SpankyMcLankey

god damn cat, I've never noticed how much your AV girl is actually violently shaking her head at very odd angles for vertebrae.

catastrophe

original ipod ads, gotta throw itupman

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RIP Gov

“To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.”

The Rev

I don't like fear. It makes it hard to think.



The Rev

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reverie

Recognizing a threat, and resistance to act are common themes here.

Awareness has a lot to do with this as well. The one more is aware of possible dangers, the more one has the potential of fearing. It's kind of like a dance though.. between awareness and not fully comprehending all the various possibilities. When you fear you are only being aware of some possibilities that arise form any so called danger. The resistance of action comes from this limited perspective. Because if you were fully comprehensive of all the possibilities of the moment, there would be much less to fear.


Thus I would reduce the concept further to:

Fear is the crippling reaction one experiences when they skip beyond actuality of the present-tense.

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Jenna_Grows

I think fear shows us our bounderies...it shows the edges of our reality and can keep us from looking on the other side of that.

It's an illusion.

spicoli

i agree with this interpretation.

i believe fear is directly related to ego. i also believe it to be a waste of time and energy, even though i succumb to it at times.

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Roach

tsk

Dr. ShinDig

While I think you are definitely on to something here, I have to disagree.
If you were aware of all the possibilities that arise from a dangerous situation, then you would really have more to fear, not less. the more possibilities of outcome there are in any given occurrence, the more less favorable outcomes there are along with the positive ones. But since fear causes humans to focus more on the negative possibilities, the more you are aware of, the more causes for the fear based emotion there actually is. And that's why Fear is really there in the first place, it is a safe way of analyzing every situation and predicting or performing extreme measures in order to escape or come out favorably.


don't forget that fear is one of the root human emotions and is a large part of human success during our long and dangerous evolution. Fear is actually a great thing.

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verklingen

that's one interpretation. there could also be a recognition of one's inherent inability to arrange his or her exposure to these potentials, to make peace with that fact and simply go with the flow. fear is helpful to us in times of distress where our survival is threatened, but so much of our experience with fear is self-generated in the way you're describing. in my experience this application has only served to detract from my quality of life.

when i was a child my parents divorced. this taught me that even the most unimaginable thing -- losing your mother -- was possible. in the years following, i spent nearly every moment away from my parents (my dad remarried) in a crippling fear that i simply learned to deal with. would they get in a car wreck? would a tornado come whisk them away? could there be a fire? all of these things are possibilities, and to be honest now that i have a family of my own i catch myself falling into that crippling mode of thought every now and again. but possibility is not actuality. and even being aware of all potentials, i lack the capacity to prevent the potentials i fear.

worrying like this is a tragedy of the highest order. it's like taking a life of leisure which you have every right and reason to enjoy and transforming it into a constant mindfuck. i could say it's cheating yourself out of comfort, but maybe we have to learn how to be comfortable. i really believe a lot of the misdirection of our feelings can be traced back to our experiences as an infant and very early childhood. not due to our parenting, but due simply to the mechanic of being comforted and relieved of comfort: an inescapable aspect of our reality we all come to grips with.

do you mean to say projecting their feelings upon or channeling feelings from something they are not experiencing physically? i'd say i agree. and that's what's interesting. . . this same mechanic can be used for the positive integration of our feelings with our experiences, hopes and fears. we are, afterall, a relentlessly fickle bunch.

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reverie

Yes, I believe this is accurate in the case of a dangerous situation. However, a dangerous situation and fear are not indefinitely synonymous. Fear is a human reaction where a dangerous situation is a specific circumstance, that is likely to have specific outcomes. The relationship between the human and the circumstance is a very complex one, and highly subjective. It is subjective based upon personal experience. People have different fears because people have different experiences or results with specific circumstances.

What I was explaining was a very reduced reasoning for the phenomenon that can be universally the same for every individual under any circumstance. In my opinion total awareness goes beyond specific circumstances and the complexities of all possibility. Ie: If a woman walking alone at night see's a man in a dark alley, it is reasonable for her to fear the possibilities of the situation based on her knowledge of rape and murder etc. However, this is only one possibility and does not make this specific man harbour ill-intended thoughts. If she was to be fully aware, she would acknowledge that what she is seeing is just a representation of many things occurring at once (Night=Time of day, Alley=location, Man being there=another person's experience. etc). The man could be scared and hiding, he could be meeting someone, he cold be homeless and cold...and on and on. The fact of the matter is there are lots of possible explanations to account for his being there at that time. Her interpretation of fear is a reaction to one possibility of that occurrence, which is not total awareness.

Oh it certainly serves its purposes, undoubtedly. It certainly has helped our evolution. At this point in the game though I feel it's just a matter of establishing where our fear can be utilized to benefit us and where it can be discarded because it can harm us.

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reverie

I must emphasize that what I entailed was the most reduced version of the concept as possible. I would agree with you that fear also entails not being able to influence one's reality. I would say that that specific issue could be accounted for what I explained as "awareness". This awareness is something that comes from our conditioning. The realization of inability stems from trial and error or ones exposure to specific situations. All these factors play together, and to the degree of their effect is dependent on the personal composition of the individual.

The feeling of inability is probably one of the most reasonable reaction to the reaction of fear there is. For it includes a healthy dose of reality and relativity of other possibilities. However, it still can be limited by focusing too much on a certain type of possibility. It then becomes parasitic in regards to initiating action.

Yeah, pretty much anything that they are not experiencing at that moment, physical or not (because we stoners know how experience can extend beyond the physical. Ie: the mental mindscape.).

It definitely is an occurrence that can also account for our desires and really anything else that can be realized through possibility. It makes you wonder how unique specific experiences are, when they follow very similar basic motivations. Where is the individuality we pide ourselves so much upon? Lol, fickle indeed.

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verklingen

thank you for clarifying, i have an entirely different view on awareness that i'd like to share here. to me, being aware of potentials is not awareness. it's really more using your imagination than anything, like a mental exercise. true awareness to me is more like what socrates described: knowing that you know nothing. for all the careful planning and "guarding against the future" you may undertake, one simple uncontrollable possibility is enough to bring it to shambles. is it unfair, or were your expectations simply unrealistic? this is why i consider awareness in this way, along a line of thinking which supposes we can approach the comprehensive awareness of all potentialities necessary to arrive at our goal in exactly the way we plan, to be a farce. much of the trouble we experience is rooted in such misaligned, disintegrated expectation. it's an experiential wall we bang our heads on time and time again.

true awareness to me is simply being aware of what is happening each and every moment to the extent that it applies to you so that you may also become aware of the ways in which you may react to it. in a way you might say that the further you project your reactions from now, the deeper the trap you lay for yourself. the only question is: can we trust ourselves? well, whether we believe we can or not we have to. we're trusting ourselves to control the world already. . . i don't think it's too big a leap to begin trusting our ability to handle circumstances as they appear in our lives.

this is where our imagination comes in again, and this is where we can exercise the real control that we DO have: our ability to reflect and dream up how to best react under our current circumstances in order to bring about the kind of result we favor. not by barging through life and making demands, but by rolling with it in a graceful dance of curiosity and appreciation. if we treat every unexpected happening as an opportunity to flex our muscle so to speak instead of taking offense to it, we might be pleasantly surprised by what we find. gotta keep at it, though. it's a kind of puzzle you must engage your whole being in to keep from losing track. but it's YOUR life! you should be paying attention anyway, right?

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FourtySecondRip

i think there is 2 types of fear. Physical fear which is the chemical reaction someone mentioned, something you cant really control. I think this was probably leftover from evolving out of animals maybe. Basically its a automatic response to try and keep you safe, almost all animals have this. Then theres mental fear which i believe is our consciousness trying to give us the heads up for situations that dont evoke the response physically. What i mean is we realized how effective fear is at keeping species alive and wanted to get that benefit in other aspects of our life other the immediate physical threat. I dunno let me know if that makes sense to you guys

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SpankyMcLankey

I figured out the scariest thing I've ever done. Definitely swimming in the open ocean. It fucking freaks the FUCK out of me. You can't see what's 1 foot under you. When I'm just out there fucking treading water between waves you can't even see the shore 100 feet away when your at the bottom of a swell. Once and awhile you bump into the occasional fish/seaweed or just nick something in the water with your toes. Just imagining myself in 3rd person from underwater and what could be under all the dark water below me.

clive

I didnt read the entire thread. but fear allows us to react to bad situations in a faster response. its just a basic programmed reaction. nothing to do with higher thoughts.

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verklingen

^ what basic programmed reaction is the fear of dying in a plane crash, or having a meteor crash down on your head (my daughter had that one)? how would that fear allow you to respond more quickly?

i think fear is an emotion that we must deal with just like becoming angry or sad or whatever. and if any of these can be consider programmed reactions, i think we can likewise program ourselves to work through it in a fulfilling way.

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clive

The reaction of fear, is to avoid something, like a plane crash or a meteor falling. it's quite simple really. you nigs always trying to over-complicate things when they're simple.

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verklingen

i gotcha mate, but is it really that cut and dry? you don't think people with such fears could be misapplying what they feel, or externalizing a sense they'd rather not face internally? i suppose the main theme or energy of fear is insecurity. can our insecurities manifest as fears? i don't mean like the reactionary fear we feel when encountering a bear, with a rush of adrenaline and all. i mean the fear of something that hasn't happened yet. maybe it's happened before and maybe not, but i'm starting to see how fear, at least for myself, can be the result of misapplied expression. i don't know how many here have experienced the crippling fear of uncertainty, but it feels a bit like a being caught in a circuit which loops due to a short. and in a way you truly are shorting a circuit in your experience of the moment by forcibly opening yourself up to something which is not present in the moment.

you can call it over-complicated, i just say there's lots to think about.

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reverie

Communication breakdown, its always the same...
Semantics

Well I just want to point out that I personally wouldn't describe my absolute ideal of awareness as projecting reactions either. I plucked that word out of the air for communication's sake. I was after all explaining fear, not awareness. In this specific context the word "awareness" was simply used to signify one's attention to what is going on and the acknowledgment of possibilities....all in relation to what happens when one experiences fear.


If everyone genuinely harboured the practical application of your idea of awareness I'm not sure fear as we know it would exist.

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ziplock

Dope thread Of course, all is IMHO...

Fear is a self-preservation mechanism. Us humans, as opposed to say your cat or dog, have a deeper understanding and definition of "self" and therefore we see fear arise in a myriad of situations not all surrounding simply the threat of physical harm/death. From my observations, fear arises after the perception of potential threat to self. This could be us personally, those close to us, our routine and way of life, our means of providing for our life, etc, etc, etc.

It's a regulatory system, it keeps in check the consciousness. If one were to not have fear, we as a species would have most likely died off long ago as we ran around trying to embrace bears and such. Jesus, for instance, lacking this regulatory system, was consequentially torn apart by the wolves he attempted to embrace. Most bunnies don't embrace wolves, they turn tail and get the fuck out of there.

That's not to say every wolf is going to chew your ass, but it only takes 1. It's then more cost effective, or safe, to run from 100 wolves than it is to bank on the odds that you won't run into the 1 in 100 that could kill you. The more aware you are of the odds (1:100, 1:50, 1:25, 1:10, etc) the more fear you feel thus the more motivation you get to do something about it.

Fear and pain serve pretty much the same purpose as far as self preservation goes. Fear manifests in the present as a reaction to the past in anticipation of the future.

Awareness is of course the key in all of this and life in general. I will not argue the submitted definitions of awareness in this thread, instead I will simply state my own. Awareness a quality of attunement. We think of a dark room, with a light that gradually builds radiating from the center. In the beginning of this scenario, we are unaware of our surroundings. We're configured in a way that attunes us to receive visually a certain bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum via our eyes. We need "light" in order to see. There being EM radiation within this bandwidth (light) results in our perception of nothing, of unawareness (dark). As light is introduced to our surroundings we begin to receive stimuli being transmitted at the frequency that falls into our bandwidth, into our awareness. Now we begin to be able to perceive certain characteristics of our surroundings. We then established a relation, we are interacting, with these objects.

For the mind, awareness could utilized as a measurement of how much of the bandwidth we are able to receive. We then consider self-awareness. We can imagine you as an overall wave on a piece of graphing paper for instance. Self-awareness is then the bandwidth that your "ego" is able to receive of this wave. No one is completely self-aware or things like conditioning, emotional reaction, etc, would not exist. Our "level" or "degree" of self- awareness (or in a way I like to put it, the level of intimacy in our relationship with ourselves) changes constantly or else things like conditioning, emotional reaction, etc, would not exist.

I believe that "self" can be considered somewhat of a fifth-dimensional object. Our body then representing the third-dimensional "shadow" of this fifth-dimensional self. The mind, consciousness, what we consider ourselves under the names we've been attributed, is then the fourth-dimensional "shadow", thus our conscious experience of space and time. Being aware of what was occurring 5 seconds ago and the progression from there to the current.

Here then, self-awareness encompasses potentials and probabilies or future as well as the past and the present. Self being 5th dimensional places it a "level" higher than time. To demonstrate this, if we were "conscious" 5th-dimensionally what we see as a fluid progression of "time" would appear as a singular "static" characteristic. The 3rd-dimensional characteristics of the objects around us appear "static" though we know they're moving through space-time. In the same way, the totality of our lives, from start to finish, would not appear as a fluid progression as it does to us, but as a static characteristic of an object moving through the 6th dimension which would then be the backdrop of the fluid progression.

Anyways, hopefully that offered up some different perspectives on the things you guys are looking at.

Cheers

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