If fear is the opposite of love and love is the opposite of fear, then confidence and love are one and the same, if not closely related. Your thoughts?




P.S. It kinda makes sense, I mean, it takes a lot of guts to do the right thing. Being absent of fear, "confident," you should have no problem taking right action.

I think there might be some relation but it depends on how you define confident. From dictionary.com:

con·fi·dent   
1. having strong belief or full assurance; sure: confident of fulfillment.
2. sure of oneself; having no uncertainty about one's own abilities, correctness, successfulness, etc.; self-confident; bold: a confident speaker.
3. excessively bold; presumptuous.

I definitely wouldn't use the equal sign. Generally, love is about other (caring, compassion) and is a state of being (peace, balance, joy, etc.).

You can be confident but full of ego, as a defensive mechanism for high amounts of fear. An example would be a bully.
If you are sure of yourself to the point of it becoming a belief trap, it is actually limiting and does not express a high QoC. i.e. you think you know what the correct decision is but are merely blind to better ones.

On the other hand, I can see where you're coming from and a loving being would likely express confidence in his/her abilities as well. The large amount of knowledge, wisdom, and awareness would make many interactions straightforward to a loving being.

_________________
Mike

I have been toying with the idea that... LOVE = COURAGE.

Which seems to be supported by The Tao Te Ching

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. "
~Lao Tzu


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courage

Love will allow a man rush into a burning building to save another.
Love will make a man risk his life for another.
Love will make a mother bear stand her ground against a male grizzly twice her size.

And I have felt the effects of this "power of love" in my own experience.

Also, I have heard others speak of the idea that, when you feel fear, you dont just feel it in your head. Your whole body is full of it. The same with LOVE. When you feel love your whole body is FULL of love.

And the two cannot occupy the same space. This too, I have found to be true. The heart that is full of LOVE has no fear.

_________________
LOVE is the answer

peace
patrick

Psychology today seems to feel that LOVE is also medicinal...

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles ... power-love

_________________
LOVE is the answer

peace
patrick

Only when you have, and to the degree that you have, doubt that it is the right thing.

I notice you jumping around threads taking quotes out of thier original contexts placing your inputs as if they meant something to anyone but yourself. You have anything original, or is this going to be it from you?
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

I thought my words expressed meaning clearly and that I was addressing things within context. In this case for example, he is saying you have to overcome fear in order to do "the right thing". Why would you fear doing the right thing? Because you have doubt that it IS the right thing. You lack confidence. You lack trust. He is asking if love is that confidence that removes fear.

Living comfortably with uncertainty is a goal.
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

Love is such an icky word.

It does have all sorts of emotions attached to it, doesn't it. So many as to almost make it worthless because you have to define what kind of love, or if it is the Love that is opposite Fear on the Evolutionary continuum that we talk about here as the measuring for Entropy levels metaphor. If it is the MBT model of Love as low entropy and Fear as high entropy it is something totally different than loving your neighbor, or not. See, just in the concept of "loving your neighbor, or not" there could be neighborly love, having a romance like happens with youth, or an affair, or the MBT concept of Love as the opposite of Fear, probably even more ways the love word could be meant, or interpreted. It's icky then in the same way as "god" is to me, except there actually is a use for the Love concept still.
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

Also, I am aware that confidence can have positive or negative connotations. But... you guys know what I mean ;). I don't think that language does the larger reality or any of its ideals any justice, but I agree w pgtrue that "Courage" might be a better word to use. And yes, the equal sign was a bad idea, but there is a relationship!

In the absence of fear... fear is not there to stop you from taking a risk for the greater good, like a mama bear defending her young or rescuing a baby in a house on fire. Fear will prevent you from doing those things.

I see what you're saying, Andre, but

Even if I know in my heart, without a doubt, what the right thing to do is, the ego can, and sometimes will prevent me. My intellect, serving the ego, will come up with reasons to NOT do the right thing because egos like mine are selfish.

Logically, I'll know what's right or wrong sometimes. But at the core, I still have an ego. Since the ego is a manifestation of fear, you need guts to battle it, especially w an ego like mine.

Fear is on a continuum with Love, it is at the other end so to say to the other. Like a number line I suppose and easily enough to use 0 as being equally driven by both with the negative going towards Fear with the positives going towards Love. Of course we could set it up the other way to with negative towards Love, and the like. It doesn't matter because it is just an analogy, metaphor or something else I am not naming correctly in grammar. The more towards one the less of the other.

Doing the right thing is often not known to us beyond the obvious. All you can really do is to think through your actions or behaviors, your choices before you make them as to how they might affect an other later, or right then.

A momma bear is fearfully loving, huh? Remember that Love is a force too. ;)
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

It might help you to first define the meaning of "right thing". What does it mean for something to be "the right thing"? Right thing in relation to what? How do you know that something is "the right thing"?




For example?

Bette,

I like the number line metaphor lol


Andre,

okay, for example...

Let's say, I'm a boss at a major company, and let's say I have a choice of hiring either a beautiful but underqualified woman, versus an overqualified ugly one. Now, I know the right thing to do would be to hire the overqualified ugly woman, but, being selfish, I am liable to hire the beautiful one and take a chance with the company.

what an example...not the best, but whatever, I tried lol.