What is worry? Worry is that modern-day epidemic that is a major cause of stress in society. It is that pesky little habit that everyone seems prone to – seeing problems where none exist.
The Anatomy of Worry
The outer mind is that part of your mind that examines all the circumstances of life that you experience. It receives feedback from the 5 organs of sensory perception about the world outside of ourselves that we call circumstances.
The job of the outer mind is to analyse the feedback and to build upon it in various directions in an effort to predict how it would progress after the present moment. It pictures all kinds of scenarios that present circumstances could lead to or evolve into, in an effort to be prepared for what might happen next. In other words, its purpose is to judge. So everything you experience is pulled apart and analysed. It judges situations. It judges people. It pretty much judges everything you might witness or experience. Its primary responsibility is the protection of the organism and this is the survival instinct in action. It tries to work out how you should react, when faced with the various situations of life.
We see this kind of mental action everywhere today. We also have a fancy name for it: “trending”. Its not just the individual; the whole of society seems stuck on the concept of trending and what it holds in store for us. This is what keeps you in the grip of fear. Shadows take on fearful forms when clothed with the darkness of uncertainty.
We Love Worrying
Our love affair with trending has kept us so busy over the centuries that it has spawned diverse branches of knowledge on the subject, one of the oldest-known being astrology. That’s how much we are under the control of the outer or lower mind. The very information that comes to it is from second-hand sources, the 5 organs of sensory perception. They see and experience. They pass on the details of the experience to the brain. The lower mind then gets in a tizzy, trying to outdo itself in masterful deception, all for the sake of trying to convince you that the absolute worst is about to happen
In order to break out of this whirlpool of mindless habit of meaningless analysis, we need to rely on the higher mind of intelligence. The light of intelligence dispels all the meaningless possibilities and scenarios like a mist that disappears in the sunlight.
Focus on Happiness, Lose the Fear
The deeper truth here is that the more you focus on your fears, the more you hasten their arrival into the physical reality of form. But if you would just take the trouble to rationalize and use the sharp edge of intelligence to understand the absolute, impossible unreality of your fears, you immediately freeze the scenarios and stop them in their tracks.
Its a proven, scientific fact that the attention spotlight of the brain cannot focus on more than one item at a time. Multi-tasking is something the brain just cannot do. Hence, if you just changed the focus of your thoughts towards something completely different, you actually stop punishing yourself.
It doesn’t require effort to quit worrying. It just needs the ability to know how to turn the inherent weakness of lower mind against itself, in order to keep it within the bounds of reasonable control. Your emotions are the key to help you watch your thoughts.
Lower or outer mind is myopic. It has more of a microscopic vision. Have you ever viewed a microbe or bacteria when it is blown up under the lens of a microscope? It looks positively dangerous, doesn’t it?
That’s the nature of the lower or outer mind. It blows everything out of proportion. Kinda like the paparazzi! Don’t you think?