Fear is something that will provide powerful challenges for you should you chooses a path to mastering your mind power. Actually, fear is going to challenge you whether you choose to better yourself or not. Therefore, it will be very helpful to you if you know something about how fear develops to successfully meet the challenge.

The American Heritage dictionary defines fear as a feeling of agitation and/or anxiety caused by the (real or imagined) presence or imminence of danger. I took a look at a list of fears and phobias that I collected from some place and it contained over 500 fears and phobias! This is not to suggest that you or I have all 500 of these fears and phobias within ourselves, but I assure you the number is significant.

Psychologists tell us that human babies are born with 2 basic fears: the fear of falling and a fear of loud noises, so how did the list grow to 500? I am not a psychologist so I am not about to suggest that I know why each of us fear the things that we do, but I do understand a little about the process. Throughout the articles I have written related to the self image and habit-forming, the process has been mentioned either directly or indirectly.

Fear is a habit, and it is developed within you just as other habits are. This means that sometime during the early stages of your development, someone in some way and for some reason invoked fear in you. It could have come in the form of a joke, teasing, out of meanness, or it could have been a well-meaning attempt to prevent you from some real or perceived danger. If the fear was even remotely related to the overwhelmingly powerful self-preservation instinct, your self image immediately allowed that fear to enter and to be filed away in a certain section of your subconscious mind.

For the purpose of this article, let us just say that your subconscious mind identifies the section as the FEAR section. The particular incident that generated the fear may be buried so deeply in the FEAR section of the subconscious as to be unavailable for conscious recall. The feelings of fear, however, are always available and accessible for conscious recall.

As more and more people, conditions, and circumstances were presented to you in such a way as to generate fear, the events were also allowed by the self image to take residence in the FEAR section of the subconscious. Thus, over time, a larger and larger pool of fears with feelings attached, resided in your subconscious even though the events that originally produced them had long since drifted below the level of your mind that is accessible to the conscious mind.

As you may recall, the memory of the subconscious is perfect, and it does not distinguish between what is real and what is imagined. Therefore, if you suspect that a threat is present (whether real or not), your imagination races back into your past trying to identify a matching event or incident. In all likelihood, your imagination will not be able to find a match. If it can not find one, it will assign one related to something in your present mental environment. Thus a new fear is born.

The fear feelings will attach themselves to the new match and begin to intensify. All of the bodily fear systems are activated. Conscious thinking becomes cloudy and confused. Fear is then in control.

This I know for sure. You can claim or re-claim control of your own mind power. You are the most miraculous of all living beings on earth. You are the owner of a mind that is so stupendous, that as you truly begin mastering your mind power and consciously using it, there is no dream that you can dream that you cannot achieve.