ABOUT FEAR

A lot of people proclaim a lack of fear as their bedrock manly character. Truth is that those who talk about conquering fear do not understand the first word about fear. Very typically soldiers are trained to make a brave choice which is in the region of offering sacrifice of personal life in the face of adversity. Students are taught to avoid dishonesty as their way out of mistakes and to accept the loss of face as being a sign of fearlessness. In movies we can find the Hero literally executing impossible stunts to overcome the baddies to protect his lady love or his own or family honour without a care for his own bodily injury. The surgeon tells his patient to bravely face the knife so that some future pains can be avoided. There are innumerable such instances in daily life. The one common factor in such bravery asserting situations is the protection and perpetuation of or the avoidance of loss of, property, life, honour and physical wellness.

Well, bravery does mean standing up to face fear rather than the absence of fear. The most important question that cries out for an answer is whether it is possible to live without fear. For that one has to address the question as to what is fear. A few good thinkers articulated thus; J. Krishnamurti “We are all afraid of something; there is no fear in abstraction, it is always in relation to something……. One of the major causes of fear is that we do not want to face ourselves as we are.” Marianne Williamson “Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts.” H. P. Lovecraft. "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear."

Fear is a basic tenet of the mind. This is because the mind does not have a physical existence like the body nor does it have an enigmatic one like the soul. It exists out of a need for the body to function properly and it has no other real purpose or objective. The existence of the mind is thus ephemeral. However when it succeeds in creating an opaque purpose of its own through the cultivation of desires and the working of ego, the fear of its evaporation into thin air strongly persists.  The mind remains always aware of its non-real nature, and when is begins to enjoy an abnormal importance it is also aware of its falsehood. Fear is recognition of a probable cessation of existence and thus a natural trait of its anomalous subsistence.

For every life form, survival is its primary function or if one may use the word responsibility. Since every life form is a result of tremendous efforts by nature of mixing and matching various elements, therefore come what may, it is programmed to make efforts to protect its existence for which the mind and intellect have to work together with the body. The body could become internally ill and suffer dysfunction; it could be attacked by other organisms / life forms and become decapitated, it could become the victim of some minor or major natural disaster, or it could also suffer from birth related deformities and all of these threaten its basic existence. To this factor the mind adds the qualitative term ‘comfortable’ existence. The mind justifies its survival on an elaborate and strategic working towards possession of varied things and loss of any possession worries the mind. Whenever basic survival is threatened, fear instantaneously escalates. Every life form is therefore programmed to employ various methods starting from anger, resistance, flight, reason, to surrender just to ensure its survival.  Thus I consider that for a human being who lives a normal worldly life it is not possible to live without fear.

But does that mean that nobody can overcome fear. No it is not so. Those beings who are not excessively worried about continuity of present existence, who are not bothered about their having or not having any kind (material or intrinsic) of possessions and those who can subdue the noisy clutter of their mind and keep it continuously tied to its basis duty, only they can claim fearlessness and can really understand the meaning of fear. The only way to overcome fear is to face it, accept it and then rationalize with it.