FEARNESS

WHAT IS FEAR?
Fear plays a very important part in our daily life, and in human society as a whole. Fear comes in many shapes and forms, but it could be described as: an unpleasant feeling of perceived risk or danger, real or not. It functions to make us alert and ready for action while expecting specific problems.
As is often said, fear lies at the basis of all religions. At the time humans were gatherers and hunters, little was understood of the world around them, so without understanding the causes for many everyday experiences there is logically existential fear. In search for understanding the world around them, shamans and mystics tried to explain the world with invisible and incomprehensible aspects aspects like spirits, gods, nature itself, the sun and moon etc. which also gave the possibility to do something about 'the unexpected' by pleasing the gods and spirits with prayers and rituals. Later on, more advanced ideas and philosophies developed, and of course, organized religions.
Also Buddhism is to an extent based on fear; the fear of suffering. The historical Buddha went out on his spiritual quest when he realized that everybody is subject to discomfort, problems and pain, and with the goal to find a way to end it alltogether he discovered a 'way out'.
In fact, this is not too different from the main motivation to develop human civilization: we fear discomfort so we store food for more difficult times, we prepare ourselves for dangers like wild animals, or to defend ourselves from other humans. This fear of discomfort and attachement to comfort has driven humans in their development from a type of smart monkey to a creature that has gained control over nearly all other living beings on this planet.
Our most basic fear is the fear of death, which functions to make us alert in dangerous situations, and can thus be a very healthy emotion. But much less dramatic reasons of fear are found everywhere in our daily lives: 'Did I lock the house?', 'Isn't this food unhealthy?', 'Is my health insurance high enough?', 'Shouldn't my daughter be home yet?'. These worries can be based or quite baseless. Problematic types of fear can be when we are afraid of things that do not pose any real threat, like fear of spiders or large spaces. Fear and paranoia, together with attachment, craving and hatred are usually responsible for wars.
In all cases, we could say that fear is a reaction to something that may happen in the future, be it realistic or not, it is always uncomfortable. And here we find one of the contradictions of fear itself: it should work to keep us from discomfort, yet it is uncomfortable itself.
PROJECTION
As fear is based on something that we think may happen in the future, it is clearly a mental process which tries to predict the future - in that sense, the reason of fear is a projection of our mind. We can be afraid to fall, but once we are falling, we are afraid to hit the ground, once we hit the ground, we may fear we have a bad injury, once we know we have a bad injury, we may fear the pain and the consequences of not being able to work for some time or become disabled etc. So one could say that fear is always based on something that has not happened yet, and is therefore a fantasy of our mind rather than fact.

ADDICTION TO FEAR
Some people like fear, because in activities like riding a roller-coaster or during bunjee-jumping, we get an adrenaline-rush: a physical reaction to make us alert and ready for action - some people actually get addicted to this natural drug and get into extreme activities. This can easily lead to needing more dangerous situations more often, so they may tend to take ever increasing risks - until the parachute does not open, or the weather changes while climbing a steep, dangerous mountain slope......
SUFFERING
Fear is generally a very uncomfortable feeling - Buddhists would call it therefore a form of suffering. We do not like to be afraid, but still, our fear can keep us from harm for example as it makes us hold back when we see a snake or a fast car straight in our direction. So, yes, we need to realize danger and be alert, but once we are alert, we cannot do much more than whatever we think is best in the situation. If we let our fear take over completely, we can even 'freeze' and become completely helpless. Similarly, many of us are afraid for quite irrational things, meaning things that do not really pose any threat to us. For example, fear of spiders, small enclosed spaces or large spaces. Life can become really difficult, simply because illogical projections and delusions are taking over our normal, rational mind and small things can begin to determine our whole life. In that case, we can start to talk about having a phobia.
PHOBIA
The process of normal fear turning into phobia is very similar in Buddhist psychology to when anger turns into blind hatred or a liking of chocolate turns into addiction. The difference is in the levels of the fear. Initially, anger or fear may have a useful function in life (to protect ourselves from suffering), but they are both based on mental projections. When these projections grow into something like phobia, it only means that the mind is strongly exaggerating the situation. For whatever reason, our mind gets out of control, and it turns a spider into a monster or the height of a chair into a ravine. So the remedy to phobia cannot really lie in taking medicines, but must be to habituate our mind back to 'normal' reactions.
WESTERN THERAPIES - GENERAL APPROACH
Therapies for irrational fears work on the same basic principle: discover by experience that the feeling of fear (paranoia) is an exaggeration of what we perceive in the world, and force our rational mind to keep in control of the emotion. So, if you are afraid of spiders, perhaps the cure starts with simply drawing them, then looking at a small one - far away locked in a safe place - then forcing yourself to go closer (the rational mind says that nothing can happen), in the end, usually the patients will regain so much control that can even hold a poisonous, hairy, huge tarantula in their hands - obviously the end of therapy! This is not because they are exceptionally brave people, but they have gradually learned to take control over their exaggerated emotions, by realizing these emotions were not based on a real danger.
In extreme cases, people can be much harder to treat. Specifically when the reason for the fear is vague and hardly known, like imagining that you are being followed (paranoia), it is not always straight-forward or simple to make people realize that these fears are unfounded and the rational mind should take control.
Many types of fear/phobia are identified, I found some in a web blog recently:
Common fears:Acrophobia: Fear of heightsArachnophobia: fear of spidersAgoraphobia: fear of open spacesBelonephobia: fear of needlesBrontophobia: fear of thunder and lightningClaustrophobia: fear of confined spacesHamartophobia: fear of sinningSuriphobia: fear of mice and/or ratsNecrophobia: fear of deathPentheraphobia: fear of the mother-in-lawThalassophobia: fear of the seaXenophobia: fear of strangers or foreigners