Shannon's Journal Discussion Volume 3

[Shannon]

Could maybe a big obastacle in letting go of fear being getting over the fear of letting go of fear itself? As if fear previously have given the boundaries that guided your life, without it you are fearful of trusting your own instincts, as you are unfamiliar in how to do so.

Yup. Shannon has mentioned that already somewhere and I believe he's been working on the whole fear of fear thing. Getting the mind to understand that it's not fear that keeps us safe, but common sense.

The issue is that it is not the mind, but the emotional self that you are talking about. As far as I can determine, the mind is separate from the emotional awareness. They seem to be mutually exclusive in how they cogitate and comprehend the world around them. They communicate in vastly different ways and they generally do not understand one another. The "mind" is the logical one, and the "heart" (for lack of a better term) is the emotional one. The emotional self is the one that feels fear, because fear is an emotion. The mind does not experience emotional anything in it's pure expression. Only when they are blended and/or balanced does one experience the other.

The emotional self experiences fear as a safety mechanism, and the mind experiences logic as a safety mechanism. Because fear is arising from an irrational awareness, it can become tangled and all sorts of issues arise from it when it does. Too much fear is a bad thing, just as not enough fear without any other safety mechanism in play is a bad thing. We can only remain safe when we let go of fear and replace it with the use of our other potential safety mechanism, which is our logic and ability to think and know.

So being utterly fearless and not bothering to think about what you're doing and what the potential consequences are is a bad thing; but logic tells you that if you walk on the edge of a skyscraper and you lose your balance, you may fall and die. Logic suffices perfectly well to prevent you from doing that, even if you have no fear.