Life without Unnecessary Fear

Is your life free of fear? And by fear, I mean that unpleasant, and sometimes disabling, emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is going to cause you discomfort or pain. I think most people want to feel good, and they want to avoid distress. Of course, the person or thing causing the fear may not be a real threat. Nevertheless, if you think it is a threat, that thought may be enough to induce a sense of fear. The mind and body will respond to imagined threats as well as real threats.

I think few of us will claim that we have never been afraid. Sometimes fear is a good thing because it causes the body to marshal its reserves to thwart the threat in the best way possible. If your life is in danger from another person, flight may be the proper response.

But how do you stop the fear that is a result of all of the imagined threats. In this, I include the fear of failure, rejection, loneliness, poverty, sickness, old age, criticism, and a host of other things that you may worry about. How can you live free of this type of fear?

I think that much of the fear comes from one’s not knowing what tomorrow will bring. An optimist may expect tomorrow to bring the best and that life will only improve. However, many people reflect on all the bad things that might happen, and they fear the unknown—the future that they think is not yet written. Only, the future is written, and you can see your future if you look. And if the future is undesirable, you can change that probable future into the future you want.

The answer to seeing the future you are building is found in your dreams. Your dreams will show you where your path leads. And threats will not come out of nowhere, completely unexpected; you will be forewarned, giving you an opportunity to avoid many of them. And for those you cannot avoid or change, you will have time to prepare yourself psychologically for the coming event.

I am not suggesting that it is easy to eradicate unnecessary fears. It requires effort on your part, but there is a definite comfort in knowing that a presence is watching out for you and constantly advising you about the proper course of action. This presence is within you and speaks to you through flashes of insight or intuition, and speaks to you nightly through your dreams. That presence never leaves you because it is part of you—it is a deeper layer of consciousness that is not normally accessible to your conscious awareness.

Some will say, “I would rather not know.” To me, that is like trying to navigate the world without sight. Blind people do it with the help of guide dogs and other resources, but life is much more difficult without the sense of vision. However, even with sight, the things you think you see are blurred by your prejudices and beliefs. You don’t see reality; you only see your own version of reality. The external world is a world of energy. Signals are generated by the retina of the eye from light photons impinging on it, from the external energy that is the world. The picture of what you see is created in your brain from the electrical signals flowing along the optic nerve to the brain. Your brain creates what you accept as the real world.

When it comes to judging another’s motives or intentions, your own conditioning and beliefs will determine what you see. The conscious mind is limited in what it can determine and “see” as reality because you cannot see without some degree of bias and filtering. But with the help of unconscious portions of the mind, a greater reality can be seen. And many of the biases and inhibiting beliefs can be recognized and corrected before they seriously limit the quality of your life.

If you want to be free from unnecessary fear, unite the conscious and unconscious aspects of your mind. And the way to do this is to understand your dreams. The famous psychiatrist Carl Jung said that we couldn’t be whole without that integration or joining of the conscious and unconscious, which he called individuation.