Most of my life, I've had what I've come to call "that wrong-planet feeling." It may or may not be for similar reasons to the alienation you feel, but it's still alienation. so I really empathize with what you say.

The thing about fear is, it seems to me that it takes at least two--someone who fears, and someone(s) or something(s) that is/are the target(s) of the fear. The person or thing that seems to "arouse" fear only does so because the person who fears has learned to fear the person or thing in question, or because the target of the fear belongs to some perceived group of "people and/or things to fear." Our brains are really good at categorizing and grouping, and that's not even necessarily a bad thing. The problem comes when people forget they're doing that and see only categories, not individuals. So, the bottom line here is, I'm not sure that you necessarily "arouse" fear, so much as that you're running into people's inability to deal with the fact that you're an entire person rather than just one aspect which they happen to have learned to fear. Just to simplify a bit...I'm basically talking about prejudice and ignorance, those old monsters that have been putting humans through hell for millenia.

I remember very clearly how I learned to swim. See, when I was a little kid, I had this swimming teacher who used to toss me in the water and yell "Kick! Kick!," while I flailed around, terrified. I'm pretty sure he actually meant well, but at five years old there was no way for me to know that at the time. Oh god, I used to _hate_ swimming lessons. I had nightmares often about being at the bottom of a topless swimming pool--and no, I don't mean there were girls
running around bare-chested, I mean the swimming pool of my nightmares had a bottom (to which I would invariably stick, with an infinite amount of water pressing me down from above) but no top, no surface. (Wow, talk about "fluidity and fear"...In my dreams, I was drowning in water, which is probably our most familiar fluid! Sorry, I can't resist a cheesy joke...) Anyway, that was when I was in kindergarten. When I was in elementary school, I ended up in a school that actually had a swimming pool, so sometimes in gym class we'd go swimming. By that time I'd gotten so I could do OK in the shallow end of the pool, but the mere thought of swimming in water that reached over my head would induce panic. One day, I was just kind of hanging in the shallow end and I saw my friends over at the other end of the pool, jumping in, laughing, just having a damn good time, and something just hit me like a flash. Suddenly I was just plain tired of being afraid--not frustration exactly, like a struggle to "banish" it, but just this feeling of "I'm tired of always having to feel afraid!" Almost before I knew what I was doing, I took off toward the deep end of the pool. Of course, my panic about deep water was notorious by then, so most of the kids and adults there nderstandably thought I didn't know I was doing that and there were lots of shouts of "Hey! Andy! That's the deep end...," and I said very calmly "I know. I know it is. I don't care. I don't wanna be afraid anymore," and when I realized I actually _wasn't_ afraid anymore I started laughing. See, when I tried to struggle and dance with the fear to get it to let me try it slowly, etc., it never worked. At some point, I had to just decide "Screw this, I'm trying something different now," and I'm not sure that all the coaxing, coaching, and "working through it" in the world would have gotten me there. At some point I just had to...be there. Everyone was so shocked--including me--but they misunderstood. It wasn't even "confidence" that got me over my fear, not really. It was purely a desire to shake off the infinite weight of all that fear holding me down, so I could just...live...and yes, that moment was totally ecstatic.

I'm not sure that one _can_ "force" oneself to go to that place. It's like "trying hard to relax," or "not thinking about a blue elephant." The more you struggle to get there, the further away you are from it, because by definition it's the place where the struggle stops. Even trying to stop struggling won't do it. Maybe sometimes we're in a space where we feel we need the _struggle_ to get there even more than we need to get there, and perhaps there are valuable things to learn in that space as well. I think when you decide you want to be there, you'll probably find you were there all along. Several times throughout my life I've had those moments, when "dealing with fear"...like the only way for me to "deal" with it is actually to stop trying to "deal" with it and just...be. It's slippery though, because--at least for me--it just kind of has to happen...BAM!...and it can be really disorienting until I realize what happened and just roll with it.

A lot of things get called New Age, and some of those things make sense to me while others seem like a lot of slogans and what I call "self-help-speak." The thing that really baffles me about a lot of it is, yes, some of it probably really is an honest attempt to feel one's connection with the Universe, etc., but it seems a lot of it is based on compartmentalizing oneself into "sides" (light/dark, spirit/body, sacred/profane, etc.) and then having the "sides" struggle for "balance" or "unity" of some kind. I've wondered for a long time what would happen if we quit even compartmentalizing ourselves to begin with. My two-year-old niece has no clue about light versus dark, spirit versus body, etc...Hell, she's not even clear yet about the difference between "yes" and "no"...and she's one of the happiest kids I've ever seen. She hasn't learned to get in her own way and trip herself over yet, as us silly adults have.

Neither heaven nor hell are exclusive. Both will take anyone who happens to be there to create them. It's just up to us to decide what we're going to create. Did you ever hear the Greek myth about Pan, the goat god? Pan was in a flute-playing contest with Apollo and he lost, so he was banished to live in a mountain cave. The thing is, it always seemed to me that Pan got the better end of the deal, in a way. Oh sure, Apollo got to "win" and show everyone what a kick-ass god of music he was, but then he always had that image to maintain. Pan, on the other hand, got to give up the struggling and general soap-opera-esque BS the other gods kept getting caught up in. He got to chill in his cave, and make friends with a bunch of nymphs, and live his life playfully and joyfully. Some say that he'd play his Pan-pipes when people walked by to scare them away--That's in fact where the word "panic" comes from--but I've always wondered about that. I bet he was actually trying to invite them to join his party, and those who still needed to struggle and worry simply couldn't relate so they freaked out. At least that's how I choose to interpret the story.

Anyway, I hope at least some of this makes sense.

Peace,
--Andy