What is Fear?

What is Fear?

Let us begin with the apple. Why? Because it gives us a starting point to consider what it means to call something a fact.

If I place an apple before you, its presence is undeniable. You may argue, you may laugh, you may say, “It is not an apple.” But your denial does not change its nature. If I move the apple from here to there, it remains what it is. If I destroy it, still we say: it was an apple, and the remains testify to that fact. Even if I erase it from memory, the awareness that it once was does not vanish from time. The apple is not subject to my opinion. The apple is a fact.

One of the reasons an apple is not fear is because we can do something about it. We can do something to the apple.

Now, what of fear? Does fear share this same quality of fact?

The apple we can see, touch, hold. Fear—can we not? I would say yes: we can see it, we can hold it, we can touch it. But the question is where? That question itself is fear. Where is it? Can we point to it? Can we say, “Here, this is where fear is”?

To be in fear is to say: I am in fear, and there is nothing I can do about it. I cannot see it, I cannot locate it, I cannot alter it—yet it is here. And I do not know where it is. To make something clear, not the reason to fear but fear itself. For when fear comes, it comes undeniably. Is fear in the future and so where is that? Can we do something about it or must it be avoided? If can see fear in the future as a fact then we know what to avoid. Avoided like an object lies in the fact that it is. From this we can see… What if our future events already exist but it is fear that keeps us from recognizing them… because where are they and what can we do about them? Can I do anything about them, to them and where are they? And that is fear. So it is fear that keeps them from us. It must be the same with the past. There is nothing I can do about them, to them and where are they? so our past is clouded in fear. Before this becomes clearly more metaphysical than it should, the more fear we have in our lives, of being in fear not being able to do anything about being in fear and not able to escape it and not being able to see ourselves in the future because of fear is exactly that.

What can you do? Suddenly the predator is upon you. Only this: to face it when it arrives. Yet even then, fear does not disappear.

Fear is not conquered by confrontation. Fear is only revealed as fact. So when confronting fear, what can be done? Every reaction to fear is fear. Thus you do not react. Your reaction to a fact does not change the fact. You can only escape it and sometimes the only escape to fear is stillness or rather nothingness.

Here’s an interesting trait of fear. Joy, happiness, even sadness and despair every emotion the entire spectrum is because of fear.

An another… Have you noticed that if you share fear somehow there is none. If there are two for example experiencing fear together one looks to the other and somehow knows what is needed to be done.

To say, “I will not be afraid,” does not dissolve it. To prepare for it, to expect it, does not abolish it. Another may even fear the very thing you deny, and in that moment their fear is as real, as factual, as the apple before them. Almost as if the apple itself were the source of fear, the reason to fear—but fear itself?

Here is the difference: I can do something to the apple, I can make a difference about or to the apple. But I cannot do something about fear and that is fear. Therefore I do not fear the apple. With fear it seems all I can do is escape it.

And what of the thing feared? If I can do something to it, something about it, then I do not fear it. But the fact of fear is that nothing has been done—only the poor object has been acted upon, as if it were the source of fear. Yet fear itself remains.

The problem deepens: if fear is fact, in what way is it so? So in a loose understanding what is so passes through because fear would seem to be within, but yet also a fact the first understanding of inclusion to be excluded, so fear is projection. For example that is ‘so’ you can be witnessed as your projection of self. Then to say ‘so’ is fear as a projection but to include or exclude fear does have anything to do with the fact of fear. As with the apple no matter where you move it it is still fear, a fact.

It is the future, the past, the present. One could say fear is that. Where is it? This future, this past, this present? These are facts correct? Like the apple in front of me? I have no fear of the apple, look what I can do to it. But the future, the past, even the present are too complicated to say that they are illusory facts which to me is a colorful way of describing fear. What can be done with it, to it? What if nothing can actually be done to, with or about it? For example what within the present moment would mean we are within fear, wouldn’t it. But it seems more inevitable to simply say: fear is.

You cannot banish it once and for all. You cannot determine its time or place.

Someone may say, “I caused this fear to arise here and now.” But that is not fear. That is creation. That is projection. And projecting fear is not conquering it. That too is fear.

What then remains?

If you cannot dissolve it, if you cannot predict it, what can you do? Only this: to face it when it arrives. Yet even then, fear does not disappear.

Fear is not conquered by confrontation. Fear is only revealed as fact. So when confronting fear, what can be done? Every reaction to fear is fear. Thus you do not react. Your reaction to a fact does not change the fact. You can only escape it and sometimes the only escape to fear is stillness or rather nothingness.

Here’s an interesting trait of fear. Joy, happiness, even sadness and despair every emotion the entire spectrum is because of fear.

An another… Have you noticed that if you share fear somehow there is none. If there are two for example experiencing fear together one looks to the other and somehow knows what is needed to be done.

When the mind opens itself to the object as me universe it see or becomes aware even if it’s blind to objects.

Objects are immovable until I prove it’s not by moving it breaking it improving it endlessly. But when I see this object as the mind I struggle in witnessing who… what… I am. Do you see the struggle?