From the author: This is my existential philosophy. My scientific work, and I share it with you. If this article helps you to be bolder in life, I will be glad. For your attention, the thesis version of the article. Fear is the strongest human emotion, a feeling that arises as a result of internal unconscious anxiety, psychological or physical trauma. This is the definition I give to fear. It’s not for nothing that I call fear both an emotion and a feeling. This is true. There is a basic emotion of fear, a person is born with it. It arises in the soul as a natural reaction of the body to a threat to life. And it manifests itself in a body that begins to move or stops it. The car honked - the man got scared and jumped away. It `s naturally. If you don't jump away, you won't survive. The instinct of self-preservation worked, causing the emotion of fear in a person: “Jump, otherwise you will die!” The feeling of fear is a completely different matter. This is where we fall into the trap of our not-so-best thoughts. The feeling of fear is born in a person’s thoughts; it is a product of the human mind. And the emotion of fear is born in the soul, as a natural reaction of the body to a threat. Do you feel the difference? For example, I feel it. And when I know that I am making up fear, then I have a choice: “Wow! Then I won’t do this and will become free from my invented fear.” And then I am responsible for my invented fear. It is I who create fear for myself, thinking: “I will never get married, I will die from a disease early like my mother and grandmother, I am always unlucky, I will never earn a lot of money, I have an ugly appearance,” etc. .Fear is one feeling, there cannot be several. There are many objects of fear: heights, darkness, bandits, robbers, natural disasters, etc. Anxiety is a CONDITION that has no object. A certain level of anxiety is constantly present in a person. Thanks to this we live. While a person is alive, he is in anxiety. Just like in love. Those people who believe that love can appear and disappear are mistaken. No! She is born with a person and dies with him. Therefore, the questions “do I love?” or “do they love me?” inappropriate. Because there is only one answer: you love and you are loved. While a person is alive, he loves and is in a constant state of anxiety. It is appropriate to put an equal sign here. Anxiety has a lot of energy. When a traumatic event occurs, anxiety levels increase and become unbearable. A defense mechanism is triggered and the person turns anxiety into fear. Fear has an object, you can breathe calmly: “I was afraid of this.” You can do something with fear, overcome it. Confidence in one's own strength appears. And this is worth a lot. Therefore, we can’t escape fear, as in the song “and I can’t escape it anywhere, anywhere.” It turns out that being afraid is beneficial, no matter how you look at it. But this is only at first glance. Man is a part of nature and, in terms of his physiological functions, belongs to the world of animals, whose existence is determined by instincts and harmony with nature. Every living creature experiences fear. Thanks to their instincts, animals and plants unmistakably guess the approach of a thunderstorm or earthquake and do everything to escape. A person has poorly developed instincts, but he has reason, imagination, the ability to think creatively, and this helps him survive. A person knows about his past and future: in the past he was born, and in the future he will die. It would seem that everything is very simple. Born to die, like any living creature. Then why is man given reason, creative imagination, and the ability to create? Is it really just to brighten up your existence? Or maybe in order to destroy the earth and himself? Or maybe man was created in order to save the earth when there was a threat of its destruction? One way or another, this question remains open. On the one hand, man is a part of nature, her child, and on the other hand, he is a creature endowed with intelligence and the ability to resist the forces of nature and enter into confrontation with it. And thisduality is the essence of the existential contradiction inherent in man. Man is not destined to be either here or here completely: he is forced to be a part of nature, to satisfy his needs for food, air, warmth and yet at the same time be separated from it. The source of human horror is the freedom to which man strives and from which he flees. The biblical myth of the creation of man already contains the phenomenon of fear. The act of disobeying the prohibition to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil became the first choice that a person made, the first act of freedom. Along with the need to make a choice and a feeling of freedom, a feeling of loneliness appeared. A person is alone at the moment of choice, and he cannot escape from this. Just as one cannot escape the anxiety that accompanies a person throughout his life. Children's fears are a reflection of the fears of adults. Their main feature is the ability to increase and transform. Children experience fear more often than we think. Unfortunately, during consultations I often have to convince the mother that the child is really afraid. Parents are convinced that this is not actually fear, but an ordinary trick or whim. Children, just like adults, are afraid of death, poverty, disease and natural disasters. The biggest mistake adults make is their lack of faith. Parents sometimes explain to children how to cope with fear, but very rarely accept children's fear. This makes the fears intensify, there are more of them. Imagine a little three-year-old girl Sasha. Big blue eyes with long eyelashes, white curly locks and a pacifier that she never leaves. The little philosopher with the pacifier intimidated the whole family. Even I felt scared for a while, and I was confused when I heard: “I’m afraid of death everywhere: in the elevator, in the entrance, on the bus, in the bedroom.” And it all started with the usual evening so-called whims: I want milk, I want candy, I forgot to say “good night” to my grandmother, don’t close the door, turn on the light,” etc. If parents had paid attention to this from the very beginning and taken a closer look at the child, then the usual fear of the dark would not have turned into a terrible nightmare of sleepless nights and restless days for the whole family. If you listen carefully to the children's stories, you can easily notice that they are talking quite seriously about the monster that lives in the bedroom, or in the kitchen, or even outside the window, about invisible robbers. Since the Chernobyl disaster, a new fear has emerged, the fear of radiation. It manifests itself especially often in children and adults who have lived or are living abroad. This fear is sometimes unconscious. I had to look for a long time for the reasons for the drowsiness of a teenager who slept almost the whole day, waking up only to go to school or to eat. And these symptoms appeared immediately after arriving from abroad. Of course, he was influenced by the fears of his parents, who talked a lot about this before leaving, and by reports about the environmental situation in Belarus in the media. There are several types of situations in which a child develops fear or assumptions about it: this is imitation, trauma , the “punishment-hostility-guilt” system, constantly renewed fear. Imitation is a natural process in which a child adopts the fears of his parents. An anxious mother constantly warns her child about danger; she herself is afraid of the dark, dogs, or being alone at home. Thus, the mother passes on her fears to her children. But an adult can calm himself down with the help of sound reasoning, but a child finds it difficult to do this due to his age and continues to feel vague anxiety. Trauma is a strong mental experience that leaves a mark on a person’s consciousness for a long time, and sometimes for life . Very often, such a trauma is separation from the mother, the very first fear that a child experiences in his life, and the separation can be very short in time. Children react to separation differently: with fever, illness, aggressiveness,the child may become withdrawn and stop eating. It all depends on the character of the baby, the severity of the situation and the reaction of the parents. The “punishment-hostility-guilt” system. When parents yell at a child, only one thing is clear to him - they don’t love him. The child is angry, feels guilty for his anger and is afraid of punishment. Constantly renewed fear is nothing more than the fear of loneliness, when the child begins to understand that he cannot find support anywhere, that close people on whom his survival depends cannot provide complete safety. The child has nowhere to go, no one to turn to. Anxiety and fear of loneliness makes children “stick” to their mother. Unaccountable anxiety, constantly living in the human soul, gives rise to more and more new images and fantasies. Images and fantasies help to cope with the painful experience of fear, a sense of one’s own helplessness. In the film “The Blonde for corner,” the main character is going to marry a man whom she has dreamed of all her life. It would seem that she should be happy, but she is crying. And when she was asked why she was crying, she answered: “I imagined that we would have a boy, he will be.” go to school, then study at the institute, and in the summer their group will be sent to a construction detachment. There will be a fire, our boy will rush into the fire to save people and die.” there may be unexpected and intricate images of fear taken from the environment, but most often they are not enough, because the environment that supplies us with information is not rich enough. Opposites live in a person, and these parts constantly require release. This is helped by identification with other people or characters from films and books. Why did JK Rowling's Harry Potter books become so popular that not only children, but also adults read them? In this book, a little boy feels deeply lonely in the family of his aunt and uncle. His only fault is that he was born into an unusual family, a family of wizards, people unlike everyone else. And he also has a scar on his forehead, left by someone who cannot be named out loud. And this is how he differs from other children. Harry is a modest, even shy, boy. He doesn't do everything well, he makes a lot of mistakes, he is far from the best student in his school. And yet, he successfully copes with difficulties, overcomes his fear and defeats the monster that is trying to kill him. Each of us can see ourselves in the image of Harry, merge with the experiences that the little wizard has to go through, fight the monster with him and defeat him. A small, lonely, defenseless man and a strong, formidable monster, which no matter how much you kill, you cannot kill completely; it is always reborn and always in a new guise. All of these are parts of one whole. Harry will never kill the monster completely, because then it would mean killing himself. Each of us has our own dragon, our own fear, which everyone wants to overcome, but which cannot be killed, because... he is a part of ourselves, each of us. You cannot kill one part of yourself and leave another to live, you can only accept, understand and learn to manage it. A person is always alone, both in grief and even in joy. Loneliness is a condition of life, an experience of human existence that allows a person to maintain, expand and deepen his human nature. Loneliness is inevitable, we all experience existential loneliness, and we all struggle with it. Some try to drown out their feeling of loneliness in incessant activity, try to escape from a terrible reality, do not want to remain themselves, as they really are. Others seek salvation in religion, creative activity,group membership, sex and drugs. The answer to the overwhelming feeling of loneliness is anxiety, which manifests itself on all four levels of human existence: mental, physical, social and spiritual. In diagram form it might look something like this. (The table is colored on two pages, is not copied, it can be viewed in my book, which can be purchased from me personally). At the mental level, anxiety is transformed into fear. Fear becomes for a person both a feeling that stimulates achievement, and an inhibiting, restraining and depriving of strength. If we conditionally divide the feelings that a person has into positive and negative, then we will classify as negative anger, which destroys everything good in a person, which inexorably follows the feeling of fear, shame, guilt, jealousy, disgust, envy. And to the positive ones - healthy aggression necessary to accomplish any task, pride, surprise, sadness, trust, respect, etc. In fact, there are no bad or good feelings or states. Sometimes envy, anger, jealousy and other “bad” feelings can become a stimulus for achievement, and pride can turn into arrogance, joy into frivolity, respect into humiliation, etc. As a result, on a mental level, a person chooses death with disgust for life or death with gratitude to life for all the good and bad that has happened in it over the past years. At the physical level, anxiety causes tension, which also manifests itself in two ways: on the one hand, it is loss of strength, illness, vanity and self-abuse, and on the other hand, activity, good health, purposeful actions. As a result, a person chooses death from old age or death from illness on a physical level. At the social level, anxiety manifests itself in a person’s interactions with society and in his ways of behavior. Ineffective ways of behavior include: self-isolation, infantilism, addiction, violence against others, poverty. And we classify openness, responsibility, freedom in action, in communicating with other people, material wealth, prosperity and the ability to choose as effective ways of behavior and healthy relationships. As a result, a person chooses at the social level to die in war or in peace. On a spiritual level, anxiety manifests itself in choice, the process of creativity, creation, creation. It is at the spiritual level that such human values ​​as choice, love, faith, hope, creation become either true or false depending on the degree of awareness of oneself, one’s true feelings and desires. On the spiritual level, a person finds a way out, a final answer to the painful feeling of existential loneliness and anxiety. Love as a way of unity with the world, merging with another person is a complete and final answer to the problem of existential isolation and anxiety. On the spiritual level, death becomes a free or false choice. As we see, a person experiences different feelings, these feelings transform into each other, complement and at the same time mutually exclude each other. There are not only good feelings and there are only negative ones. In different life situations, a person behaves differently and experiences many different feelings. But most often he is still a kind, accepting, sympathetic and caring person. Or, on the contrary, he is constantly dissatisfied with life, offended by everyone and everything, a person who does not want to take responsibility for his resentment, his illnesses, and his poverty on himself. Fear is the result of an existential contradiction, a person’s chosen freedom of choice, the choice between good and evil. A person chooses what he should be and how to live his life and bears responsibility for this. When I started preparing my report, I wanted to present everything in the form of a diagram so that it would be clear to both myself and everyone who would listen to my speech. I didn’t think then that death would appear in this scheme. I entered it automatically and did not remove it, because... death is a natural outcome of human life and it was impossible not to write about it.!