16 February 2021
The mind is scared of what it doesn’t know. That’s why new experiences and challenging situations are often frightening – because they are unfamiliar. That’s why we often avoid high-stakes maneuvers, or anything that involves risk. I’ve always been one to play it safe. I’ve been that way my whole life. I am a calculated, conservative, thoughtful, wait-and-see kind of person. Snap judgements, off-the-cuff kind of living has never been my thing. But often, life pushes you into unfamiliar territory. Your circumstances change suddenly, or you’re faced with a health challenge and because of it, you can become frightened. When we live in fear, it’s almost as if the universe nudges us, through experience, into that fear, to expose us to it’s illusory nature. Saying it will be OK doesn’t seem to work as well as knowing it’s OK, through experience.
When a behavioral therapist wants to help someone overcome a fear, they expose that person to that which they fear. If you’re afraid of dogs, the best way to overcome that fear is by being exposed to dogs. In life, the universe will expose you to what scares you – even death. But not even death is to be feared. Death is an illusion because the soul is eternal – so we know there isn’t a reason to be afraid. The universe often makes you face your fears – head on. Why? To show you that what you’re afraid of is essentially an illusion of your mind. When you’re thrust into a new, and “scary” situation, as so often happens in life, you’ll panic, you’ll lose sleep, you’ll tremble. But eventually, you’ll see that the loud-talking, fiery wizard is nothing more than a cowardly trickster with a mustache, speaking into a microphone, hiding behind a curtain! Life will expose you to the farce of your fears. You can’t just tell yourself that everything will be ok. You have to step out, face your fears, and show the mind that the doomsday images it produces is nothing more than a passing, harmless thought.