Fear (...in Blackest Night...)

The parenthetical of this post comes from an oath written in 1943 by (probably) Alfred Bester:

In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight,
Let those who worship evil’s might,
Beware my power, Green Lantern’s light.

“Blackest Night” was later used as the title for a DC comic book series. The series focuses on the Green Lantern Corps, a group of…um, sentient things, each of whom wears a ring which grants him or her power, provided that particular "Green Lantern"  has the will to use it. Anyway, the point I’m trudging toward is that the Green Lantern Corps' primary and absolute weakness is shared with the LSAT student: Fear…and the color yellow. We won’t deal with yellow here.

To the LSAT student, Fear is that image or voice that lives in the brain as a perpetual reminder of potential futures. Each LSAT question is the difference between Tier 1 and Tier 3. Each raw point is the difference between a $75,000 scholarship and not being accepted at all. Each moment spent studying is one step closer to attaining the education, job, and life you want. Each moment spent in anything other than study, such as sleep, is a moment spent in a fruitless panic of impending doom. Fear is that wholly natural, utterly reliable progeny of the human mind.

The guarantee for the Tier 1, full-ride, BMW, two-house life—the student believes—is success on the LSAT. And its success can essentially be boiled down to the practice of mastering the skills it tests: formal logic, reading closely, argument analysis and the like. The student masters these skills so that s/he can solve problems accurately and quickly. And anybody who has studied the LSAT for more than 3 months should realize that anybody who can read English can master the LSAT. The hangup the average student has is Fear. The only thing that separates the top 10%  (and 1%) from the rest is really how the student manages Fear. To break into the super-numbers, the student must either ignore, conquer, use, or embrace Fear.

Enter the Green Lantern Corps!

Or Zen. Let’s use Zen.

In Zen, we sit with our bodies and our breath and our stories and our narratives about things that haven’t happened, but might happen…and we sit with our thoughts. And we sit with our thoughts about thoughts. And our thoughts about thoughts about thoughts. And so on. And we do our best to stave off insanity as we sit, unmoving, with the tornado of mental activity raging between our ears and tormenting our universe. And we sit like this, patiently (at least in appearance), because that’s what the mind does; there really is no stopping it. In Zen, however, we realize that though the mind will do its thinking, and its thinking about thinking, we don’t need to worry about all the stuff that’s going on in the mind’s race.

In Zen, we spend our moments counting our breaths and following inhalations and exhalations. When we do this, Fear dissipates. If you examine Fear, you see that it’s your mind’s narrative about events that have not yet come to pass: definite, probable, possible and everything among. Fear is a way of living beyond the present moment. This will usually make a person unhappy.

But more importantly, it seriously detracts from a 99% LSAT score. So what does the student do? Well, s/he sure as hell doesn’t sit around counting his/her damn breaths. That would be an enormous waste of study time. The best thing to do, I think, is to give your mind’s tendency toward false and useless prediction a loving pat on the head while gentle telling it, “not now, sweety.”

If gentle isn’t your style, I know plenty of successful LSAT students who show Fear their middle finger while shouting, “cram it with razors, ugly!” Funnily enough, this is the usual way of the Green Lantern Corps.