“But did not we, ourselves, set the ball rolling?” (Page 67, Big Book)
When something happens, and I am tempted to be frightened, this is what is going on:
I have previously trained my physical brain to equate certain events with danger.
All my brain is doing is applying the algorithm and churning back out to me the output I programmed it to churn out in response to a particular occurrence. I am not processing the event that is actually happening; I’m simply receiving the goods I ordered in the past. In other words, the fear that presents is not a response to this situation but a response to a previous situation.
If I then accede to this fear, effectively I’m adopting the proposition, ‘This situation is as perilous as the last’, without assessing whether the fear response to the previous situation was reasonable, whether the last situation genuinely corresponds to this one such as to constitute a valid precedent, and whether this situation reasonably commands fear.
This represents a circumvention of thought. It is non-thought. It is the acceptance of a sub-routine’s output in the place of thought.
Fear is literally mindless. It’s brain-ful mindlessness.