Fear exists only in imagination.
The forces of imagination are so powerful that it is difficult for man to overcome fear (or the falseness of imagination). He tries using his reason, but few individuals ever succeed. Reason is a babe against the giant of imagination that keeps the poor, shuffling, robot world in chains.
Both imagination and reason are activities of the ego, the unifying principle of your experience in this life. The imaginative aspect of the ego is that every desire is pursued with the feeling, the conviction, that you are permanent — that ‘it cannot happen to me’. But it does happen to you. It will happen to you.
There is no more obvious fact than death; but death seems to make no difference.
You imagine from moment to moment that you are permanent; and so identify yourself with that desire. But it is the desire that is permanent, not you.
When you are forced to look at death in relation to yourself, you fear it. When the surgeon looks at death in relation to a body on the operating table, he doesn’t feel this fear. But he feels it when forced to face the fact of his own death.
Yet it is not death you fear, because you cannot fear what you do not know and you do not know what death comprises. You fear death because you know in your own experience that it will take away all your power, position, prestige, possessions — everything you imagine you are.
Fear is not a fact. It is an assumption.
Fear is your constant companion and merciless whip. The most pressing, ever-present fear is the fear of what people will say. You are afraid when you think you will lose your life, power or possessions. But you are not afraid in the moments of losing them.
You are always in fear, thinking, imagining, until the moment of action.
No one ever knows fear when they are not thinking; when they are aware.
A soldier’s fear of going into combat may be greater than the fear of what his comrades would say if he held back. The army knows from experience that something like that can happen to a man with time to think, so training and discipline are aimed at making him obey instantly, without thought.
The body does not know fear, only the desire for self-preservation at the moment of threat, and then it acts within its limited capabilities. The ego, the unifying principle, protects the body in the moment of danger. But the problem is that in monitoring your senses you use your memory, imagination and reason to protect your body before the moment of danger occurs. As soon as the chattering chimpanzee of a mind sees or hears something it plunges into a jungle of associated ideas that are limitless in number in your memory. If you have one matter causing you concern, the mind will use every association to bring you back to it. It will suggest unending possibilities, most of them unfavourable or bad for you, because you are concerned or upset and expecting the worst. This is the ceaseless agony of worry.
If your desire for power, position, possessions and permanence disappeared your body would not die. All that dies is your fear.