Okay, tonight's topic, is being or living with dread, understanding what dread is?

Somehow seemed appropriate.

So I'm going to try to... to now seemed appropriate.

So I'm going to try to explain dread

and hopefully ways that will make it understandable.

And then we'll have a meditation that will hopefully alleviate any dread that any of us is.

Starting off just to label some terms, fear is a rather straightforward state where the midbrain detects and reacts to a present threat in the actual environment.

So whether it's a bear, a hostile person, a car rolling out of control.

Fear is the actual detection generally first by the midbrain, not by consciousness of a threat the midbrain actually triggers

the release of a bunch of neurotransmitters such as a setene, which focuses your attention,

adrenaline which creates the impulse to do something,

to take care of yourself, dopamine, the reward

to save your ass and when you have all of these

attentional and arousal states going on what happens is then you survey the

environment and your consciousness, the slow circuits detect what actually is present that activated your midbrain and it fixates on it and then it adds maybe some memory about why this thing is dangerous and that entire

experience of

midbrain arousal, conscious finding a threat, and then pinning a memory to why it is indeed something

we should be wary of, like, oh, bear, I should be scared of bear, bears eat people.

That entire experience is what we call fear.

It's very possible to have conscious fear without the unconscious activations.

Some people don't have working amigolas so they don't actually have the

underpinnings of fear but they do have the conscious

...