What is Fear?

The mental state that the author holds brings more undesirable conditions than any other. It paralyzes the body, closes the life channels, and opens the door to the very things it fears. It is born of lack of faith, can harm others when they are held in fearful thought, and can be replaced by faith through knowledge of oneself.

Ralph Waldo Trine published In Tune with the Infinite in 1897. In it he treats fear as more than an unpleasant feeling. To him it is an active force, a way of using thought that has effects on the body, on circumstance, and on other people. Of all the mental states he describes, fear is the one he says brings in the most undesirable conditions.

### Fear as a closing of the channels Trine's whole teaching rests on the idea of divine inflow. The Infinite Spirit is always pouring life, power and health into each person, as far as that person stays open to receive it. Fear works the other way. It contracts. It shuts the channels through which this life would come in. On the bodily level, Trine says fear paralyzes healthy action, tightens the system, and slows the free movement of life forces, so that the body is left open to disease. Where faith opens and expands, fear closes and contracts.

### Fear as an attracting force Trine holds that thoughts are forces and that like draws like. A mind that keeps returning to a feared outcome is giving that outcome its energy and attention. "We invite what we fear," he writes, "the same as, by a different attitude of mind, we invite and attract the influences and conditions we desire." Fear does more than predict misfortune. It helps to bring it about. The man who lives in constant dread of illness or poverty is shaping the conditions he dreads, without knowing it.

### Fear and others Trine gives this part of the teaching special weight. Thought is not shut up inside the person thinking it, so a fearful thought held about another person can reach and affect that person. He tells of parents who, unwittingly, through anxiety and over-care, hold a child so continually in the thought of fear that the very things feared are drawn to the child. Holding a loved one in fearful thought harms them. Holding them in the thought of wisdom and strength, so that they can meet a condition and master it, helps them.

### The root and the remedy Trine traces fear to a lack of faith. The two go together, and one grows out of the other. So the cure begins with knowing oneself: "You must know yourself in order to know your powers." When a person sees that they are one with the Infinite Life and Power, that this Power is with them, and that they are protected by it, fear loses its ground. Faith, rightly understood and rightly used, is a force before which nothing can stand. Once that knowledge comes, fear falls away in the way darkness ends when a light is brought in.

The English word comes from Old English fǣr, which meant "calamity, sudden danger, peril," and is thought to go back to Proto-Germanic \fēraz*. At first the word named the external danger itself. Only in Middle English did it come to mean the inner emotion caused by danger. Trine's teaching, in a way, takes this shift further. For him the inner state is not just a reaction to outside peril. It can help call that peril into being.

Trine's approach to fear works through self-knowledge and the planting of faith.

1. Notice the contraction. Learn to feel the tightening of body and mind that fear brings. Treat it as a sign that the channels of inflow are closing, not as a true account of what will happen. 2. Go back to the root. Because fear grows out of a lack of faith, ask what you have forgotten about your own nature. Remind yourself on purpose that you are one with the Infinite Spirit, and that its life, wisdom and power are flowing through you now. 3. Turn the thought around. Do not keep dwelling on the outcome you dread. Hold the picture of the condition you want, calmly and steadily. Trine teaches that the mind can hold one dominant image or the other, and that the one it keeps is the one it builds. 4. Guard your thought about others. When someone you love is ill, traveling or in difficulty, catch yourself before you surround them with anxious images. Hold them instead in the thought of wisdom and strength, so that they can meet the condition and master it. Trine teaches that such thought reaches them. 5. Plant the seed-thought. Take the thought that you can, plant it in your consciousness, tend it, and cultivate it. It will draw to your aid the influence of other minds that are fearless, strong, and courageous, and if you are earnest and faithful, the time will soon come when fear loses its hold.

"Fear is natural and cannot be helped." Trine meets this directly: "Don't say you can't help it." Saying so only shows that one does not yet know oneself. Take the thought that you can as a seed-thought and tend it, and fear loosens its hold as faith grows, for faith comes from knowing oneself.

"This teaching is about blame." Trine does teach that we invite whatever comes, and that fear is one way we invite it. His point is the remedy: what was caused within can be changed within, and the one who looks within for the cause becomes the master of circumstances instead of their creature.

"Fear is a private matter that affects only me." One of Trine's central points is that fearful thought spreads beyond the person thinking it and can lower the vitality of the people it is aimed at, especially children and the sensitively organized.

"Fear keeps me safe." By fear, Trine writes, nothing is to be gained and everything is to be lost. The mind dominated by fear opens the door for the entrance of the very things it fears.