“Anxiety is the fear without a cause” – a better way to put it could be “ anxiety is the fear – the cause can’t be felt consciously”
This establishes the axis of fear -anxiety-consciousness.
The hypothesis is that “anxiety” could be reduced to “fear” if one becomes “conscious” of this.
What’s the payoff – “ that which is not conscious can not be dealt with” – we increase the chances of dealing with something which we are conscious of- we are more likely to bring it to the emotional level -feel it – the unpleasant emotion would still be there but our mind is capable of dealing with it – since from birth onward we have dealt with painful emotions of “hunger” “discomfort” “utter helplessness as an infant” and so on – we survived all that if we are reading this blog.
Reminds me of the movie “ Predator” – the villain is this superhuman “entity” which kills everyone who is “armed”and is able to see everyone because of the thermal sensors it’s equipped with – the hero Major “Dutch” Schaefer( played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) realizes it doesn’t kill the unarmed people and when, out of pure serendipity, he is “covered with mud” the entity can’t see him.
The “entity” has to reveal itself for a hand to hand combat and of course is slayed by the hero.
I always wondered, if one could visualize “anxiety” the same way – it plagues us as long as we are “unconscious” of it or in other words, “armed with our psychological defense mechanisms” ,but when we divest ourselves of these – and are in more primal form -akin to being “covered” with the mud, it has to “reveal itself” and we can slay it in hand to hand combat .
To sum up the thoughts , unarmed=defenseless we have better chance of fighting this entity “anxiety- now reduced to fear” by “ hand to hand combat=feeling it meditatively”.
“ the hand to hand combat” can be perfected through other means – that I would talk about next time.
Mind opening