The Tyranny of Fear

“It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble; it’s what we know for sure that’s just not true.” –Mark Twain

Fear is the mechanism used by the ego to keep us tied to our thoughts and beliefs. It results in our ego state of consciousness. Fear is the glue the ego uses to bind us to itself, and fear is what needs to be overcome to be free of ego-identification. Fortunately, it isn’t as difficult as it sounds. After all, fear is just another idea, and like all ideas, fear is only as real and holds as much power as we give it.

The best definition of FEAR that I have heard is: False Evidence Appearing Real

How difficult is it to overcome something that has no reality or truth? Overcoming fear- based beliefs is only difficult if you make fear a reality by believing in it.

Fear is a creation of the ego. If you examine any one of your fears, you’ll see that it refers to a future possibility, not a current reality. Fear is almost always tied to a negative idea about something in the future that hasn’t happened and probably won’t happen. It is the emotion that is generated by thinking about some dreaded possibility in the future. This emotion becomes fuel for activity designed to vanquish what is feared. Many of our activities are responses to fears. Fearful thoughts are particularly difficult to ignore or detach from because we feel our survival might be at stake if we don’t take them seriously.

Some warnings are worth heeding, of course, but much of the fear that drives human behavior is based on a false belief. For example: you are afraid you won’t be loved if you don’t look a certain way, so you go to great lengths to have a certain appearance. This fear drives you to do a lot of things that are essentially unnecessary. Being loved isn’t dependent on how you look.

Many false beliefs fueled by fear exist (e.g., If you don’t kill terrorists, they will kill you). False beliefs are responsible for a great deal of the suffering on earth. They cause suffering not only because being in a state of fear is painful, but also because the state of fear and the activities that stem from fear keep us from being in the flow and experiencing the joy that is available in the present moment as well as from doing more fulfilling things.

We think the ego is useful in keeping us safe, but it isn’t. Our Soul can be trusted to keep us safe because, from it comes true wisdom and insight about the present moment. When we are connecting to our soul’s wisdom, we are guided to act appropriately, and these actions will be the ones that support our purpose and highest good any moment. When acting from our soul’s truth and wisdom we will always be safe, even when our ego say we are not.

We must become tone deaf to egos whispers of safety and its unreasonable demands of power, control and safety.

The ego wants us to believe otherwise because that gives it an opportunity to control our life, which gives some reality to its unreal existence. If we didn’t pay attention to its fears and act on them, the ego wouldn’t have a sense of existing. The ego does have something to be afraid of because if we see the truth, that it doesn’t exist, it loses its reality.