Fear is an inseparable part of human experience. The variety of fears that accompany our lives is enormous, the fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of death. Everyone is invited to complete his private list. Have you ever tried to reach the essence of this emotion? To his source? To his structure?
Is it really an integral part of our lives? Over the years, various spiritual teachers have pointed to fear as a potential gateway to the real reason, and have called on us to stop letting fear dominate our lives. Fearlessness, it turns out, is just another word for true freedom.
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Fear Ensures Survival And Survival Is The Game Of The Mind
The mind evolved as a tool for survival. It calculates the likelihood of survival in every action. It worked fine thousands of years ago, in Savannah. Where we had to reach the fruit on the tree before the lion devours us ...Now, this mind has grown into a monster. He can not stop figuring out whether the lions are going to eat us or not. And of course, there are no lions here. There are cars that go at intersections, bills to make, phones to answer them, planes crash, MTV, e-mail, fast food - an accelerated world where we do not distinguish between enemy and lover.
We can not know where the lions are. Our mind tries to calculate our survival under the enormous weight of information overload.
In the face of this overload, the mind projects danger everywhere. He lives in fear. He does not know what he's afraid of anymore. It does not matter. Fear ensures survival and survival is the game of the mind.
This definition can explain the source of fear, and where it came from, but all these words cannot contain even a fraction of the unpleasant physical and mental feeling - at best - which we call fear. No one enjoyed this feeling. Or is it? It is the fear that makes you believe that you are alive and that you will die. What we do not want is for fear to end. So we invented all the new mind, the new sciences, the new speech, the therapies, the awareness without freedom of choice and all kinds of other gimmicks.
We do not want to be free of fear. All we want is to play with fear games and talk about freeing ourselves from fear. And a second before we protest here's a slightly better definition, you love the fear. The end of fear is death, and you do not want it to happen. I'm not talking about wiping out the phobias on the body. These are necessary for survival. The death of fear is the only death.
Thought itself is the source of fear. Thought is time; thought of tomorrow is pleasure or pain; if it’s pleasurable, thought will pursue it, fearing its end; if it’s painful, the very avoidance of it is fear. Both pleasure and pain cause fear. Time as thought and time as feeling bring fear. It is the understanding of thought, the mechanism of memory and experience, that is the ending of fear. Thought is the whole process of consciousness, the open and the hidden; thought is not merely the thing thought upon but the origin of itself. Thought is not merely belief, dogma, idea and reason but the centre from which these arise. This centre is the origin of all fear.
In other words, there is the inherent fear for survival, and there are the fears of the mind, the fears that do not come from the immediate dangers we face, but from our thoughts and imaginations. And as we all know, it does not make these fears less tangible.
Why Do We Enjoy Seeing Horror Movies?
What do sane people find in horror movies, so I went to check it out with psychologists. The conclusion: We are a bunch of cowards who are afraid to talk about what really hurts them.
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What causes us time and time again to go to the cinema to scream with pleasure at crushed bodies? What brings Hollywood producers to cut fat coupons at the expense of our fears? For the scariest date on the calendar, is mankind naturally masochistic, or the only reason to go to a horror film is to make the girl next to you, jump on you in the scariest parts?
If you ask Freud, sexual urges and violence drive us all our lives. Horror movies only allow us to take them out of the barber and scream them in front of everyone. These films express our fears. They give us the opportunity to identify with the other, to speak and to live the fear without revealing that it is our inner fear.
Is it possible to characterize the type who likes to watch the genre?
They are usually people with violent tendencies, which are not always aware. The same person will enjoy watching such films because they express what is happening to him inside and he is afraid to talk about it.
A boy who kills cats for a hobby will want to intensify his inner impulses through films. It is also "a kind of sadism because he will enjoy it.
Adolescence
The great love for the genre occurs precisely in adolescence, mainly because it is a period full of fears. A adolescence whose whole being changes - the body, the hormones, the sexual identity - is frightening and confusing, one of the greatest fears of this age is fear of death.Adolescence, recognize that life has to end. This understanding puts intellectual thinking on the subject of death, but also fears and suicidal thoughts.
The biggest problem for some of the boys in this situation is to admit the whirlwind of fears raging within them. Then the defense mechanism came into play, or in this case a "reversal reaction". This mechanism drives a person to do exactly the opposite of what he feels inside: let's say, be afraid of death and pay money to see him with all his might in front of your face on the screen.
It's like children masquerading as scary characters, making their voices and trying to get into the role of the bad guy and being a bit like him, precisely because the children are afraid of the character they identify with. This powerful experience distinguishes the inner experience and leads to a certain catharsis. The moment you see the fear and experience it, you seem to be able to purify it.
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This mechanism is joined by another weapon of the mind: the mechanism of projection. When you feel fear, we sometimes prefer to throw away our fears at the victim of the plot rather than admit that we are afraid. So we can scream our fears out for someone else instead of for ourselves.
Reality As A Horror Film
It is not only our fears that are satisfying when watching horror movies, but also the voyeurism. Many of the films use photographic angles that do not tell the whole story, dark lighting that hides the murderer in the arena, film shot from the perspective of the victim and more. Everyone stimulate our imagination.In the past decade, horror films have become particularly horrifying, and various studies have claimed that sadistic pornography has also intensified in view of body parts displayed. Since the 1980s, our stimulus threshold, as a society, has changed. The camera and the Internet that come everywhere in real time have also made the horrors an integral part of our daily lives. Like Tsunami, earthquake, a mass attack, the reality is a film with an extremely high level of violence.
The current horror films also represent this trend. The more gruesome death is, the more beautiful it is and the more money it breaks. These are presented to the spectator's lust and allow him to unload in the cinema all the dark, violent and sexual impulses that he will never admit to himself in their very existence.
Why Are We So Scared Of Clowns?
On the thin line between funny and frightening are the clowns. I tried to understand how such a kind creature could scare us to death? The results are below
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With the rise of the new season of "American Horror Story: Freak Show" and the decision of the Clown Association to condemn the murderous clown starring there, we wondered where this fear stems from clowns? It turns out that so far there have been a few studies on fear of clowns (or as many call it "Coulrophobia") but the answer is clear.
The clowns have a certain aspect of horror because they resemble ordinary humans, only they do not. In order for something to frighten you, it must have a certain degree of 'normalcy' and some degree of 'weirdness'. All of us have a brain area whose function is to identify faces. Anything that perverts and deviates from the classic face puts us in a position of pressure and is interpreted as a danger. To make something cute and scary, you do not have to invent a monster. It's enough to make a distortion in something ordinary. That's how clowns are. There is a distortion in them that can quickly make them adorable to stressors. Unnatural smiles, for example, are horrifying. You communicate to the brain that a smile is a good thing, but when someone smiles all the time nonstop, it gets strange. The brain does not accept it and interprets it as something frightening.
Clown, by definition, should make you laugh, but there is always a fear that it is not. We all have in the back of our minds the fear that we can not do something we are meant to do. This fear is related to our fear of clowns.
In the Middle Ages, when clowns did not make the king laugh, they paid for it dearly. They were operated inside to make them smile all the time. They cut the muscles that made them frown.
A new study, published recently in The Conversation, attempted to deepen the phenomenon of fear of clowns and reached interesting findings. The study, which included more than 1,300 adult participants, found that we tend to perceive men as more frightening than women, tend to perceive the unexpected as frightening and threatening, and perceive abnormal forms of nonverbal communication as particularly threatening.
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The study found that these are not necessarily unique features per se, like a smile or a strange eye look, which frightens us. However, these exceptional traits may increase our tendency to perceive a person as frightening. Clowns are mostly men, who are often made up or wearing a mask that smiles an unconventional smile, and their behavior is of course unpredictable. Therefore, these findings are not surprising because we tend to catch clowns as threatening. In addition to this finding, one of the stages of the study asked subjects to rate how diverse subjects they feared, and found that clowns were first on the list.
The researchers concluded that people tend to panic and experience fear as a result of ambiguity about a threat, that is, when it is not clear whether or not the stimulus is threatening. When we are unsure about the nature of a particular stimulus, we are more likely to be alarmed. One of the theoretic proposals on the subject is that by their very nature, thieves hide their true identity behind the costume, makeup and masks, and all of these may create an immediate sense of ambiguity in front of them. The very fact that we do not see the person behind the grandiose costume raises concerns about his nature and what we should expect from him. This proposal is consistent with the findings of the study, which also held that the sense of ambiguity about the clowns' identity is what makes them unpredictable and, consequently, frightening.
The findings of this study join other professional literature that speaks of clowns as an extreme deviation from the familiar, leading to a sense of danger. It may be the smile that does not come off their faces, the color combination of their clothes and hair or any other unusual item, which can cause the clown to miss its goal of making it laugh and achieve the opposite result - fear and terror.The findings of this study join other professional literature that speaks of clowns as an extreme deviation from the familiar, leading to a sense of danger. It may be the smile that does not come off their faces, the color combination of their clothes and hair or any other unusual item, which can cause the clown to miss its goal of making it laugh and achieve the opposite result - fear and terror.
How To Get Rid Of Fear?
So if fear is not necessary, if life is much better without it, and if it is really possible to get rid of it, how do we do it? The answer, as always, lies in us and in the way we look at the world.How do we bring the fear to an end?
If you ask the question very seriously, with the full intention of finding the way to end the fear, but with the intention to find the nature and structure of fear, once you find it, the fear itself will come to an end. You do not have to do anything about it. Only if we understand the structure of fear and its nature, this understanding will liberate us.
We can feel the result of fear: attachment, attachment, repetition, references. All these are created in response to the vitality of this moment. What we call fear is the translation of that energetic movement.
It is translated by the mind as annihilation. But if this interpretation is abandoned, fear will only remain as energy. The same energy that flows through life, without dualism.
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When you understand that there is nothing you can do to change the state of fear and that experience only intensifies it, you finally agree to stop everything, stop the search, the escape yourself, the abandonment of yourself, the sweet little boy who fears within you. You agree to be together with you in the great fear and not move anywhere.
And then something new happens ... You are no longer just fear, but you are also agreeing to be fear. In addition, the element of the agreement, rest, surrender, surrender to yourself. Fear is the quality of the sweet child within you, the agreement to be fear is the quality of the loving parent within you.
When you "agree" to be the fear, you are actually creating a fusion and reunion between the child and the parent, and when the frightened child gets a loving parent who agrees to be with him unconditionally just as he is then something happens to be afraid .. because he is no longer alone... Precisely from the fact that we completely agreed to remain in it forever without trying to change anything.
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Thanks @nirgf for this great post, quite a good examination of the word 'fear'. As an author I have come to define Fear as your Faith in chains, your Will paralyzed and your Courage confined to a wheel chair.
It is indeed a stranger that needs to be constantly engaged with and defeated.
Thanks for your post once again, truly appreciate it.
Such warm words from you, I really appreciate it,
Thank you very much @delphia16
Really cool post, I have a fear of hurting myself and then injuring myself so that I own't be able to provide for my family (both temporary and permanently), this is something I really have to learn to overcome when I go cross-country skiing, otherwise I do this with a break on.
That's the weirdest thing, is not it?
You can not avoid injuring yourself, it is not in your control
Which makes it even worse as you keep having that fear in your head that stops you from giving 100%
Very good postings, think of fun things, and throw away fear yourself.
Don't Be Afraid of Fear
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