemus... as you hear it in your churches and temples...  We may even spend years sincerely believing ourselves to be free, because technically nobody is forcing us to stay. And this is why some prisons are so difficult to leave: the lock is no longer outside.

So these days I find myself asking a slightly different question. I want to know where in my life has fear stopped calling itself fear? Where have I renamed it responsibility, morality, loyalty, patience, common sense, “not yet,” “I should,” “I have to,” or “I have no choice”? Where have I mistaken the fear of losing love, belonging, money, reputation, identity, security or approval for evidence that another life is impossible? 

And the most revealing question of all is this: what would I choose if I were no longer making the decision under the threat of losing love, belonging, money, reputation, identity, security or someone else’s approval? This does not mean I must immediately run out and make that choice. Awareness does not require impulsiveness. Sometimes the first act of freedom is simply becoming willing to see the choice that fear has spent years convincing us does not exist.

Free will does not begin when fear disappears. It begins when I finally recognize fear for what it is and stop allowing it to introduce itself to me as God, morality, duty, responsibility, love or destiny.

And then, underneath all the explanations, obligations, identities, expectations and perfectly reasonable arguments, one final question remains:

If fear were removed from the equation, what would you choose? 

And this is where I want to leave you, not with another answer, but with a few questions. Because sometimes a good question is far more dangerous to the prison we have built than another explanation of how to escape it.

Have a problem in front of you right now and answer these 4 questions truthfully. You will get to your truth within 30 minutes if you really go deeper into the core of the problem:

1. Who benefits from you believing this about yourself? Who benefits from you believing that you are too much, not enough, selfish, weak, difficult, incapable, sinful, irresponsible, unlovable, too old, too late, or somehow fundamentally wrong? And before you automatically answer “no one,” look again. Where did this particular idea about yourself come from? Whose voice did it originally belong to? Who needed you to believe it? Who became safer, more comfortable, more powerful, or less threatened when you made yourself smaller? How much of what you call your “self-esteem” is actually your own perception of yourself, and how much of it is an accumulation of other people’s judgments that you eventually learned to repeat in your own voice?

2. Who would you be without this story about yourself? Not who should you become, and not who would be more impressive, healed, spiritual, successful, or acceptable. Who would remain if the story disappeared? If you were no longer the abandoned one, the responsible one, the betrayed one, the good one, the victim, the rescuer, the one who always has to wait, the one who cannot leave, the one who has to hold everything together, the one who must earn love, the one who always sacrifices? Sometimes we hold on to painful identities because at least they tell us who we are. Freedom can be terrifying precisely because it removes the familiar character we have spent years learning how to play.

3. When did you decide that this was true? Go back further than your adult explanations. When did you first learn that love had to be earned, that telling the truth was dangerous, that choosing yourself hurt other people, that your desires were inconvenient, that being good meant obedience, that conflict meant abandonment, that security mattered more than aliveness? Was there a sentence somebody said, a look on somebody’s face, a punishment, a rejection, a moment of humiliation, a childhood conclusion that made perfect sense to the child you were and quietly became a law governing the adult you became? And perhaps the question is no longer whether that belief once protected you. Perhaps the question is whether it is still true now.

4. And finally, what would happen to you if this story actually changed? This may be the most uncomfortable question of all. Because we usually imagine that freedom is what we desperately want, but freedom also takes things away from us. It takes away familiar excuses, familiar enemies, familiar explanations, sometimes even the right to keep blaming the past for the life we continue choosing in the present. If the old story were no longer true, what would you suddenly become responsible for? What decision could you no longer postpone? What door would you have to admit has been open for a very long time?

Maybe this is why freedom can frighten us almost as much as captivity. A prison tells you where the walls are. It tells you who you are inside them. It explains why you cannot leave. An open door gives you no such comfort.

Now that you know you can leave, what are you going to choose?