Shannon's Journal Discussion

[Shannon]

Shannon, I just came up with an idea, and was wondering what you think. Would it be beneficial to have lines in the script that have to do with being more comfortable with the feeling of fear, and the emotion of fear? For example, when I'm feeling fearful, I feel uncomfortable with it, uneasy. Would it be beneficial to program the mind to be comfortable with, be accepting of, be unafraid of the feeling of fear? Or would these sensations/emotions of fear be completely gone from the sub, so there would be no u se for such programming?

Being uncomfortable is the whole point of fear. Fear is a form of emotional pain, and all types of pain are intended to communicate to you that "something is wrong, something needs attention, we need to do something about this!"

Accepting fear would potentially allow one to become even more complacent with being fearful and even more entrenched in a fear rut. I believe it is much better to cause the person to outgrow the level of awareness and experience that results in fear in the first place.

For example, when I was a little boy, I was deathly afraid of the dark. What existed in the dark, you see, was unknown; it could be ANYTHING! Werewolves, vampires, skeletons, mummies, blobs of goo and any other imaginable form of monster that was going to "get" me. I didn't really know what would happen if it "got" me, but I also wasn't about to find out, either! Monsters were not going to get me! So I slept with a night light for a number of years. But eventually, I realized that no matter how long I turned off the light for, nothing showed up. No monsters. It was just me. And when I realized that logically, there is no way a monster can simply materialize out of thin air just because the light is turned off, I outgrew that fear because I understood sufficiently to do so.

That's the goal. Grow out of the fear by outgrowing it's root cause, and by educating the person in the right ways that fear evaporates as a natural response and consequence. Like my fear of the dark evaporated when I understood that the laws of physics do not allow for spontaneous materialization of "monsters" when photons are not present above a certain threshold.

Knowledge and understanding, and frequently experience is the root cause for those two, erases fear as a natural consequence. What we are knowledgeable about, aware of and familiar with we do not fear. And in cases where that is not the case - such as being afraid of the pain of being punished by one's father as punishment, we can simply transfer that to the conscious mind and realize that "If I obey my father, he won't punish me." It's primarily about growth, education and familiarization. Not making fear more comfortable to deal with. We want to outgrow the root causes and tus eliminate fear completely.