Truth About Fear and Reason

Truth About Fear and Reason. Hey everyone, I hope you are all well. In today’s post, I will be sharing the truth about Fear and Reason. We all have a fear of something, and to be honest, the world right now is living in fear. However, I feel it is essential to try to see the light at the end of the tunnel and not let fear get to you. We still have dreams to achieve. We have all heard the seemingly discriminating remarks that fear is normal and abnormal and that normal fear should be regarded as a friend, while abnormal fear should be destroyed as an enemy.

The fact is that no so-called normal fear can be named, which has not been absent in some people who have had every cause. Suppose you will run over human history in your mind or look about yea in the present life. You will find here and there persons who, in situations or before, objects which ought, as any fearful soul will insist, to inspire the feeling of at least normal self-protecting fear, are nevertheless wholly without the feeling.

Truth About Fear and Reason

They possess every feeling and thought demanded except fear. The idea of self-preservation is as strongly present as with the most abjectly timid or terrified but fearful they do not know.

This fearless awareness of fear suggests conditions may be due to several causes.

It may result from constitutional make-up, long-continued training or habituation, religious ecstasy, a clear sense of unhurtable spiritual selfhood, or the action of very exalted reason.

Whatever the explanation, the fact remains the very causes which excite fear in most of us merely appeal, to such people, if at all, to the instinct of self-preservation and to reason, the thought element of the soul which makes for personal peace and wholeness.

Banish All fear

It is on such considerations that I have come to hold that all real fear-feeling should and may be banished from our lives and that what we call “normal fear” should be substituted in our language by “instinct” or by “reason,” the element of fear being dropped altogether.

The mental representations may be faint, but the idea of hurt to self is undoubtedly present if it can be profoundly believed that the authentic self cannot be hurt if the reason can be brought to consider vividly and believingly all quieting considerations.

The self can be held consciously in the assurance that the White Life surrounds the true self, is undoubtedly within that self and will suffer “no evil to come nigh.” At the same time, all the instincts of self-preservation may be perfectly active. Fear must be removed “as far as the east is from the west.”

These are the ways, then, in which any occasion for fear may be divided,

As a warning and as a maker of panic. But let us say that the warning should be understood as given to reason, that fear need not appear at all and that the panic is perfectly useless pain. With these discriminations in mind, we may conduct a preliminary study of fear.

APreliminary Study Of Fear

Fear is:

• an impulse
• a habit
• a disease

Fear, as it exists in man, is a make-believe of sanity, a creature of the imagination, a state of insanity.

Furthermore, fear is now of the nerves, now of the mind, now of the moral consciousness.

The division depends upon the point of view. Usually, normal fear should give place to reason, using the word to cover instinct and thought. From the correct point of view, all fear is evil so long as entertained.

Whatever its manifestations, wherever its prominent location, fear is a psychic state, of course, reacting upon the individual in several ways:

• the nerves
• mental moods
• in a single impulse
• in a chronic habit
• an unbalanced condition

The reaction always has a good intention, meaning, in each case, “Take care! Danger!” You will see that this is so if you look for a moment at three comprehensive kinds of fear fear of self, fear for self, and fear for others. Fear of self is indirectly fear of self-danger. And Fear for others signifies fore-sensed or fore-pictured distress to self because of anticipated misfortune to others.

Fear, then, is usually regarded as the soul’s danger signal. But the actual signal is an intuitive and thoughtful reason.

Even instinct and reason, acting as a warning, may perform their duty abnormally or assume abnormal proportions. And then we have the feeling of fear. The usual warning is induced by actual danger apprehended by the mind in a state of balance and self-control. The ordinary mind is always capable of such a warning. There are but two ways in which so-called normal fear, acting in the guise of reason, maybe annihilated: by the substitution of reason for fear and by the assurance of the white life.

Reason

Let it be understood, now, that normal fear is here meant legal reason, real fear being denied place and function altogether. Then we may say that such an act of reason benefits man. With pain and weariness, it is the philanthropy of the Nature of things within us.

One person said: “Tired? No such word in my house!” Now, this cannot be a good and healthy attitude. At a particular stage of the effort, weariness is a signal to stop work. When one becomes so absorbed in labour as to lose consciousness of weariness, he has issued a “hurry call” on death.

No more

I do not deny that the soul may cultivate a sublime sense of buoyancy and power; instead, do I urge you to seek that beautiful condition, but I hold that when a belief or a hallucination refuses to permit you to hear the warning of nerves and muscles, Nature will work disaster inevitably.

Let us stand for the more considerable liberty which is joyously free to take advantage of everything Nature may offer for true well-being. There is partial liberty which tries to realize itself by denying various realities as accurate; there is higher liberty which realizes itself by conceding such realities as honest and by using or disusing them as occasion may require in the interest of the self at its best.

I hold this to be true wisdom: to take advantage of everything which promises good to the self, without regard to this or that theory, and free to use all things, material or immaterial, reasonable or spiritual. I embrace your science or method but beg to ignore your bondage to philosophy or consistency. So I say that to normal health, the weary sense is a rational command to replenish exhausted nerves and muscles.

It Does Exist

It is not liberty or healthful to declare, “There is no pain!” Pain does exist; whatever you affirm, and your affirmation that it does not, is proof that it does exist. Why (and how) declare the non-existence of that which is non-existent? But if you say, “As a matter of fact, I have pain, but I am earnestly striving to ignore it and to cultivate thought-health so that the cause of the pain may be removed,”. That is sane and beautiful.

This is the commendable attitude of the Bible character who cried: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” To undertake to swamp pain with a cloud of psychological fog that is to turn anarchists against the excellent government of Nature.

By pain, Nature informs the individual that he is somewhere out of order. This warning is standard. The feeling becomes abnormal in the mind when imagination twangs the nerves with reiterated irritation, and Will, confused by the discord and the psychic chaos, cowers and shivers with fear.

I do not say there is no such thing as fear.

But it exists in your life by your permission only, not because it is needful as a warning against “evil.”

Fear is induced by unduly magnifying actual danger or conjuring up fictitious dangers through excessive and misdirected psychical reactions. This also may be taken as a signal of danger, but it is a falsely-intentioned witness. It is unnecessary and hostile to the individual because it threatens self-control and absorbs life’s forces. In useless and destructive work when they ought to be engaged in creating values.

I hope you enjoyed the post.

Talk soon.