Frowning at Fear

Is there any person on earth, who is not afraid of any thing under the sky? If ever there is one, then I would be tempted to take my hats off to him/her, whoever that be! It is not that I don't believe there can be a person who is completely fearless. We may come across one in a thousand, who can frighten even the worst of all enemies, the death! But I realize that there is nothing more dangerous and more crippling to life than fear, and if we think seriously about what we are afraid of, we may be surprised to know that most often we do not know what we are afraid of. Because once we know what we are afraid of, then the fear takes leave of us immediately.

Often we are frightened of phantoms of our imagination, which have no correspondence to reality outside. In other words, what we are afraid of, are the creation of our imagination! Some may say that the fears have their origin in hallucinations and hallucinogens and phantasmagoria! The words may sound too big, but what they say is this: we create our own phantoms, which threaten to kill us at a time when we are weak and vulnerable. One of the ways how to over come fear is by confronting the phantoms squarely. Ask yourself, what am I afraid of! No vague answers, but direct concrete answers. If this exercise is repeated three times, then the fear may not be there at all.

But we need to face a more vital question: how and why do I create phantoms of my imagination? The answer is rather simple: we cannot face raw reality, because it is too frightening, and life-threatening. We would like to face sugar-coated reality, something that is mild and gentle. So our mind creates phantoms according to our liking, and these phantoms cannot kill us, because they survive on our fear; but they can lead us to situations where we feel helpless and need to fall back on to them. One way of tackling them is, by realizing that they are as frightened of us as we are frightened of them.

Fear of known things and persons are more within the purview of our control, while fear of unknown is something that is more dangerous. The fear of the unknown can strike at a time when the person least expects, and the the consequences could be quite costly. It will be beneficient to think that most of the fear, which are based on unknown persons and things and events, will lead us to some known fear, because we human beings cannot think in a vacuum.

One way how to treat people with fear of any sort is to look at their fears from rational point of view. The very fact that most of the fears are based on irrational, imaginary concoctions, they are easy to tackle. Take for instance, if a person is afraid of ghosts, start analysing this fear: has the person every seen one? when, where and how? has anyone else seen it? These are questions which can make the person realise that the fear was simply the creation of his/her mind. But there is a fear which is not easy to tackle, and it may take quite a while to really overcome: fear of oneself, of one's conscience, of consciousness! But that is an altogether different story!