Self repair your fear

You have probably heard the seemingly discriminating remarks that fear is normal and abnormal, and that normal fear is to be regarded as a friend, while abnormal fear should be destroyed as an enemy.

The fact is that no so called normal fear can be named which has not been clearly absent in some people who have had every cause therefore. If you will run over human history in your mind, or look about yea in the present life, you will find here and there persons who, in situations or before objects which ought, as any fearful soul will insist, to inspire the feeling of at least normal self repair fear, are nevertheless wholly without the feeling. They possess every feeling and thought demanded except fear. The idea of self repair is as strongly present as with the most abjectly timid or terrified, but fear they do not know. This fearless awareness of fear suggesting conditions may be due to several causes. It may result from constitutional make-up, or from long continued training or habituation, or from religious ecstasy, or from a perfectly calm sense of spiritual selfhood which is unhurt able, or from the action of very exalted reason. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains: the very causes which excite fear in most of us, merely appeal, with such people, if at all. To the instinct of self repair and to reason, the thought-element of the soul which makes for personal peace and wholeness.

It is on such considerations that I have come to hold that all real fear-feeling should and may be banished by self repair from our life, and that what we call normal fear should be substituted in our language by instinct or by reason, the element of fear being dropped altogether.

The mental representations may be very faint as such, but the idea of hurt to self is surely present. If, then, it can be profoundly believed that the real self cannot be hurt; if the reason can be brought to consider vividly and believingly all quieting considerations; if the self repair can be held consciously in the assurance that the life surrounds the true self, and is surely within that self, and will suffer no evil to come nigh, while all the instincts of self preservation may be perfectly active, fear itself must be removed as far as the east is from the west.

These are the ways, then, in which any occasion for fear may be divided:

As a warning and as a maker of panic. But let us say that the warning should be understood as given to reason, that fear need not appear at all, and that the panic is perfectly useless pain. With these discriminations in mind, we may now go on to a preliminary study of fear and self repair.

Fear is an impulse, a habit, a disease. Fear, as it exists in man, is a make-believe of sanity, a creature of the imagination, a state of insanity. Fear is, now of the nerves, now of the mind, now of the moral consciousness.

The division depends upon the point of view. What is commonly called normal fear should give place to reason, using the word to cover instinct as well as thought. From the correct point of view all fear is an evil so long as entertained.

Whatever its manifestations, wherever its apparent location, fear is a psychic state, of course, reacting upon the individual in several ways: as, in the nerves, in mental moods, in a single impulse, in a chronic habit, in a totally unbalanced condition. The reaction has always a good intention, meaning, in each case, “Take care! Danger!” You will see that this is so if you will look for a moment at four comprehensive kinds of fear of self, fear for self, fear for others, fear of self repair. Fear of self is indirectly fear for self danger. Fear for others signifies fore sensed or fore pictured distress to self because of anticipated misfortune to others. I often wonder whether, when we fear for others, it is distress to self or hurt to them that is most emphatically in our thought. Fear of self repair assumes our expectations.

Fear, then, is usually regarded as the soul’s danger signal. But the true signal is instinctive and thoughtful reason.

Even instinct and reason, acting as warning, may perform their duty abnormally, or assume abnormal proportions. And then we have the feeling of fear. The normal warning is induced by actual danger apprehended by mind in a state of balance and self-control over self repair. Normal mind is always capable of such warning. There are but two ways in which so-called normal fear, acting in the guise of reason, may be self repaired.

Let it be understood, now, that by normal fear is here meant normal reason real fear being denied place and function altogether. Then we may say that such action of reason is a benefactor to man. It is, with pain and weariness, the philanthropy of the nature of things within us.

I do not say there is no such thing as fear. Fear does exist. But it exists in your life by your permission only, not because it is needful as a warning against evil. And you can self repair it.

Fear is induced by unduly magnifying actual danger, or by conjuring up fictitious dangers through excessive and misdirected psychical reactions. This also may be taken as a signal of danger, but it is a falsely-intentioned witness, for it is not needed, is hostile to the individual because it threatens self-control and self repair and it absorbs life’s forces in useless and destructive work when they ought to be engaged in creating values.

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