What I have come to realize is that you can suppress fear, but only at the cost of suppressing substantially all OTHER emotions as well. It is a blanket cure, that carries with it both the suppression of unwanted emotions, but also WANTED emotions.
No person whose life is largely characterized by fear can be loving, or compassionate, or caring, or in any way emotionally available to others. They can be inventive intellectually, however. This may be what drives evil in some cases: the need to avoid fear, combined with a need for perceptual motion. Deep traumas, avoided, push repetition, intellectualized. Is this Lenin or Hitler: rationalized hatred of chosen Others?
At a deep level we have to open ourselves to pain. The happy life is one in which sorrow is always “digested” as it happens, in which mourning is sincere and effective, and ideally shared.
This may seem trite–I don’t know–but for me at any rate his feels like one of the more important truths of my own experience that I have uncovered in some time.