Fear comes with life, for all that is born will surely die. A star, a planet, a human or a tree, all of these have a life expectancy upon the expiry of which they all succumb to the opposite of life— death.

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The most primal fear — that of not being or death — is shared by all manifest objects in the universe. In yogic terms, this emotion of primal fear is said to be concentrated in the Mūlādhāra Chakra or the Root-Identity Consciousness.

Primal fear in humans is to be seen in four parts. The first part, physical fear, deals with the physical body wherein pain and disease, lack of physical fitness, are some of the causal factors. Second is emotional fear or fear of certain emotions that cause pain, which feel overpowering and beyond one’s control. Third is mental fear or fear of the unknown. This fear particularly dominates among decision makers and others who define their self-identity predominantly in terms of intellect. Last is the afterlife fear, or the fear of the unknowable, the state following organic death.

Together these four fears cause the greatest disturbances to the equilibrium of the body-mind complex. Fear and fear-based stress or aggression, usually referred to as the body’s fight or flight response, lead to systemic degeneration, quicker rates of cell apoptosis (programmed cell death) and lack of inner vitality or joie de vivre, the very basis of life. This is because it constant disturbs the pituitary-adrenal mechanism of hormonal regulation

Over a period of time, the effect of this hormonal disturbance is felt in the cardiovascular system and the muscles of the heart. It causes the heart’s pacemaker — the Sino-Atrial Node — to be overactivated, leading to arrhythmic heartbeat sequences. Fear, thus, causes wear and tear of the heart and the malfunctioning of its pacemaker system. Hypertension, which is also based in mental fear, can further lead to stenosis and arterial contraction, thus leading to early arteriosclerosis (thickening and hardening of the walls of the arteries) and the onset of conditions conducive to seizures, stroke and heart attacks.

The four forms of fear together decide most of our actions

What we often consider our desires or ambition arise out of the necessity to escape from deep fears. So, we are usually running toward something only to escape from something else. In contrast, were we to control our fears, we would be able to have a totally different perspective on our ambitions and desires.

Fear closes the psychological heart and forces us to believe we have limited choices if we wish to attain success, security and love. The conundrum here is that the very definitions of success, security and love are usually generated by the fear principle.

The opposite of fear being freedom, the seeking of freedoms for oneself and granting the same to others becomes imperative for those who would like to move towards an open heart and find equilibrium in the physical body-mind complex.

The very first of the four basic fears, the physical fear, is to be overcome through active full body exercises, such as swimming and running, as well as hiking in the wilds. Where possible, one should practise full contact sports such as boxing or wrestling. The beautiful skeleto-muscular architecture of the human body is not meant to be wasted behind a desk, and it should not be considered old and fragile past the age of 50. Rather, regular maintenance of the body keeps it in a state of ideal fitness and athletic lightness that only undergoes degeneration after 80 years of age.

The second of the four basic fears, emotional fear can be overcome by first reducing and then terminating altogether the kind of associations we have generated between some emotions and specific memories. While we do not control memories — because the perceptional or sensory experience that produced the memory was not under our control — we do have complete control over the emotions we attach to each experience. In normal circumstances, we do not seem to have this control and the experience almost seems to come with an emotion attached to it, as if it is the situation or the other person who is responsible for the emotion and not us. In a retrospective and prospective method, it is this lack of control and reversed accountability that must be corrected if we are to evolve as individuals and as a progressively polarised society.

The third of the fears, mental fear, can only be overcome by the method of combining opposites. What that means is when we have a certain thought and then set up a train of connected thoughts behind this thought, the whole thing starts chugging along— it tends to gain its own momentum. The very force of this ‘train of thought’ then tends to justify its own reality or ‘truth’. The problem with this is that there is no way of knowing if the train of thought is in the station of truth or not. It is ironic, but it is by such force of thinking that a person becomes a fundamentalist or an ideologue, ready to war with nations and take up arms. To prevent ourselves from falling into such traps, we must counter this with other thought processes that might run completely counter to our own well-established ones that run along our well-defined reference frame. This then allows us to get to a constantly progressive mental framework where new thought processes and understandings are being consistently created by the voluntary cognitive dissonance generated by the collision between our normal thoughts and their counters.

The last of the four fears, the afterlife fear, is instinctive at the most primal layer in all manifest beings— even a stone. That is why a stone, through its mineral structure, resists any change and possesses inertia, the quality shared by all manifest beings. Everything that is not, wants to be. Everything that is, wants to continue being, but all are destined to lose their being in death. In short, there is no death, only if there is no birth, but there is always ‘life’, or to put it more succinctly, there exists only the continuity of experience, which is compartmentalised and categorised by us as birth, life, death, afterlife, rebirth, etc. Knowing this and abiding within this knowledge, the greatest of the fears, that of not-being, is overcome and transformed.

Of the 8 knots or affective blocks of the mind that cause hormonal imbalance and disease of the cardiovascular system, fear and its four components are the foundation. From this quadrant complex of fear arises doubt, with which we dealt in Part 2 of this series.

In Part 4 we shall look at the third set of knots which are generated from the doubt complex— lust.

Previous articles in this series:

Healthy Hearts: Part 1 | What is yoga’s solution to heart disease?

Healthy Hearts: Part 2 | Five yoga asanas to manage stress

AryaMarga Yoga is a yogic research institute based out of Himachal Pradesh. Their work primarily focuses on the integration of certain parametric systems of contemporary psychology with the ancient yogic systems of mental process-control.