Two Types of Fear
Living Well in the New Year
Two Types of Fear
The New Year has arrived, and we've no choice but to recognize it. Many mutter their forebodings about what might come this new year. We worry about our own health and well-being and that of our loved ones climate change, stunning intentional violence, unpredictable policies from a new American administration, and much more. We admit quietly to ourselves, we are frightened.
In this and the following post, I will introduce two brief Teachings from Manjushri about fear. Here I will introduce his notion there are essentially two types of fear. Next, I will summarize his description of several simple ways to address our imagined fears and limit their impact on us. I've excerpted them from a talk I gave ten years ago.
There are two kinds of fear, as the teacher Manjushri explains to me in my book, What in the World Is Going On? Wisdom Teachings for Our Time. The first, communicative fear, we share with many other species; it gives us information about an immediate danger in our environment which requires a response: flight or fight, in most cases. This superb mechanism, sensitive to “the tiger in the grass,” vastly enhances our survival, and we can only be grateful for it.
The second type, imaginative fear, however, is created in and by our own minds. Such fear may or may not be grounded in external reality and may have little connection with any plausible threat to our survival. Yet it can just as powerfully repeatedly shape our perceptions and our behavior, until it becomes an unexamined assumption about our supposed reality. Because it is rooted in our human intellect and imagination, it is much more difficult to handle wisely. It is a delicate process to uncover those self-created but deeply rooted fears and begin the long and hard work of dissolving them.
(Penny Gill "Fear Shapes Our Lives" July 2015)
Perhaps you might identify a particular fear that is haunting you these days, and ask yourself if it offers you information about your own survival or if it is a product of your mind's great gift of imagination.
In my next post I'll suggest what you might do then. Meanwhile, for much more on fear, I suggest my book of Manjushri's Teachings, What in the World Is Going On? Wisdom Teachings for our World.
With best wishes for a New Year that brings you much more than fear and anxiety - good health, deep understanding, and gratitude for your life as it unfolds.
Fear taps energy big time, for instant use, but fear experienced over a long time tends to sap one's ability to act. That is why fear is a major tool of tyrants seeking control over an entire population. They specialize in displacing real fear of themselves by creating imaginative fear of "could be" allies, transforming them into enemies through divide and conquer technics .