Fear changes over a lifetime. As children we are more daring; as adults we develop certain mechanisms, and fear can take many shapes. But what is fear actually made of?
The fear is not in the elevator
A fear always seems to be about something outside us. Often people say they are afraid of something, for example, I'm afraid of elevators, or I'm afraid of cockroaches. But the fear is not an element of the elevator. It is not part of its walls, what it's made of, or how it functions. The fear is yours. So fear is not something that happens to you, but rather something created by you, and that belongs to you. And, most importantly, it feeds off the attention you give it.
So if the fear is not in the elevator, where does it come from? We will look at what it really is, why it grows the more you attend to it, why it stops making sense the moment you question it, and where it leads if you follow it all the way down.
What happens when you question a fear
If we start questioning our fears, it's possible that they will begin to run out of reasons to exist. Let's say you are afraid of cockroaches. Afraid of what, exactly? You may say, "They're disgusting." But disgust is not fear. Then you may reason that they carry diseases. And if you ask, "Which disease?", you might not know for sure. You've heard something once. Oh, but they might fly and land on you. But if it lands on you, what happens? Each answer, when you look at it, as it is, is not really about the cockroach. You might fear the discomfort of having one flying on you, or you might fear a disease you may catch.
This is also why a fear never comes alone. Ask about its reasons, and it reaches for another, and another, because fear does not exist on its own. It's always accompanied.
Why fear grows the more you feed it
Fear is not the only feeling that lives on attention. All of them do. Let's take hatred, for example. That's an easy one to notice. If you are not thinking about the person you resent, the hatred is asleep; it does nothing on its own. But bring the person to mind, and remember why you resent them, and you can feel it begin to rise in the body.
This is how such feelings stay alive. A good feeling is easy to maintain. It's like a friend you haven't spoken to in a while: the moment you meet again, it feels like yesterday. A heavy one, like resentment or fear, is different: it has to be fed, and it has to be fed often. Fear and hatred: every time you talk about them and live them again, you make them bigger.
Why we go looking for fear
If feeding a fear only makes it bigger, it would make more sense to stay away from it. But we do the opposite, and quite often we even spend money on it. We watch horror movies, or go to roller coasters. Some of us might even slow down for the crash on the road, or watch the news that shows only the horror in the world. If a feeling is unpleasant, what makes us seek it out?
You may say these are different things. But take the rush of the roller coaster: the adrenaline is no different. Fear of heights and being excited by them, what's the difference? And remember that fear is always accompanied. So that rush might be attached to the fear of something, and a horror movie or a bungee jump might feed every fear that resonates with it. It is a small startle that can later raise emotions in you, in a different situation that shares the same base fears.
One question we can leave open: why do we keep feeding it, be it through fear or through rush and adrenaline? Why is there an intrinsic need to keep feeding it? There is even a children's film built on the idea, a whole city powered by the screams of frightened children, as if the fear were fuel for something else. Remember this?
A fear is a small thing you made
Different traditions have tried to name what we are feeding. Some spiritual philosophies, like Theosophy, describe it as a thought-form, or an artificial elemental: a small being made of your own energy, with one function, which is to carry the feeling you gave it. Artificial means made by you, rather than the natural elementals those same traditions speak of, the spirits of nature, which are a different subject for another time. What matters here is what the idea helps us see, not whether elementals are literally real.
Seen this way, a fear of cockroaches is a very small consciousness, and the only thing it knows how to do is to be afraid of cockroaches. That is its whole function in life. It is a single reaction, kept alive because you keep feeding it.
There is a whole structure behind this idea, worth studying on its own. For now it is enough to notice its shape: a fear is something small that you made, a little creature, that knows how to do only one thing, and that stays alive on your attention.
What to do with a fear once you see it
So what do you do with a fear once you see it this way? As opposed to what a lot of practices may say, what I'd propose is not to fight it or face it. Ask it some questions, the same ones I mentioned before. Afraid of what? Why? And is that true? The antidote to fear is truth. Under an honest question, a fear runs out of reasons to exist.
But notice that you are not destroying the fear. You are giving it something it did not have: more consciousness. A fear creature that begins to know itself can no longer only be afraid. It changes and expands. Some traditions would say it is sublimated, transmuted, and the energy it had been eating comes back to you, free now for something better.
This is why the answer is not courage. Courage still assumes there is something to conquer, some fear left to push through. Fear does not ask for force but for truth, and what keeps it expanding and gaining consciousness is peace. A quiet mind gives off no heat for a fear to feed on. You are not fighting a war against fear, because that would only make it bigger. You are simply no longer feeding it, but giving it truth, so it can expand into something else entirely.
Nearly every fear ends at the fear of death
There is one more thing worth noticing once we start talking about this. Remember that a fear never comes alone: ask it why, and it hands you another fear, and that one hands you another. Follow the chain down far enough and it almost always arrives at the same place. Afraid of the elevator, because it might malfunction and not open. Afraid to be trapped. Afraid not to be able to breathe. Nearly every fear, followed all the way down, ends at the fear of death.
Ask the same of death. Death itself is not the frightening part; everyone dies, and you have always known that. What frightens us is that when death comes close, what we actually say is: not now. Not yet.
And not yet is a wish. It means this is not how I wanted it to go. It is happening differently than I expected. The expectation that things would be different than they are is where most of our suffering lives.
One less fear in the shared field
Even that wish for things to be otherwise is a feeling like any other. A feeling given consciousness does not change only in you. Some traditions say it changes the field it came from, the cloud of feelings we all share as humanity. A fear made conscious is one less fear in that cloud, for everyone. This is the quiet, unglamorous way a person changes the world: by taming their own creations, rescuing them, talking to them, giving them consciousness, allowing them to be sublimated, transformed.