Last weekend Carol and I adopted 8 ducklings. They are as adorable as you imagine, with their fuzzy heads and small, high-pitched meeping sounds. Ducks have a reputation for being easily frightened and blindly fleeing as one when scared. No doubt these little folks, new to the world as they are, play to type every time they see one of us human giants coming at them with our front-facing predator eyes and hungry smiles. But eventually, even with us sitting right there in front of them, terror gives way to curiosity and the need for freedom and so they take that first step out of the cornered pack and toward us.
Truly, ducks are not cowards. On the contrary, they are immensely brave.
Ducks are hardwired to run at the first glint of danger. It’s instinct. It’s what keeps them alive. If you don’t imprint on them while they’re young (which is the cold way of saying, become a friend or family member), odds are, it will be like this every time. Every time they will run. When cornered, every time they will have to take those first steps out of terror if they are to move past you, move past their state of fear. And they will.
Unlike us, they will.
Fear of death is the fear of permanent discontinuity. Our greatest fear in life is not-life. Hence, when people have spiritually transcendent experiences they often say that the important thing is to be able to integrate what they learned into their normal lives. This sensible, rational response is fear speaking. In this context, the drive to “bravely” ingest hallucinogenic plant medicines, such as ayahuasca and peyote, is a drive to control death, to make a continuity of it. Not for those who were raised in the cultures where such plant medicines were discovered naturally and normalized long ago, mind you, but for foreigners seeking them for their own personal psycho-spiritual journeys. Our lust for security, for continuity, for impossibly keeping the self intact through its death and resurrection, is so great that we will temporarily dive into the deep end of mind-at-large to net ourselves a psycho-spiritual treasure and call that shiny golden form, enlightenment.
If we were ducks we would face ourselves as fear—face ourselves anew every moment. You may say that performing a hallucinogenic immersion is facing fear, but it isn’t facing the me as the root of fear. It’s an experience of the me facing fear as a feeling held apart from itself to conquer it and continue on in ignorance of itself as fear. Ducks, on the other hand, are fear. There’s no thought process of denial that soothes them, that says, “I’m not fear. I’m someone who is feeling fear right now, but will overcome it.”
Ducks are fear until they are not and that whole movement is the moment they live in. That is the moment we avoid so desperately, because to acknowledge our own simple predicate—we are fear—is to transform out of ourselves.
We may laugh at ducks or pity them for their reflexive response of running from us due to mistaken identity, yet we’re the ones living with mistaken identities. Perhaps ducks sense our confused state of being through our best intentions and it throws them off.
Perhaps their running is a reflection of what we project.