"Fear," the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway."

Fear means being afraid of the future. When you are not ready to accept the future moments, it becomes fear.

fear is a visceral response to imminent jeopardy, real or perceived, threatening to come crashing down on you with devastating results.

Fear is the imaginary response to something that has not happened.

Fear is an old word that derives from the same roots that give us “fare,” as in “thoroughfare.” Although it often causes people to run away from troubling situations, at a deeper level, fear means “to go through it.” The hidden purpose of fear involves bringing us closer to natural instincts for survival, but also for awakening inner resources and sharpening our intelligence when faced with true danger and the basic need to change.

A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat.

Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.

But while all fear is not laziness, much fear is exactly that. Much of our fear is fear of a change in the status quo, a fear that we might lose what we have if we venture forth from where we are now. In the section on discipline I spoke of the fact

Fear is a mental projection of something that has not happened.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

I am
asking myself what is fear not what I am afraid of.
I lead a certain kind of life; I think in a certain pattern; I have
certain beliefs and dogmas and I don't want those patterns of
existence to be disturbed because I have my roots in them. I don't
want them to be disturbed because the disturbance produces a state
of unknowing and I dislike that. If I am torn away from everything
I know and believe, I want to be reasonably certain of the state of
things to which I am going. So the brain cells have created a
pattern and those brain cells refuse to create another pattern which
may be uncertain. The movement from certainty to uncertainty is
what I call fear.

Fear is incomplete knowledge.

A great deal of fear is a result of just “not knowing.” We do not know what is involved in a new situation. We do not know whether we can deal with it. The sooner we learn what it entails, the sooner we can dissolve our fear.

Fear means you’re trying to move toward something you love, but your old beliefs, or unhealed experiences, are getting in the way.