Today I made an interesting correlation between religious doctrine and self-empowerment concepts. By watching ghostly horror movies based around demon mythology, I have lately become familiar with the “know the name of the demon to expel it” idea. Today I realized when reading an article that this correlates to the idea of understanding your fears in order to overcome them.
By naming your personal demon, your fears, you can then attack the issue head on. By seeking out this discomfort or fear and developing the skills to address potential negative outcomes, you can rob the fear of its influence thusly expelling the demon.
Sometimes the fear is of rejection itself in which case seeking out rejection may offer a solution. Sometimes the fear is of a specific outcome, like a failure to succeed, or of personal harm. In these types of cases, you can arm yourself with the best odds of success through preparation, training, or other mitigation strategies.
In a boring American life of routine drudgery, of going to class or work and having little exposure to genuine life threatening fear, we manifest unjustified fears within our mundane realities. The human mind evolved with a fight or flight response as a survival mechanism and at the subconscious core, the mind will attempt to frame our existence in these terms.
While there are activities every day that expose all of us to mortal danger, modern society has built in mitigation strategies to address these dangers. Things like safety restraints in cars and police and firefighters. While these strategies are not 100% effective, a preoccupation or excessive level of fear may manifest as anxiety or compulsive disorders or simply as an inability to function effectively.
The mind has also evolved the ability to disregard information to allow the effective concentration on a central focal point. This is necessary as the mind is constantly consuming massive amounts of information through various sensory inputs. To be able to perform any task effectively, the mind must be able to concentrate on a central point of focus and ignore competing information.
Fear corrupts this ability to concentrate. Fear holds the mind hostage to a single issue or concern and colors one’s entire perception of reality. A mind enslaved by fear leads to a person defined by it. Or perhaps put another way, a person enslaved by fear is a person possessed.
