Fear
April, 2003
We’re afraid of so many things. There’s so much fear in our lives. And yet the texts don’t treat fear all that much, largely because there are many different kinds of fear — fear associated with greed, fear associated with anger, fear associated with delusion — and the texts focus more on the emotions behind the fears than on the fears themselves. The implication here is that if you want to understand your fears, you have to understand the emotions behind them. You have to analyze fear not as a single, solid thing, but as a compound of many different factors, to see which part of the fear is dependent on the greed or passion, which part is dependent on the aversion, and which part is dependent on the delusion. Then, when you’ve taken care of the underlying emotions, you’ve taken care of the fear.