Fear.

Earlier this morning I was thinking about fear. The trigger was because I was listening to some random conversation in the radio about ghosts and other mystical beings. They mentioned that the form of the ghosts are varies depending on their origins. For example, in Indonesia we have ghosts called Pocong (a ghost that looks like a bolster and travelling by hopping), Kuntilanak (a ghost in form of a beautiful woman with long hair and creppy laughter), and many more, we also have other traditional mystical being like Leak from Bali, Bagaspati from Java and so on. In the western countries the ghosts usually come in form of the existence of a paranormal activity like poltergeist or an appearance of unknown image of someone that repeatedly visiting a certain place or doing a certain activity, they also have mystical beings like vampire or werewolf and many more.

It’s very intriguing for me to know that each country has different ghost from other countries. It made me think that FEAR is actually the product of our own assumptions and perceptions towards a certain thing / condition, thus, it can be varies, because each person has their own fear. How can ghost stories lead me to this Fear theory? Well, a ghost or any other mystical being is somehow scary for us, the idea of something that comes from the dark place or from the dead (the unknown factor of life and the mystery we are yet to experience) somehow gives us the fear. Then how can the form of ghosts varies? Because the local people have a different idea of what is scary for them. The local tales encourage the perception that a certain image or certain creature is scary although the people might have not encountered with the mystical being.

It reminded me of an episode from BBC’s Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of The Baskerville. In the episode Sherlock and Watson dealt with an experiment of a chemical weapon using a gas that will trigger certain paranoia. In this episode, a big hound with red eyes was the image that’s been haunting the client and then Sherlock. To prove his theory that it was only an imagination, Sherlock played a trick on Watson, he told Watson certain criteria of the hound that he made up and then when Watson was exposed to the gas and triggered by a certain condition, he immediately saw the image of the hound exactly as Sherlock wanted him to see. So, basically, Watson’s fear was obviously based on what he expected to see, because in reality, there’s no hound at all.

That concludes that FEAR is the result of our assumptions about something, we “see” what
we “expect to see” from something in a negative way when in reality it might not be like that at all.

We see what we want to see, that’s the thing that people fail to understand. I understand that sometimes, fear makes us be a little more careful and aware but fear should not paralyzed us. I read somewhere in an article that 90% of our fears never really happen that should explain that fear is just a product of our feeling towards something that is uncommon and uncertain for us because we have no idea yet how should we respond to that thing or how should we deal with it. Mostly, once we have dealt with our fears, we will then see that in the end, it's just nothing and we can actually overcome it :)