Page 32 - Life is a Fight for Territory

fear the fear. A healthy concern, sensible caution, a few basic safety procedures and there is no need for the emotional response at all. Why use it then? Because we’ve learned to use it and now the tail is wagging the dog!
If you think about it, if fear is successful in its objective, you avoid the situation you fear and never actually know if the fear was founded in the first place. And because you always experience the fear, you never find out what would happen if you just exercised basic caution without the emotion. The emotion will convince you of its necessity and if you comply, you’ll never know any different. Every time you engage avoidance because of fear, you are reinforcing the credibility of the fear.
The interesting thing about the body’s response to fear is that it is exactly the same for an imagined fear as it is for an actual fear of something right in front of you in the material world.
If you are in the African Savanna and you see a lion, your body responds the same whether you actually see a lion or whether you just thought you saw a lion.
If you just think about that, it is amazing. Imagine you are sitting at home staring blankly out the window. Suddenly just a single thought can pop into your head. Depending on the thought, a feeling of sadness or euphoria or lustfulness or anger can sweep through your body in an instant. Your pancreas secretes a hormone and your liver makes an enzyme that wasn’t there just moments before. The blood flow around your body is altered.
And what was the cause of all these physiological changes? A single thought in your mind that doesn’t exist anywhere except 31