"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
 
 

There’s two ways to tackle this. One would be to say that you could find an excuse to not fear something, In other words overriding the source with an exemption, or to actually go below and make an excuse out of the source, by submerging deeper into the mind, like what Frank Herbert did here with a passage from DUNE. Specifically speaking, after thinking about this thought I realized that it was the truth. When I get nervous or afraid, It’s like this cancerous fear that’s like a choking feeling, building up and up in the minutes and moments before I have to do a risky action. The fear, I believe, comes from the fact that I tell myself over and over again not to be afraid.  Applied to the passage, I’m not really looking my fear in the eye, I’m just trying to get around it by (what I said before) operating on a higher plane of consciousness; trying to patch up a dam. On a better point, I’ve also found when I take it to the opposite end and form a root thought deeper than the fear itself, it’s hardly as bad (and sometimes I don’t fear at all). For example… I always hated giving speeches. I found myself saying “don’t get afraid, don’t get afraid, don’t get afraid”, and when it came down to give the speech, I found an insurmountable amount of anxiety (which was in reality, I believe, simply all those chants directed at this point in time, as if my mind had stored the instructions and was receiving them all now). To complete this loop, all I had to do was go one step lower than my fear and look at the facts: in this case, was I a good speech giver in reality, or not? I knew I was, but all I had to do if I wasn’t was to practice more. When based on truth and reputation, the fear seemed like more of an insecurity than anything else, and I found I didn’t have to resort to tricks like I did before to get around the point of nervousness. Since I was closer to myself, my consciousness carried through rather than having to switch off.   6-7-98