Eliminating fear

[Shannon]

How much fear is necessary once you're intelligent enough to realize that standing on a tree branch a hundred feet up is potentially a threat to your life? Or that poisonous snakes can kill you? Or that anything that you may have a positive fear of... is dangerous?

Compare that to how many of us get hung up on negative, useless, unnnecessary fears. Fear of being noticed. Fear of being left alone. Fear of being without mommy. Fear of the unknown... when the unknown constitutes growing up and being an adult!

I think that Alightnment has hit the nail on the head. Once you're old enough to think, you don't need fear anymore. Fear is useful for protecting and controlling animals and kids too young to think.

Unless, of course, you don't have common sense.

But let's take an example of what Sean is saying and consider it. A few days ago, I had a gun pointed at my head during a "demonstration" of someone's point. This gun was not safety checked, and aside from being pointed at my head, I happen to know that the safety was off, and the man's finger was on the trigger. Very obvious and clear violations of almost every rule of gun safety. This all coming from an Army vet who should have known better 50 years ago, at least.

This constituted a valid threat to my life. The gun could have had ammunition in it because it wasn't safety checked. Worse still, it was a .25 caliber pistol, just powerful enough to pierce my skull and potentially scramble my brains instead of kill me outright.

There's nothing like a sudden threat to one's life to wake you up. And it did wake me up. How did I react? I was calm, and I dealt with the situation calmly. It made me more angry that he would do something so stupid than than to feel threatened.

Now, had I reacted in fear, and that been a real life situation of real life threat, would that fear have helped me, or hindered me?

I'm going to argue that in most cases, fear will actually hinder a response to modern threats.

With fear, my response would have been to start shaking so violently that I wouldn't have been able to do anything but run away. I would have been in a blind panic, and not thinking enough to even zig-zag. I would have gotten shot at, and most likely killed.

Without fear, I was able to calmly and quickly diffuse the situation, but in a situation where a real assailant has a real gun, the assailant is almost as likely to be shaking with fear and adrenaline as the target is. That makes for less control, and more opportunity to get hurt. If I remain calm, and my assailant is shaking, it sends a powerful message. It says, "You may have the gun, but clearly, I'm the one in control here." It says that the gun doesn't make him the stronger of the two of us. It also gives me the opportunity to use my neo-cortex to get myself to safety instead of my lizard brain. I can respond with any number of options that the fight or flight system doesn't allow. I am more likely to survive because I was able to think without being driven by, and controlled by fear.

And that guy with the gun may end up killing me anyway, but worst case scenario... at least I died without peeing my pants in fear!

As long as you can - and actually DO - think with your neo-cortex... that is, have and USE common sense... you don't need fear.