A Guide to Confident Living by Norman Vincent Peale

Author:Norman Vincent Peale
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Simon and Schuster

CHAPTER EIGHT

How to Be Free from Fear

“T HE COMMONEST AND subtlest of all human diseases is fear,” says a distinguished physician.

A well-known psychologist declares that fear is the most disintegrating enemy of human personality.

Obviously these scientific men are referring not to normal but to abnormal fear. Normal fear is both necessary and desirable. It is a mechanism designed for our protection. Without normal fear a person cannot be a well organized personality. He would be lacking in ordinary and sensible caution. Normal fear prevents us from taking chances, from doing hazardous and foolish things.

But the line of distinction between normal and abnormal fear is very finely drawn. Before one realizes, he may step across the line from normal fear into the dark and shadowy regions of abnormal fear. And what a terror abnormal fear is! It disturbs your days and haunts your nights. It is a center and source of complexes. It tangles the mind with obsessions. It draws off energies, destroys inner peace, blocks power. It reduces one to ineffectiveness and frustrates ambitions. Abnormal fear is the poisonous well out of which dismal unhappiness is drawn. It makes life literally a hell. Many are they who suffer from this grievous malady. How pathetic and pitiful they are—the unhappy victims of abnormal fear.

But you can be free from such fear. Abnormal fear can be cured. In this chapter we shall outline a cure that will work if you will work it.

A doctor, in boyhood, developed a fear psychosis. It grew upon him until by the time he entered medical school it was drawing off the energies of his mind so much that it was only by Herculean efforts that he was able to do his work. It put an abnormal strain on his energies which left him weak and ineffective.

With great expenditure of nervous energy he finally graduated and went into internship still carrying his heavy burden of fear.

Finally, unable to stand it longer he consulted one of his medical teachers and said, “I must be rid of this terrible burden of fear or I will have to give up.” The older physician, a wise and kindly man, directed the young student to a Healer who, as he cleverly said, “keeps office in the New Testament.”

“I followed my teacher’s suggestion,” he declared, “and that Physician gave me a medicine which made me well.”

And what was this medicine? It was not a liquid in a bottle, nor was it compounded as a pellet, but it was in the form of words. It was that potent combination of words called a Biblical text. “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” (II Timothy 1:7.)

“I took those words,” said the young doctor. “I allowed them to sink deeply into my mind. By a process of intellectual and spiritual osmosis, their healing potency penetrated and infiltrated into my mind and in due course deliverance came, followed by a strange sense of peace.

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