Fear: Opposing Courage, or Love?

Sometimes I carry fear in my heart.

I allow it a place to reside when it refuses to do anything but hurt me.

I allow myself to be hurt and controlled by my fear, as we all do. If I apply the concepts discussed in Duality then I have to accept that Fear is just one part of a Duality, made whole by it’s opposite. What is the opposite of Fear? Love. Some may argue the opposite of Fear is courage, or Love is Hate, but I do not agree.

While it is true in many way’s the opposite of fear may be courage, you cannot summon courage inside of you without love for yourself, another, or something. Courage stems from love, which is why it is not the absolute opposite of fear.In this same way, while we may think Hate is the opposite of love, we will find that fear is what breeds hatred, just as love breeds courage. This is why Hate is not the absolute opposite of Love, and why the Duality is Love and Fear. This is why we can use love to counteract fear, and achieve harmony in that duality.

Fear and Love are true opposites, and you see them playing across every aspect of society  in every nation. Where Humanity resides, we are driven by Love and Fear. In America today we see the effects of fear used as a device of control, and we see it rampantly across the perversion of religion. Using the fear we consciously experience as a weapon or restraint against us. There is a lot of depth to dive into here but at the risk of political or religo-political arguments we will suffice it to say that  commonly people in charge, using power over people, are doing it with fear. To counteract this it is important for us to realize what the opposite of Fear is, and as mentioned above, I believe that is Love. 

Love Excercise

By exercising love and seeking to understand the fear we are experiencing  we can use our love to balance out the fear. Bringing that duality into harmony. As we discussed in the post on Dualities, each half of them is important for the experience. We have to have Fear. It is not something we can hope to “abolish” from this existence. We must experience it and carry the lessons of fear into our experience of love to fully comprehend the entirety of that polarity. The deeper our understanding of fear, the more we  understand its counterpart, love, and what a reward that is! To have a deeper, more intense understanding of love. 

What then should I be doing with the Fear I sometimes carry inside of me? What am I supposed to learn from this fear? Where does it even come from? 

The only thing I think that I can do with it now is to experience it:

What is my fear?

• I feel fear, tied to anxiety, about whether I am on the right life path with my writing. Whether I will do any Good for anyone. A Fear of Failure.

Accept that fear as reality. 

• If I am on the path, I will have to second guess the path, I will have to have fears to understand the loving reward. 

Replace the Fear with Love

• I love myself for who I am on the path to become. I love what I am creating. That is so much more important and enjoyable to experience at this moment. I exist to experience this creation and all creations within. Love and Fear are part of that experience, to ignore either is a disservice to both. There is no greater service I can do in the face of fear or love, or any other emotion, than to experience them, and carry them all consciously, so that I may understand them all more deeply. 

Just because we must experience fear, does not mean that we are cursed to carry the weight and pain of it to maintain it’s lessons. Those things are not tied to the emotion, but to the trauma experienced within the emotion. Our bodies and subconscious remembers better than we realize how traumatic some emotions have been for us. Often our emotion is the one thing that ties all of those experiences, memories, or traumas together. They are all linked by one emotion, in most cases fear. When we feel fear, all of those memories, cognitive or otherwise spread across the membrane of our soul. How we respond to this depends on how sensitive we are and how intense this feeling is.  This is when our perspective comes into play. Through our perspective we can transmute these feelings and the lessons from them into material better suitable for where you are consciously now.

Fear-alysis

Fear has a way of inhibiting us. It can get in the way of everything we try to do and make us perform our lives unpredictably and without reason. Often this fear is not fear of an idea or concept. It is fear of acceptance of an idea. For example, I wait tables for cash to pay the bills. I like to think I am pretty good at it and love to put on a show while I am there. Often I am asked if I am ever “afraid I’ll drop the food” at the way I hold some of the trays.

Complacently I have usually answered something like:

“I know I’m gonna drop a tray, or something. No need to be afraid about it if I know it’s gonna happen”

And even when I recently started demanding myself be more consciously involved in the words I say, this still sticks. I think it’s because it holds a lot of truth within it, and demonstrates perspective overcoming fear easily. If I was afraid every time I picked up a tray of food, I would drop a lot more food because of that fear. While fear is necessary, to much of it is paralyzing.

It is the same lesson I was trying to help my little sister learn today as she was learning to ride a bike. She was doing really well yesterday but then she fell and since she fell she hasn’t been riding as confidently as before and she was upset about why she felt she forgot how to ride. I explained that it was her fear getting in the way . Then I found myself saying this “ Don’t be afraid you’re gonna fall. You are gonna fall. If you spend time worrying about it you’ll just fall faster because that’s what you’re paying attention to.”

Now I’ll admit I don’t think that made her less afraid, but Its what I knew to say because it is what worked for me, just as everything I write here is also only words from my own experience in hopes that they may help someone else find a bit more harmony within their experience in this existence. It is my hope that these words also find a way to help you overcome the fear your may experience in your lifetime, as they have done for me.

What I have learned is in the face of fear, we can use the same exercises discussed in Happiness, and use the opposite, or counterpart of that duality to bring balance to the emotion. When we are afraid, transmute that energy into love.

The lesson I’ve learned in the exercise of writing this, is that my love for writing, my love for helping consciousness, are the things I will counter the abundance of fear I have been feeling. Fear of inadequacy in my writing. Fear of wasting time. Fear of Failure. All of that becomes null when I shine the perspective of love on it. The joy of writing and love I feel within my experience shift the narrative of fear into the succession of love.