Fear

　　Thanissaro Bhikkhu

　　April, 2003

　　We”re afraid of so many things. There”s so much fear in our lives. And yet the texts don”t treat fear all that much, largely because there are many different kinds of fear: fear associated with greed, fear associated with anger, fear associated with delusion. So if you want to understand fear, you have to understand the emotion behind it. You have to analyze fear not as a single, solid thing, but as a compound of many different factors, to see which part of the fear is dependent on the greed or passion, which part is dependent on the aversion, and which part is dependent on the delusion. Then, when you”ve taken care of the underlying emotion, you”ve taken care of the fear.

　　If there is greed for something, or passion for something, there”s the fear that you”re not going to get it, or the fear that once you have got it you”re going to be deprived of it.

　　Then there”s fear based on anger. You know that if a certain thing happens it”s going to hurt, you”re going to suffer. You”re averse to it, so you”re afraid of it. And then there”s the whole area of delusion, of what you don”t know, of the great unknown out there. Fear based on delusion can range anywhere from fear of a ghost in the next room, or a strange person in this room, to general existential angst: a sense that something is required of you, and you don”t know what it is. Human experience seems like such a huge void, something very alien. There is the big sense of fear that there may not be any meaning or purpose to all this. There is just pointless, fruitless suffering in vain.

　　So it”s important that you pide out the different kinds of fear, because you have to work not so much on the fear as on its root. Unless you dig down to the different factors, you won”t know what kind of fear it is, you won”t be able to get to its root. Now fear is complicated by the fact that it”s such a physical emotion. When fear arises there are all kinds of reactions in the body. The heartbeat can speed up, stomach juices get churning, and we often confuse the physical reactions for the mental state. In other words, a single flash of fear floods the mind and then recedes, but it sets into motion a huge series of physical reactions that sometimes will take a long time to settle down. And because they don”t settle down right away, there is a sense that “I must still be afraid because here are all the physical attributes of fear.” So the first thing in dealing with fear, especially strong fear like this, is to separate the mental state out from the physical state.

　　Some people say they have no trouble reasoning out of the fear, but they”re still afraid. That may be based on a misunderstanding: on mistaking the physical symptoms of fear from the actual mental state. We have to separate the physical side of the fear from the mental state, because if you”re reasoning through the issue, the actual fear itself may be at bay. What seems to live on, or seems to be unwilling to go away, is the physical side, and of course it takes a while to go away because of the hormones churned up in your blood stream. It”s going to take a while for them to wash out. So your first line of defense is to learn to know when there actually is fear in the mind and when there is no fear in the mind, even though there may be the signs of fear in the body, so you don”t feel so overwhelmed by the emotion. You breathe as best you can through the manifestations of fear, the tension, the feelings that come with that shortened breath or the constricted breath that comes with fear. Then consciously expand that sensation of physical and open it up to counteract the physical symptoms of fear.

　　And at the same time, ask yourself, “Exactly what is the fear

　　” “What is it that you”re afraid of

　　” “W…

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