Fear

Every individual must realize responsibility for oneself and concomitantly the world as a whole. We must abandon all personal distractions and look within. 

Fear is an involuntary mechanism ingrained in us through evolution. Those beings that never experienced the fear response were not the beings who survived. The ones who exhibited this response were the ones who went on to propagate, thus leaving only beings who experienced it. Fear was absolutely necessary before we were conscious aware beings. Meaning before we developed the ability to think, contemplate, or question. This response still exists within us as the fight or flight system. When we encounter something that we deem to be threatening to our well being, almost immediately blood is transferred from the major organs and sent to the appendages giving us the ability to either flee the scene as fast as we can or engage in a physical battle. When we experience this response we typically act in one of these ways thus putting this massive transfer of energy to use. We channel it outward.

But in situations where neither of these responses are appropriate then the energy transfer is perceived differently and often painfully. In the same way we might hold back a sneeze, or laughter, or crying, it is felt as pressure or stress on the body, it is necessary to comply with these natural forces to feel the release or relief of the energy, it is also necessary to act when we feel the fear response. But we as a society have designed a scenario where these two potential responses from fear do not effectively dissolve the energy. For example, humans as a pack animal depend on others for survival so if we were to be outed from our pack or group it would trigger this fear response, leaving us to believe in the moment that our life was in danger. Only neither running nor fighting would serve as an appropriate response, so that transfer of energy would not be used, and we would feel it only as what many might describe as your heart “skipping a beat”. It would be a tension or stress on our internal organs which manifests as physical pain which typically results in mental or emotional pain. This also occurs when we depend on one other individual for happiness. When we are in a relationship we feel the safety and security of love from another, but when our significant other communicates to us that they no longer wish to continue the relationship or no longer feel love for us then we experience what most would call their heart breaking. This too, is the fear response not being carried out through appropriate means. There is the physical fear, the feeling we get in the pit of our stomachs and then there is the mental fear of believing that we are doomed upon learning that we no longer have something or someone we believe we need in order to survive or simply live a happy or peaceful life. 

When we feel sadness we cry and moan and release the energy and this catharsis serves us in that it makes us feel better when the energy is released. This release is also necessary when we feel fear but typically we internalize that fear energy when it isn’t actually a life or death scenario and it does damage to our body and our mental state.  

Animals in nature don’t experience fear in the same way we do. They only experience the fight or flight response and they always act on it releasing the energy. The shrew doesn’t run around all day fearing that the hawk will swoop down and eat it but when it sees the shape of the hawk in the sky it runs as fast as it can to get to shelter. But we as thinking beings can imagine the future, so we can contemplate what might happen to us making it possible to feel fear in every moment even when there is no real perceivable threat. Most of us live in this state all the time because from the time we are small children we are taught to fear many situations that aren’t actually life threatening. When we are young we often experience the feeling of love and admiration and this quickly becomes our preferred state of being, then we are told by society that this feeling is conditional and that we can only really receive it when we act and be in a certain way that pleases others.

Most people come to believe that the purest form of love comes from one other special being that is destined to be our match. So as we grow and we struggle to find this match, or if we do and then lose this match we immediately feel fear that we will not be happy unless we regain that bond. We are all conditioned to believe that this strong feeling of love and connection can only come from without and that we are incapable of experiencing it from within, from connecting to one’s self. But when we understand this to be false, and we know that that infinite feeling of love and connection is possible at all times regardless of how those in our lives feel about us then we no longer experience the fear and concomitantly the sadness that comes along with believing we are alone. 

We can become like the shrew with practice. We can suspend all conditioned beliefs and know that we are never alone, that we can always experience love in every moment. We can let go of the ideas that we need another to be happy, that we need money to survive, that we need acceptance in order to feel that we belong. We will still experience the fight or flight response in actual life threatening situations but we won’t allow it to trigger the mental fears that we are doomed which can be paralyzing rather than serving its natural purpose of encouraging us to act. When we live every day in a constant subtle fear that we may lose everything we cherish at any moment, our bodies are constantly experiencing the fight or flight response on an imperceptible level causing our stress hormones to always be flowing through our blood stream contributing to inflammation and damaging the body and mind in a multitude of other ways. This becomes so regular for us that we believe it to be our normal state, so we never really fully relax and enjoy the simple pleasure of being. We resort to distracting ourselves from this heightened state by constantly needing to be stimulated or numbed in some way.