Another old post that deserves reprinting.

Absorbed wrote:
> I’d like to discuss various manifestations of fear.
> The first I will describe as a job interview. Let’s say someone is
> going to a job interview and is an extremely nervous person. What
> methods could he use to maintain calm during the interview itself? My
> own personal method for this type of situation is visualising myself
> acting confidently, or having a lengthy discussion with myself in my
> journal before the situation, but I am interested in other methods.

This is a good question.

There are two real approaches to this. One is what you could call the
John Basedow approach, which is pretty much what you are describing.
This approach basically assumes that fear is something that affects
you, and is therefore something that you have to overcome. The two
methods you describe rely on this being the case. The main benefit of
this approach is that it does not require a lot of preparation.

The other is what you could call a magical approach. The real problem
with fear is that it makes you perceive things that are not there; it
makes you pay attention to what is in your head rather than what is
real. The example of a job interview is a good example of this. To put
it simply, fear evolved to make people run away from lions (more
correctly, people who ran away from lions were more likely to survive
than those who didn’t). Unless said job interview is your last chance
to save yourself from starving to death, there is no earthly reason
whatsoever to feel the slightest fear. The actual facts are that there
is very little difference between talking to a potential employer at a
job interview, and talking to your brother down the pub. The two
situations are almost identical. It should be easy for most people to
appreciate that when you are 72, retired, and sipping wine on a warm
sunny evening on your back porch, the idea of being frightened in so
small a matter as a job interview you had 50 years ago will seem
amazingly silly.

Yet, the fact is that people do feel fear in such situations, and the
reason they do is because they perceive the situation to be something
other than it actually is. Exams are another good example. A four hour
written exam is really not much different to sitting down at your
kitchen table and writing in your journal for four hours, yet the
perceptions are remarkably different, because in the former situation
you are seeing all manner of things that aren’t there, and in the
latter you are not.

A further illustration of this can be seen in the fact that sometimes
you have good days, and sometimes bad days. You may have had job
interviews where you are doing great answering the questions, easily
developing a rapport with the interviewed, and the interviewer seems
interested and impressed. You may also have had bad interviews where
you just do not connect with the guy, where you get the feeling you
just aren’t communicating well, and the interviewer seems distant and
disinterested. In the latter case, the whole world seems to close
around you, you feel about three feet tall, your voice sounds like a 5
year old boy’s, and you just want to get under the table and hide. Both
of these situations are ultimately one person talking to another in a
more or less cordial and civil fashion. The vast differences in
perception are due to just that, perception. If the externals are
similar, what is causing the difference in perception is the internals.

Up to now, these two approaches may sound similar. The John Basedow
approach would say that you have to modify these ‘unfavorable’
perceptions and turn them to your advantage; positive thinking and all
that. The problem with this approach is that you have to deny what your
self is actually experiencing. It’s essentially about learning to act,
in the Hollywood sense, well enough for you to start fooling yourself.
While this may get you successfully through such short term events,
it’s not particularly advisable in the longer term, since what it boils
down to is pretending to be something that you aren’t, and creating
internal dissonance like this is rarely a good idea.

The magical approach takes the opposite track. Rather than trying to
‘defeat’ the fear, and to pretend it doesn’t affect you, or to try a
long term approach of modifying your reaction to it, the magical
approach involves just letting the fear do whatever is does, but
recognizing that the individual affected by it is not you. You may have
heard references in magical literature to ‘expanding your
consciousness’, this is exactly what we are talking about here.

Thus, one method involves pretending that you are some great
interviewee, and that your confidence will carry you through, whereas
the other involves recognizing that even if you are having a bad
interview, so fucking what? If it won’t frighten you when you are 72,
there’s no earthly reason why it should frighten you now. Or, more
accurately, there is no reason why you should let the fear affect you,
any more than you should start having panic attacks when you are a
little peckish. The fear makes the world close in around something, but
you don’t perceive that something as being “you” in any real sense. You
are not disassociating yourself from your fears, as much as you are
detaching yourself from them, and putting them in the proper
perspective. From where you are sitting now, it’s easy to see how silly
getting frightened by a job interview.is. The trick is to maintain this
perspective while you are experiencing it. Equilibrium is another
commonly used term for this – to cultivate the same reaction to things
when you as experiencing them as you have when you smile back on them
20 years later.

The disadvantage of this method is clearly that it is rather difficult
to achieve, and it can’t be done in a short time period. But not
impossible.

Incidentally all the above does not just apply to fear, but to pretty
much every other emotion also.

> The other thing I would like to discuss is how to deal with a fear’s
> ingenuity. I’d like to take the example of someone who severely insults
> people to protect himself from a fearful situation. Let’s say someone
> is extremely scared of being successful in his job, so he absolutely
> and completely insults his boss to get sacked, all while being
> completely unconscious of the real motivation behind the attack. I
> think one must be aware of the fear’s methods in order to conquer it,
> but again I’d be interested in different perspectives.

This is an even better question. It’s not really “fear’s methods” that
one has to be aware of, rather this is just a specific case of the
general injunction to “know thyself”. I made a more or less similar
example in one of my posts not too long ago (dealing with demons if I
remember correctly). The mind plays many tricks on you which veil your
true motivations, this is just one of them. Discovering the ways in
which your mind works is I suspect the reasoning behind Regardie’s
promotion of therapy as a precursor to magick, and this would be a good
idea if therapy wasn’t an exceptionally stupid and inane way of trying
to achieve this.

Incidentally, this self-knowledge is the real key to addressing the
original issue. When you are trying to really understand yourself, and
the way your mind works, one indication you are on the right track is a
startling feeling of how gullible you have been all this time to have
been fooled by all this mental nonsense. It’s not too far from that
realization to a position where you can confidently smile at your fear
(or whatever other attachment you are concerned with) as the phantasm
it really is. Familiarity is the order of the day here – “invoke
often”.

Success in this matter constitutes the knowledge and conversation of
the holy guardian angel.