An excerpt from the book by Ruslan Zhukovets The Science of Spiritual Growth
Anyone who explores their internal world and practices self-awareness will benefit from learning the fundamentals of the human body of emotions and the body of mind. The mind and emotions are interconnected - this is a fact, but how exactly?
One of the maxims pertaining to human inner life claims the following: if anger or sadness are springing up, look for an unfulfilled desire that caused them. There is another maxim: if one experiences anxiety, there is always fear behind it. Yet another rule of thumb states that a desire is always accompanied by fear, and any fear is always associated with a desire.
It is not always easy for an observer to figure out that fear and desire exist side-by-side. Usually, attention is seized by whichever comes first and, as it were, prevails in the fear-desire couple. For example, if a person is haunted by the fear of death, then it is this fear that consumes all of his attention; meanwhile, the simultaneously formed desire not to die, that is, to live, is overlooked. Absorbed by his fear, the person is blind to the adjacent desire and is clueless about the cause of anger and sadness that come as if out of the blue. The situation is similar for the case where desire overrides fear that is paired with it. For example, a person seeks appreciation and achievement in some activity. He has no problem tracing the cause of emotions down to this desire (i.e. self-anger when he makes a mistake), but the origin of crippling anxiety that regularly seizes him up remains obscure. And anxiety in his case is a manifestation of the fear of failure, which appears simultaneously and co-exists with the desire for success.
Desire and fear are “forever” counterparts and never exist without each other. Therefore, the elimination of one component in this dyad automatically leads to the elimination of its complementing part. Therefore, if the work with one’s fear of death had not been successful, it makes sense to try a different direction and tackle the desire to live, as the odds are that a pivot strategy will get the situation out of a rut. Whichever of the two constituents of the fear-desire duo is stronger, one would have to work through both of them if they aim at changing their own state of being.
While working through desire and fear, it is important to understand that they have opposite polarities, in energy terms. Fear represents cold and desire represents heat. Therefore, they are connected and counterbalance each other. If there were no desire to offset fear, then an excess of the energy of cold would lead to one’s quick death. And a lack of balance against a desire would urge one into a whirlpool of madness. So, when seekers work with the emotion of fear during meditation, they may experience alternating flashes of cold and hot for as long as several days. Such a reaction indicates that the seeker has reached the layer of deep-seated repressed fear and has unblocked access to these layers of the energy of cold and heat that balance out each other.
Once this happens, the state of the seeker undergoes a dramatic change and one of his internal problems gets resolved.
I have never come across anyone who would not be wishing to overcome fear. But I don’t think I ever met a person who would be open to saying farewell to his desires. Everyone wants to experience joy and pleasure by fulfilling their desires while having no fears whatsoever. The problem though is that there is no way one can live by desires yet stay free from fears at the same time. Every seeker must learn and accept this condition of one's life. If he does, then he will have a chance to transcend the limitations imposed by desires and fears and free himself from inner dissonance. Then, he has a chance to get a taste of freedom like nothing he could ever dream of before.