We don’t see the danger of fear . We live with fear, why?
Thought is fear. The stream of thinking is a ‘defense’ against the unknown, which is each moment. The ‘now’ is always unknown and thought is present to make it the known, the familiar, safe, etc. Thought avoids the ‘unknown’ as it does the idea of ‘death’ which is also the unknown, yet ‘death’ is in each moment. The senses live in the now where living/dying is ‘what is’. Thought brings the illusion of ‘continuity’ into the now, making the feared ‘unknown’ of the present into the safe familiar ‘known’ of the past. Thought is fear.
Not talking about the ‘practical’ applications of thought.
Everything you say here may be true, but we don’t really know, do we?
Do we see anything but what we think we see?
We live with fear, why?
We can’t “live” without it. Fear is the fire that keeps I, me, mine, “alive”.
“Really know” as in what? And I didn’t say “we”.
Your second sentence contradicts the first. Does thought make the “now” which “is always unknown”, familiar, safe, or does “thought avoid the unknown”?
Thought brings the illusion of ‘continuity’ into the now, making the feared ‘unknown’ of the present into the safe familiar ‘known’ of the past. Thought is fear.
Do we know that continuity is an illusion? Or are you referring to the continuity of one’s inner monologue? If Now is constantly unfolding, isn’t it a continuous process?
We live with fear because we don’t know how to look at fear.
We’re incapable of looking at fear because we don’t want to see things for what they are; fear keeps us in our comfort zone where we can continue to pretend we’re not practicing self-deception.
Physical comfort is necessary to function. Physical pain creates discomfort like a toothache.
Psychological comfort leads to illusions …
Does thought create fear or fear creates thought?“”
I think fear creates thought endlessly.
Psychological thought is an expression of fear, and sustaining the illusion of I, me, mine is its purpose. For this reason, fear is what we need attend to rather than react to, and that means finding fear more interesting than threatening.
And especially the fear of death; to find it “more interesting than threatening”.
And if that’s possible, why not find the rest of what I do, think, etc, also find all that ‘interesting’?
Can there be thought without consciousness? Can there be time without thought? Can there be fear without time? If the answer to these questions is “no”, then how did fear originate in the human being?
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The animals as far as I can see don’t form mental images of things. If that is true, they do whatever it is they’re doing, alert to what is around them and react with ‘flight or fight’ when danger appears. We are able to form images of dangerous situations that ‘may’ occur even though there is no danger in the moment. I think that is what K was pointing at with : “thought is fear”. We can visualize bad things happening even though they’re not. And then react to the image as if it’s real. Negative imagining can be a sickness with some. Intelligence or awareness of what thought is doing in one’s mind is needed.
Thought doesn’t in this case ‘create’ fear because the ‘me’ or ‘thinker’ that reacts is a projection of thought itself…it is all the thinking process: “thought is fear”.
We are part of a long line of adaptation and evolution. We did not invent something out of nothing. I would not be surprised to hear that “planning” (the ability to plan for the future) exists in many (proto) forms in different animals.
I can’t choose to find disturbing, upsetting reactions like fear, desire, anger, resentment, condemnation, justification, etc., more interesting than threatening, but I may find what triggers them more interesting.
A conditioned response is the old reacting to the new, and sometimes it’s appropriate and necessary for survival. But more often it’s for the survival of a belief that was formed in the past and needs to be reviewed in the light of the present.
Absolutely squirrels etc. They may bury the nut and eject some of their sputum on it but I don’t think they form an image of the ‘future’ when they’ll dig it back up. We’re asking about ‘fear’ and its relation to thought. Our complex ability to plan ahead is invaluable in the practical realm but is it ‘misplaced’ in the realm of the psyche? Is it the source of our suffering?
It’s practical to plan what to do tomorrow, but I can’t know what tomorrow will bring, or even if I’ll live to see it, so it’s more practical to plan for your death than to plan your life.
Is planning “misplaced” in “the realm of the psyche”? If the realm of the psyche is an imagined being in the world it imagines, the only place for the realm of the psyche is the art of fiction.
I’ll try to explain it this way. It is evening here. The sun has just gone down. A cardinal is calling and one a bit down the river is answering. I am alert now to all the different sounds. A crow from across the river has now joined in. A plane is overhead. ….The phone rang and I had a short conversation and all the sounds that were and are continuing disappeared from my awareness during the call. I am back listening, seeing. A humming bird is cautiously approaching the feeder obviously having been chased by the one who has claimed it as his/her territory. What is thought’s place here? Every thought blocks out the song of the cardinal.
Why does it intrude on all this? Is it the fear of being nothing?
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According to K, “consciousness is its content”, and content would be words and images, i.e., thought, so without content there’s only silence?
Can there be time without thought?
Not time as we know it, which is why we call it “timeless”,
Can there be fear without time?
There’s no fear without thought, and thought takes time, so No seems to be the answer.
If the answer to these questions is “no”, then how did fear originate in the human being?
The conditioned brain is traumatized when it experiences what it can’t “handle” by the usual means of distorting, denying, or dismissing, and the memory of this failure serves as a reminder of how perilously limited it is. For this reason it lives constantly in fear of its next failure.