When was the last time you felt fear?

According to Gregg Braden, there are only two Emotions, Love and Fear, as you may have guessed.
All other Emotions are triggered from these two Basics. So.. to say, you don't feel Fear is foolish.

I life with fear all the time. Walking up to a ledge where i can see down at least 10 feet, scare the living hell out of me. Its not just a small thing, i literally cant move my legs. Even watching a movie of playing a video game where the character comes to a ledge and looks over it, i get the same feeling although less intense. This is something that i have always wanted to overcome, but have never taken the time to learn about or research what makes me feel so fearful. I ran accross this cool article about a young girl who damaged her amygdala, and lived her life without any fear of anything. I wonder what type of things she is going to be able to accomplish in her life with out fear around.

reply to post by SystemResistor


WHEN I SAW A PHOTO RECENTLY OF HELEN THOMAS

The last time i felt true fear was when I was so mad at some one i started hitting him, (in class, in front of the teacher (i sit first line, he sat second)) and i was afraid i couldn't stop.

Originally posted by sublimeXS
According to Gregg Braden, there are only two Emotions, Love and Fear, as you may have guessed.
All other Emotions are triggered from these two Basics. So.. to say, you don't feel Fear is foolish.

Braden might be close, but a bit too basic. It can be argued that response is born from the the Nervous System and emotion is attached to that response, but the emotion is defined by the individual. Remember your 4 (F)s:
*Fight
*Flight
*Fright
*Fornicate

Youre experience of the world is what some would call "an analysis of particulars" ie; you look at the world, you see its full of good and evil, so you imagine the universe must be inherently this way, as opposed to human beings making it this way.

Truth is, we are beyond such limitations. Life can be all good, all joy and positivity if you only allowed it, and WANTED it. But, the evil, and demonic and diabolical... the pagan impulse seems to control the world as it currently is.

I know what youre talking about with regards to Fear. I know fear. I know the fear induced by delusion, and anxiety and sheer terror. Ive experienced it.

It isnt like day and night though. I havent expected myself to be experiencing this in an alternating motion. That is a gnostic attitde, which i completely reject. Thus, ive experienced it, but its been years since its last happened. Ive simply outgrown it.

Fear is an essential part of human survival. Fear served our ancestors well in the dangerous wilderness. Though currently its usefulness is less apparent in our modern, comfort laden, concrete jungles. Now fear is treated like a disease, and we're partially right. Rampant, unbridled fear can paralyze a person emotionally, mentally, and physically. I think that type of debilitating, dark and abject fear manifests itself, for me at least, when I am overwhelmed by a feeling of powerlessness. Lately, that powerless has been associated with the fear and uncertainty of my immediate financial future.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Fear and despair grow when you feel that you are impotent, when you think that you won't overcome your struggles.

reply to post by SystemResistor


The last time I felt real fear was the day my daughter was born four years ago. My wife was hemoraging bad after delivery to the point where her blood pressure drop enough for her to lose consciousness. I am happy to say in the end she was fine. It was a rather intense feeling because one second was the most joyful I had ever felt when i got to hold my little girl and then instant fear when i saw what was happening to my wife. Just talking about now still turns my stomach into knots.

last aug when i found out that my mother had numerous brain tumors that was speading fast and the whole month of sep 2010 when she was sick then on the day she died ..

before that the day i found out my kids were stolen by the system..

the last time i felt that kind of fear was when a ufo flew in front of my window at 5:30 in the morning, i was so terrified i couldnt fall back asleep, i was terrified at what would happen next, i was even a bit nervous the next night

I'm terrified of the water. Not our daily use water, but giant flooding coming in that sweeps away buildings, like what happened in Japan. Some weeks before that disaster, I had dreams of waters carrying away high rise apartment and office buildings. I keep feeling afraid, even though I live (somewhere in the US MidWest) (albeit over the New Madrid fault) that I am going to have to one day face times like New Orleans Hurricane Katrina waters. It's pervasive, atleast one point every day, it bugs my consciousness. But I keep living my life every day like nothing to that level will happen to me, because I DON'T WANT that fear to be real.

reply to post by simone50m


I think what you need to do is recognize that your fear is very real, but what you fear is at worst improbable and more likely impossible (within your lifetime at least). Once you can accept that a fear is irrational, the power that that fear has over you begins to decay. I'm no psychologist, but I play one on the internet.

Last time I felt fear was about 5 years ago.
I own a private investigation and security company and I was doing a domestic case for a woman that wanted me to find out if her husband was cheating on her.
The lady was going out of town for business so I started following her husband. It was around 9 p.m. on a Friday night and I was watching there house, her husband left there house and traveled to a bar where he met up with another woman. I went in and took some pictures and decided to go sit outside and wait for them to exit. I was out there for about 15 mins when someone starts banging on my passenger window. At first I thought it was security going to ask me what I was doing then as soon as I got out, I realized it was her husband and he had a gun pointed right at me.
He asked me what I was doing following him and I said I'm not I'm waiting for someone to meet me here at the bar. He then started telling me how he saw me at his house and following him here to the bar.
By now my heart is pounding so hard it feels like its going to burst, and that's when he fires 3 rounds at me. I just drop to the ground and pull out my carry weapon.
Now at this time my whole body is just numb, my skin feels like it's burning my heart is pounding. I then look under the car to see if I can see him and I see him running to the front of my vehicle. I'm still on the ground and trying to crawl to the back of my vehicle when he fires 2 more rounds at me. I then get up to my knees and take aim at him. By this time I'm behind my vehicle and my mind is racing my body is numb my skin feels like its on fire my heart is pounding like never before and then all the sudden it's like time slowed down, everything was perfectly clear my body felt normal I had a clear head and that's when I fired 3 rounds at him.
First round hit him in the shoulder second two missed. Then as fast as the fear and other emotions left they came back and dropped me to my knees. I then had to make myself go and secure his weapon and with each step it felt like my knees were going to give out. I then called the police and that was when I really truly felt FEAR.

BTW. I don't do domestic cases anymore because I found out that I'm not very good at tailing someone.
And it;s the reason I now have so much respect for military and law enforcement person. That stuff happens to them on a daily bases.

reply to post by Threadfall


How ironic that you quote Nietzche to make that point.

Originally posted by dontreally
reply to post by Threadfall

 

How ironic that you quote Nietzche to make that point.

How so?

Fear comes from the rational or irrational idea that "this situation, this person will harm me
and it's not good for me, it's gonna hurt".

Negotiate the idea and it's possible understand, overcome the fear.

My last taste of fear was this past winter when
my car stalled, the brakes went out and the car
skidded in the road. I ended up on the curb right
in front of a large lamp pole.

I too have that ledge/heights fear, not fun as
I was once encouraged by friends to go around
a mountain with a ledge of about 1 foot and
straight down - I was in the middle of 4 or 5
others - I was shaking enough to fall - never
been so scared. I fetl such relief when it
was over. BTW no ropes or gear - whewww!

This is a good question because it actually got me contemplating.

It got me to realize... I haven't been legitimately frightened since I was a child, and even then it took a lot to really rile me up.

I mean, I have anxiety: where you can actually feel your stomach organ inside your body like twisting up and you get a rush of heat through your head, but that only lasts a few seconds. And I only get that when I'm about to be put in a new situation.

Is it weird that nothing frightens me? Or is that only because I'm not exposed to frightening enough things? Or is it because when I was young I was exposed to lots of frightening things? I mean as a child I've seen lots of death: heads smashed on the pavement in front of my house, cancer eating away at emaciated family members, corpses, cemeteries, etc.
And as a child it didn't bother me too much. But that could be because I was raised by two academics who don't have the mental common sense to raise a child. A classic example of this is how my autistic father showed me The Exorcist when I was 7 because I needed to understand how dangerous demons were. Yes, at 7 my father told me that The Exorcist was the scariest movie ever made only because everything that happens in it could just as easily happen to me (or any other human). What's amusing about the way my mind works is that The Exorcist didn't faze me, and yet the movie Philadelphia scared me for months... but I think that was because no one told me what AIDS was or how you got it. Ahh the memories of childhood.

The one thing that actually scares me is heights... not just being up high, but the possibility of falling from a great height. So like, roller coasters don't scare me because I'm strapped in no matter how high up it goes. But the second floor of the mall does scare me, because there is only a 4 foot high glass barrier protecting me from a 30 foot drop. And even that doesn't really "frighten" me, but rather, it makes me feel extremely uneasy.



Now that I've spent time actually contemplating my childhood... it makes sense that I'm obsessed with death as an adult. Academically, death is what I concentrated on in undergrad (specifically a bachelors in philosophy and theology) and in grad school I'll just be continuing my studies. And I guess it makes sense...

At the ripe young age of 33 years and in my prime working a very physical job I had a heart issue.
I spent 7 days in the local hospital here and every day they told me you will be just fine.
Every night in the cardiac ward (clear windows in the rooms you can't hide there.) the alarms would go code blue and sure enough there goes another body bag by my room on a stretcher.

After the week they shipped me out of town for heart surgery and I had to wait another 3 days in another cardiac ward with lots of body bags going out the door.

Hell yes that was fear......I am going to have bad dreams tonight like it or not.
To the OP interesting thread to say the least.
S&F Regards, Iwinder

reply to post by Threadfall


"What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome."

Overall, Nietzsche was a vortex of paradox.

Dont get me wrong, he was a very interesting and complex thinker, but i think his ideal of "will to power" and "superman" was something even he - its most famous proponent - failed to live up to.

I just think the attitude of deifying and idolizing the power of will is inherenty unstable. A will that goes against the grain of creation is bound to uproot itself. Nietzsche couldnt handle the power of chaos he felt he had power over. The entire process in anycase, as explained in Jung for instance is astonishingly vain, and utterly devoted to self interest. This is because both Jung, Nietzsche and the vast majority of European intellectuals are influenced by Gnostic, Pagan Mysticism. They start to genuinely believe their own lunatic theories.

It will be the undoing of the west, just as it destroyed Nietzsche. He was an apt symbol for the self destructive essence of this philosophy. Power, unbridled and not directed by judgement and sanity will lead to insanity and disorder. The power of the conscience is the only humane way to overcome the struggle with fear. Theistic satanism or 'surrendering" yourself to your own evil, or the principle of evil, will only prolong your own relationship with that reality.

Evil at the end of the day is the creation of man. We can either live in tune with creation, and promote actions of kindness and ideals like humility, devotion to truth, and devotion to G-d, and to true justice, or we can continue with this current dualistic reality which arrests man to the fight with own evil, and his own evil machinations of thought, like this completely absurd and vain desire to become a god, or a superman. What weakness and frivolity.

True strength whether the nihilists/relativists acknowledge it or not is to submit to the will of the omnipresent, and His moral law, and the necessity for human justice, REAL justice, with G-d fearing men in positions of power. Weakness is the stupidity to think that this world is the only world, and that what we do ethically here has no effect in a higher realm. Such an attitute is intuitively insane, because everyones conscience, a piece of "G-d" which walks about within his mind, seeks to inform him what his task in this world is, and what is good.

Conscience is no more human invention than the concept of justice is. Only the Jews brought this philosophy into the world, whereas the pagans have their own "gods", in every land, with its own relative laws and principles (this being an example of moral relativism) for men to live by. This is no more than the projecting and objectifying of ones own ideas, and than worshipping them, in essence worshipping the self.

Justice exists because mankind has the power of understanding, and thus the power of Empathy. Anyone who contradicts this principle to impose his own "will" on creation, will get a nice surprise in the next world, where the self meets its creations, and made vulnernable before them. To serve those beasts which he created. That is what hell is. We each have the power to overcome this hell, but it takes true strength. This strength to act righteously simulatenously gives you strength over those things which you once feared.

I have fears, like most people, but they are dramatically less than what they used to be. I am much stronger than I ever thought i could be. It simply takes submission and faithfulness to the truth, to your conscience and to the creator of the universe.