Teachings,+Fear

=Fear (As I have have explored it)= (By Darth Affliction) (Return to Teachings)

What is fear really? Men go into battles where they know their heads will most likely get blown off with some fear, but not real fear. Perhaps this is because they know their enemy, and at least during the battle the enemy is not themselves.

But what makes a man who will charge into gunfire afraid to step into darkness that is likely empty? What terrifies us so much of the corner we have not turned? Why do we fear more than huge monstrous evils, the evils that are shaped mostly like us and unseen? We are terrified of ourselves. A little taste of the unknown sharpens the fear. When we look into the dark we are seeing what is inside of ourselves and we so often see fear.

The what fear could be so great that we suppress it at all times? So much that only at night when our senses are baffled and our greatest sense is of ourselves and our thoughts they come out in the most horrible forms? You would think that it would be ourselves we know the most about of all things! But we must not because the fear there is intense and with only a little help from the dark, a sound, a shifting shadow, we imagine all of these pictures to show that our fear inside runs rampant despite our illusions of security carefully crafted of bullshit.

What is so terrifying in there? Are we really so scary that we scare ourselves? Is there something darker inside? People can survive rape and deal with tortured murder but what can’t their mind bear the thought of when it can cope with these? Danger can be discarded, challenge and pain can be dealt with. WHAT are we terrified of that can live inside of us? Potential? Nothingness? Failure?

I cannot think of a failure that scares me more than the fear that flares up when I go out into the dark sometimes. I force myself out there to learn but there is nothing so sharp as that fear. Facing it is empowering but understanding it is what I want.

They say Fear is the opposite of Faith. What are the differences? Faith is belief in something you can’t see out there. But so is fear so that’s not a good one. Maybe it’s what you see that differentiates between Fear and Faith. One tends to cause hope, the other causes… Well fear. What is fear anyway? The feeling that tells us something horrible is out there even though we cannot imagine what could be so horrible.

I think faceless horror is more scary. I can cope with and face some pretty ugly truths including just about any fantastic monster or science fiction freak. Eventually the fear wears off. We can become acclimated to the shock and it turns from what we are afraid of to something we cope with like anything else.

Maybe fear is the crazy lilt of the imagination. How we cope with what is actually already inside. Maybe it’s the pictures our visual mind plays to help it extricate and deal with the fear of new things that it is dealing with in the subconscious mind. The kind of fear inspired by being chased by a killer is not what I am talking about. I am interested in the fear that you get when you see a dark night with no lights out.

Not the surprise of someone walking in on you when you thought you were alone, but the feelings you get when you really are all alone.

I must conclude that fear is empty of substance but I cannot conclude that it is empty of meaning. Suppressing it does not banish it, and the level of suppression that it takes to completely become numb to fear is on par with serious mental trauma suppressions and that is not very healthy for anyone who experiences it. For those people healing takes place whenever they are able to take out and talk about those emotions. Those memories and feelings.

This fear coming from nothing must have a source that can be located. This fear must somehow have a way of being disarmed. A natural method long forgotten or at least no longer obvious. These days people suppress the emotions they don’t like and wonder why they have trouble feeling the good ones after all that suppression. When the life style become so unhealthy that it gets obvious they pay someone to do some therapeutic talk. It might work like a placebo and for a time they will be convinced that the therapy helps, but how many shrinks would have a job if their medicine cured people for more than just a little while?

So talking about our feelings is out. It can provide temporary relief, but what do we really know about our own emotions anyway? If our self-understanding was perfect we would never by surprised by anything inside or out. There is a margin of undisclosed space in us all that seems to provide strange and new aspects of ourselves to try on. Odd impulses and feelings that you didn’t used to have.

This must be the evolution center or the ‘mask maker’ of our emotional and mental identity. A portion of the identity that tries on new things and helps us to evolve. As it makes us new masks to try on in the hopes of finding the one that will fit for this situation perhaps we are growing but this also provides perpetual offset for us. Even from ourselves we have no idea exactly what to expect.

So we are back to dealing with our basic components of who we are. Emotion, actual personality, and our understandings of these. One of these patients is what is causing our mind’s image projector to spew out your internal terrors. One of them is what is causing the fear of the dark. Newness isn’t new after all.

Why is faith healthy? I think I understand now and not for the reasons you would hear from another person. Eat this PHD candidates!

Faith allows us to be honest with ourselves about ourselves. That’s it. See when you have fear you don’t understand why. No matter how much you look inside you aren’t going to see what is writhing beneath the surface and your imagination certainly won’t help you focus when you are terrified. Courage is to suppress the fear that is currently present, or to accept consequences of pain so great that the will to do so is hard to gather. It is a suppression emotion or a will play.

But… Faith is simple. You see trouble out there and you accept that you don’t know how to handle it. You are honest to yourself about the state of your emotions and even about your fear but you choose to believe that everything will work out in the end.

Its not that your being positive that does it. Faith makes you honest because it accepts the current state of things (No matter how dismal) and does not rely upon an insecure compulsion to MAKE you not afraid. Once the emotions and real facts (as far as you know them, and as far as you don’t know them) are out in the open THEN the positive clarity of hope can relieve them and heal you.

So my conclusion is that fear is the natural let-off of suppressed emotions and personal insecurity and dishonesty showing. Because people are always changing (or at least always being pushed to do so by their environment) some emotional anxiety is to be expected. When this pressure is suppressed by your insecurities it builds up until your imagination has to communicate danger signals through fear. We misinterpreted those signals to mean we are not strong enough inside and suppress even more.

This is why shrinks have a Job. Emotional dishonesty and personal insecurity. If you can cure these things you will be able to cut fear out and close your tab at the shrink’s office.

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