When was the last time you felt moved to your core by an event, that you knew had changed you forever from that moment forward? It changed the way you felt about yourself and the world. It immediately evolved your quality of thinking and relating to every relationship around you.

It’s the commitment to transforming the outdated aspects of our being that brings these opportunities to us as readily as we are open to them.

Last year, I had a moment that latched onto every fibre of my being. It was a shocking experience where friends whom I cherished turned against a mystery school that I cherished. My brain could not reconcile the event, which turned me inwards, searching for the understanding. I learned in the most humbling way, that blindly following something will lead to blindly going against it. I began to research and reflect in my life, how I blindly believed and followed things.

What came from it was an emotional shift into being aware and compassionate of the fanatical swing that causes us to rush to certainty as we yearn for security. The certainty is found in pre-made conclusions that are framed into the polarised option of good/right or bad/ wrong. The greater the insecurity, the greater the need for certainty and the more extremely we are willing to hold any end of the polarity. For example, if someone hurt someone that we love, we are rarely concerned with the reasons, we are more likely to hate the person and seek to demonise them. That is, pull the trigger and ask questions later. This extremism helps explain how people can feel so righteous with opposing viewpoints and kill in the name of that righteousness.

Another amazing insight into the fanatical mindset, is its tendency to swing between loving something to hating it. How many times have you fallen for a partner, product, idea or way of doing something without fully engaging the details and understanding them/it, only to discover they/it is not what you expected at all. So you became disillusioned then go against it. Have you noticed that as quickly we can get excited about something we also lose interest. I have wasted so many resources getting excited about ideas and projects, that I would pour money and time into them only to realize they were not going to yield a return as expected.

I then reflected to what further extent I was fanatical and discovered two interesting insights. The first was that I was indeed fanatical and fanaticism exists in all contexts of our lives: health, wealth, relationships, belief systems and so on.  The second realisation was that you can be extreme or mild in any context, depending on your level of wisdom versus insecurity. The ultimate state of being to accomplish became even clearer – to get to a point in situations where you do not need to rush to a viewpoint, judge and act on impulse, unless its a physical survival situation. It’s very rare to be in these situations, yet we process, prejudice and force certainty constantly to make our environment predictable. Predictable is safe and hence we enslave ourselves by our fear.

Imagine the power of being in a situation where you can say, “I do not have a view on that at this point, let me get back to you, as I would like to sit with it.” This can frustrate, because many of us need to know what side another is taking, so we can categories accordingly. The saying is made popular by war mongers that “You are either for us or against us.”; in other words, you must live in our fanatical extreme world and choose our side, otherwise, we will assume you to be on the other, rendering you our enemy.

So I ask you, how are you fanatical? What conclusions do you rush to repeatedly, only to find out you were mistaken and had to apologise, eat humble pie or perhaps even took the hardest option and managed to remain in denial! Empowerment comes from knowing the principles at work within and around us. Fanaticism ensures that we remain ignorant and controlled by people’s views rather than the truth.

To loving and putting to rest the fanatic within us all, allowing us to awaken to the unity and abundance that exists for us to experience and share.