Your power ends where your fear begins...

How we think and behave is determined by the polar opposite emotions of the human sensory experience: love and fear. Everything we think and do - every action and reaction - arises from an initial thought or feeling anchored in love or fear (i.e. acceptance is a feeling that emerges from a state of love, war is a reaction born of fear.) Each choice from love is a step closer to a more fearless, compassionate and enlightened way of being, while fear leads only to a depressive, isolated and chaotic existence.

Love-based / Fear-based
Generous / Selfish
Selfless / Self-absorbed
Allowing / Controlling
Truth / Denial
Calm / Anxious
Confident / Arrogant
Ecstasy / Rage
Create / Destroy 
Freedom / Oppression
Spiritual / Materialistic
Tolerant / Prejudiced
Open / Secretive
Giving / Taking
Constructive / Destructive
Loving (doing as opposed to being) / hating
Forgiving / Resenting
Peace / War
Unite / Divide
Acceptance / Denial
Knowledge / Ignorance
etc. / etc.

The balance of love and fear in the human psyche varies from person to person, depending on how we have each chosen to interpret and react to our life experiences and conditioning. Few come close to constantly exercising either polarity. People like Gandhi and Mother Teresa, who gave selflessly their entire lives, demonstrated that a constant state of unconditional love can be achieved, while serial killers and psychopathic dictators like Adolf Hitler represent the epitome of unrelenting, fear-based evil.

Science is now acknowledging and researching the seven prime metaphysical energy centres that span the length of the human body - chakras - each aligned to aspects of emotional growth. The fourth - "heart" - chakra, green in colour, is located in the mid-chest region, and is the conduit through which mystics have for generations claimed that universal love (or spiritual - positive - energy) is channeled when open, flooding the senses with a profound sense of peace, interconnectedness and wellbeing, and a passion for living that makes life flow smoothly and effortlessly. All seven prime chakras need to be open for full energy and vitality, but meth closes all chakras from the heart up, leaving only the base chakras - associated with sex and survival but devoid of love - functioning.

When the heart centre closes the flow of energy, or connection, is restricted, the uplifting feeling fades, and stress, lethargy and a sense of disconnection set in as fear fills the void. Life feels empty and meaningless,
seeming to require much more effort for less return. In turn, our behaviour becomes fear-based as we try to "recharge" from external sources by controlling, dominating and manipulating others, effectively stealing their energy in order to raise our own. Power acquired this way, through force, is negative energy.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.�?
~ John Lennon
 
The minority of people who crave external power, estimated to be around 5% of the human population, often manipulate themselves into roles in which they have control over others, be it at school, home, work or play, and are interested only in taking selfishly as opposed to giving selflessly. Those driven by an extreme thirst for power may pursue top-level careers in government, religion, education, law, the military, police, major corporations - anywhere they can legitimately wield power through force over many lives. Corruption occurs when those in positions of trust abuse their power.

Psychological research shows that those who manoeuver themselves into positions where they can abuse power on a large scale frequently share the same psychopathic traits as serial killers, being callous, manipulative, arrogant, impatient, impulsive, unreliable, superficially charming and prone to flying into rages. They also tend to break promises, take credit for the work of others and blame everyone else when things go wrong. The key characteristics of all psychopaths is a total lack of conscience and little or no trace of empathy with their fellow man; such as world leaders who lie and deceive to take their countries to war, killing thousands of people in the process.

"The healthy man does not torture others. Generally, it is the tortured who turn into torturers."
~ Carl Jung [Swiss phychiatrist]

As the most maligned and powerless minority in most societies, gay men are accustomed to living with fear.

In the 1980s, AIDS indiscriminately infected thousands of unwitting gay men, shrouding our world in darkness and seriously impeding the progress of gay rights. We strove to overcome the stigma of AIDS and the barriers it created between us and mainstream society and, for the most part, succeeded as the widescale adoption of safer sexual practices and declining rates of new HIV infections into the 1990s testified.

Then around 1997/8, as drug cocktails proved effective at delaying the onset of full-blown AIDS, prematurely signalling an end to the epidemic as gay men began to dispense with precautions, a new virus arrived to knock us back down. This time around, knowledge of the dire consequences of crystal abuse - a biological weapon of mass disempowerment that ravaged Los Angeles' gay community throughout the 1980 and 1990s - did not prevent thousands across North America from voluntarily succumbing to it. Consequently, meth has contributed to the largest upsurge in HIV transmissions since the AIDS epidemic began.

Meth is succeeding where AIDS ultimately failed: the virtual psychological paralysis, through fear, of a generation of gay men.

Crystal meth seduces the user with an overload of the energising feel good chemical, dopamine, into the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, inducing an intensely euphoric wave of positive energy that liberates him from his fears - including the spectre of AIDS - and opening him up to a level of intimacy with others that he never imagined possible. Crystal appears to be his salvation, convincing him that he is in control, then proceeds to decimate his internal power supply, clamps shut his heart centre and leaves a vacuum that can only be filled with an equivalent overload of what positive energy is not - negative energy (fear) - and a mind infinitely more tortured and disempowered than the one he sought to escape in the first place.

"Tina is politics and religion reduced to chemical form: it promises a glossy, simplistic ideal of peace and beauty while delivering devastation. That doesn’t stop its adherents from worshipping at Tina’s feet, trading in
every vestige of material wealth to purchase the glow of her deceitful benevolence, and then - when every penny is gone - delivering up dignity, health, and life itself."
~ Kelian Melloy [Edge Boston]

Why are so many gay men willing participants in Tina's web of fear and disempowerment? For the answer, we need firstly to accept that crystal abuse is merely a symptom of a deeper, underlying psychological problem endemic among gay men. Like guns, it isn't meth itself that lies at the heart of the problem, but the state of mind of those who abuse it. Only when we can clearly see how we have allowed fear to play such a prominent and debilitating role in our lives can we begin the process of healing, empowering, transforming and enriching the way we choose to live...