How Fear Effects Us

The capacity for happiness is a heritage that some possess and others lack. I have never been able to decide whether mankind is "meant" to be happy. Probably an easy attainment of content would paralyze human effort. I have asked many men and women of middle age if they would like to live their lives over again, and I have never received a direct affirmative reply. There is always an " if." " // I could begin again, with ray experience of life." " // I could avoid the unhappiness and the stress that I endured in early life." " // I were well-to-do." " // I could do the work that I like." And so on. I am told that there are persons who would willingly begin to re-live their past lives, without any provisos. I can only say that I have never found these exceptional persons in any class of society.

The reality principle and the pleasure principle are in constant warfare in the human breast. Hard reality, shorn of all illusions, is abhorrent to the great majority of persons. They do not wish to know the truth. They are terrified of reality, and stop their ears, and cry: " Please don't tell me! Leave me my dreams; let me have my fantasy and illusion ! " A moment's reflection upon the universal love of illusions that conduce to comfort of mind will prove how arduous is the bold confronting of reality. Almost everywhere, and among- the most uncultured people, there is a longing- to believe in a future life beyond the portal of death. Myriads of mankind have found solace in supernatural, purely hypothetical creeds.

Millions of human beings have fought and rended each other through dissensions in opinion upon the reality or the validity of a dogmatic illusion. The flight from reality represents a perennial terror in the civilized human breast, and a way of escape is found in the substitution of compensatory myth for actuality, in neurotic illness, in narcotism of the senses with wine or drug's, or in physical disorder. Many men and women become invalids through a fear of life.The very helplessness of the sick and infirm is a protection against the insupportable task of living robustly. "Conversion hysteria," the development of bodily pathological symptoms, is a common mode of flight from reality. The drug addict and the dipsomaniac seek escape in hypnotic dreams.

A substituted form of escape from reality is a supreme passion for art and poetry, or a fervent mysticism. Religion is unquestionably a profound consolation and an inspiration for many. There are nevertheless an enormously increasing number of those persons who are quite insensitive to conventional religious influences. The woman of the world, who declared that " there is more satisfaction in a well-fitting gown than in all the consolations of religion," is representative of a host of indifferentists. The number of earnest-minded critical inquirers is small as compared with the vast number of sheer indifferentists.

There are minds with a religious bias, and others to whom religion makes little appeal, or none. What, then, is. the substituted consolation, or the source of compensation, for the innately non-religious? The desire to live is as strong in these persons as in the religious types, and many of them find their highest satisfaction in material things and sensual pleasures. The state of their souls does not trouble them; they do not ask questions of life; they experience no spiritual conflicts and throes.

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Category: Dependent Woman