Why Fear and Death Are Our Greatest Assets.
Why Fear and Death Are Our Greatest Assets.
Within this article, the reader will learn:
Why fear is one of our greatest gifts. By thinking about fear differently, we can reap its benefits.
By engaging with fear, we develop courage. By not engaging, we generate cowardness.
How reflecting upon death can help us develop a healthy outlook on life.
To frame our conversation on fear, we have to refer to our previous article and understand the concept of our mind. Our mind is this aspect of us that provides us with information - like an informatic organism.
So, everything we've done, our thoughts, and our experiences are information our mind uses, and this is how we form our basis of reality.
So, if all our thoughts and experiences are information, then fear is an experience that supplies information.
But why do we experience fear? To keep this simple, we experience fear for two reasons.
One, we experience something unknown to us, and two, we're experiencing something threatening.
The Purpose of Fear
Starting with something threatening, we experience fear when our reptilian brain goes into fight or flight mode. Our reptilian brain is the oldest part of our brain, and it serves as our instincts. It lets us know when to run or fight and fear, in this regard, has kept us as a species alive.
The second aspect of fear builds off the fight-or-flight aspect of fear but in a different way. This aspect is fear of the unknown. This aspect of fear arises when we encounter an experience when we have little to no prior information, so we don't know what happens next.
But just like the first aspect of fear, this aspect also serves a purpose.
When we experience fear regarding the unknown, that's how we develop courage. Courage is when we acknowledge our fears but still embark on the journey anyway.
Courage is the reason why we take risks. We don't know what could occur, what the next step would be, if we'll make it or not, but we continue ahead.
This bold step forward is how fear helps us thrive. Fear alerts us to when there's a real danger, and fear also lets us know when there's something that we're unsure about.
Fear is our indicator of the unknown, and we develop courage by diving into the unknown.
Courage, or engaging with the unknown, is the stark opposite of cowardice. When we encounter something unfamiliar, instead of engaging with it, we shrink from it. We creep, we crawl.
I venture to theorize that we shrink from life events due to the ideas of fear we have within our minds.
If our mind-body has earlier information about past experiences of what it calls fear, whenever we experience something that strikes up fear, we shrink towards that experience as well.
Fear can be our biggest tool, but it can also be the most prominent chain. So how do we overcome fear, so it doesn't hold us back? One way to do this is to overcome one of the greatest fear known to man: death.
The Fear of Death
Death is one of humanity's biggest fears, just because it's death. Simply speaking, what could be worse than death, right? We fear death because it's death, but this wasn't always the case.
In ancient times, death was a part of life. One would be able to walk outside their local tavern and see the sick and weakly all around.
But in today's society, we don't see that. The ill and dying are now in the hospitals, so we've lost that connection of seeing death consistently around us.
But death still comes to us all, whether in the hospital or in everyday life, because death is the one part of life that every human has and will experience. But what's quite interesting is that death itself is unknown.
No one knows what happens when you die, so why do we fear something that we have little information about?
For all we know, death could be one of life's biggest blessings. Death could be the ultimate freedom; when the individual is free from life.
If we review most of the near-death experiences, people describe this incredible peace. So, if the slightest hint of information regarding death we've received is perfect peace, why should we fear it?
If we were to perform the thought experiment, "what would happen if I were to die right now?" we would see ourselves dying. We would see our loved ones mourn, but eventually, life would continue.
They would have more happy moments and joy; we see this all within our thought experiment.
This experiment provides us with some information we can use to act on. To gather more information, we could look into creating a will.
Creating a will is an exercise that truly makes one reflect on death. This exercise shows that death occurs and is a part of life, but that life does continue.
It puts things into perspective because when faced with the reality of death, what else truly matters? Your job, this dead-end relationship?
This exercise begins to put our life into perspective, and we begin to measure and assess our lives as to what kind of life we want to live.
And this is how overcoming our fear of death supplies us with one of our greatest strengths.
By realizing that fear is an emotion our body uses to communicate to us, we can frame fear not as something to be feared but as something that informs us of what we need to explore further. Regarding emotions, we read the following:
“The normal function of emotion is to rapidly process complex situational information, in order to provide feedback to the person about his/her reaction and to prepare the person to take effective action.”
Leslie Greenberg, Emotion-Focused Therapy
By exploring those areas in which we are scared, we develop courage. And by assembling courage, we begin to soar and fly through life versus creeping or crawling, rummaging in cowardice and anxiety.
The ancients had a saying, "Memento mori," which meant to reflect consistently on death. By reflecting consistently on death, we realize that life is precious and that we should make the most of our time by doing what our soul wants.
Life is full of experiences, and fear is an experience. The experience of fear provides us with information that we're encountering something unknown.
To live a bold life, we must confront the unknown. By overcoming the greatest fear - the fear of death - we become encouraged to live a more fulfilling life and better prioritize what we want our life to consist of.
Questions to Think On
Are there areas of life where fear holds us back?
If we were to die, would those areas of life matter after we were gone?
What would happen if we had the courage to address those areas of life?
If we were to overcome those areas, would our life be more enriching?
Like Unorthodoxy and want to help make it even better? Give me feedback, point out factual errors or typos, or send me topics to address.
I enjoyed and learned about our fear emotions
“If we were to die, would those areas of life matter after we were gone?” — something to think about for sure!