The Fear To say the least, fear is humankinds most defining feature.

Fear is the basis of emotion, from which milder and more frivolous emotions arise. Fear gave birth to anger and sorrow, all three linked very closely and commonly associated with each other. Some say that love and happiness are separate from fear, that they are opposites and this is true to many degrees. However, pure forms of these emotions almost never exist as fear overrides all emotions. Without darkness, there is no light and for humans, fear is our darkness. Fear is also a crucial part of our survival system. This fear ranges from paralyzing fear of heights to the fear of pain and suffering. Without fear, man would blunder blindly on, oblivious to the need for self-preservation. Fear of death is what drove the human race and what drives us still today. If we were immortal, our existences would simply cease to have meaning, our lives would not be considered sanct. As writer Peter Carey put, in Conversations with Unicorns, death is a gift, the greatest gift any living being has ever received. Death, as logic states, makes life worth living. However, fear is also considered irrational, that fear is simply an illusion created by the mind and is not a logical process. Fear is indeed an illusion created by the mind and is in no way supported by any logical process. However, all the senses of the human body; taste, touch, sight, smell and sound are also such illusions. The universe is not composed of objects which release such senses, but are simply perceived, through human detection organs to be able to stimulate a certain sense. The universe is essentially tasteless, blind and deaf. Even the sense of touch is an illusion as no atom can come into direct contact with any other atom, only come very close to doing so. Everything we know today is all an illusion of a mass of atoms that will always be alone. But is this a bad thing? Of course not. Why? Because we simply cant tell. The phrase ignorance is bliss has been bandied around a lot and been the subject of many a debate. Ive even seen a T.V. show send a large sandbag into a blindfolded (and padded, thank god were not THAT stupid) contestant just to see if this bliss is real or simply a figment of our imagination. Personally, I hate the term as bliss itself is an imperfect word. To imply that someone has bliss, you must first make sure that the person in question has no sense of fear at all. Perfect happiness will never exist. Not now, not ever, not as long as there is no perfect fear. To put all of this into picture, imagine a graph where higher values imply greater happiness and lower values describe greater fear or sadness, and say that Zero is anything without emotion. Everyone would have two values on that graph, a degree of happiness and a degree of sadness. Needless to say, the two values are explicitly linked. The greater the sadness one has, the greater the happiness they can get. How can you express happiness without first feeling fear? I actually watched a movie called Spirited Away and this is shown in fullest when the main character is violently ripped away from everything she previously understands and knows to a world where she is all alone and her parents are turned into pigs. After the ordeal, when a stranger sits her down and gives her something to eat, she bursts into tears. To experience so much fear and sadness that a morsel of food will make you cry is very significant. Admittedly, her emotions were brought about

more from the slight relief that was given to her, rather than actual happiness, but the world is full of such excess variables and variants. Anyways, to all of you who are reading this, please dont try to say a fundamentally flawed statement like that ignorance is bliss. Instead, say ignorance is important. Because ignorance makes your knowledge that much more important. On a side note: infinity. It is a stupid concept, utterly irrational and ridiculous. I think Ill tackle it later. You could argue that my supremely awesome and sexy graph of happiness and fear can go on forever until it hits infinity i.e. perfect happiness and fear, but really, you cant possibly imagine or begin to fully comprehend something like infinity. Its essentially an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail because perfect happiness and perfect fear can also be considered as Zero, nothing, zilch. Infinity is equal to zero, because its so big that it folds back into itself. Gah, its too much, Ill just leave it like this and see if you guys can think of something better. Ciao!