You need only watch the evening news to see how fear driven humanity has become. So much of what the media presents displays and exacerbates our fears that we have to wonder, how much of our daily individual experience includes fear? Do we need fear? Can we live without it? Many of the world’s finest minds have chimed in about fear. Heidegger brought these fears to the center of his existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of [humanity] is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation. Marcus Aurelius thought that if you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. President Roosevelt taught us that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. The Buddhists think that mindful meditation relieves us of our fears. Some consider fear to be paradoxical: Fear is what keeps our boundaries. If we do not listen to that fear, that knowledge that there is something imminent that is not us, we will face the second type of fear, the fear that destroys all boundaries.
What do YOU think?
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