Eureka! Imagine trying to understand meditation for 40 years. It’s like wandering through the dry, hot desert, looking for water, seeing mirages. You feel the dryness in the back of your throat. Your mind plays tricks on you in this state. Unless you have a Self-Help Practice.
If you let your mind drift into the terror and fear of survival, the desperation of a dangerous situation, lacking survival equipment, and access to basic necessities, fear snowballs. It's designed to alert us to danger and keep us going. Fear makes us continue to fight and struggle to stay alive. Without it, many of us would give up during difficult times. Nature gave us fear to keep us alive, a little flame that keeps us moving, struggling, crawling, looking for water. Praise the universe for this design.
But at a certain point, let’s acknowledge how the fear mechanism, if not met with its counterpart at the right time, can entirely take over the mind. It can drive us into what I call "functioning madness." We might succeed, build things, raise families, make billions, and create art and government, but if we let fear fester too long, it will corrupt us. Evolution hasn’t figured out how to prevent this yet.
I believe humanity as a whole has been lost in fear for quite some time. History shows pockets of humans who were not afraid and lived in harmony with nature, compassion, and non-harm. They didn’t follow a clock but the events in nature. Modern humans struggle to understand this because we’ve lost touch, but it’s still deep within our shadow instincts. Despite our free will, we still have instincts to love and care for nature, ourselves, other humans, and weaker creatures. Ancient people who loved and cared for others and the planet were truly enlightened, regardless of their pastimes. They were compassionate.
There’s a reason ancient Aboriginal people flourished—they were remote from the chaos in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. For eons, they were unaffected by external turmoil.
Then, a few centuries ago, Europeans arrived and disrupted conscious contact with the divine. European contact with the Americas less than 500 years ago led to the annihilation of humane treatment, higher conscious treatment of creatures, and deep connection with the sacred earth. We became self-centered. Trauma throughout history created an imbalance in the collective human mind. Cultures like the Chinese and Indian had masters aware of this shift, which began some 5000 years ago. We moved from small tribal communities to large cities led by cruel emperors. Governments have committed cruelty to maintain power, much like an addictive substance affecting chemistry, mood, and self-esteem. If not handled properly, individuals self-destruct, becoming disconnected from the oneness of all things.
Intelligent, free creatures that can override instinct can override themselves into insanity. They can override instincts to be kind and move towards love, becoming violent, vengeful, overindulgent, and self-destructive. Look around the world: wars, political fighting, poverty, hunger, suffering children, drug addiction—all indicate our progress is marred by chronic anxiety and addiction.
The trick is to absorb this without giving praise to me. I’m just channeling knowledge. Don’t see me as a guru; that's an insult. My teachings come from a lifestyle of cultivating a certain type of thinking and stepping into awareness, causing relaxation. Understanding compassion and forgiveness brought healing. I can’t levitate or fold time yet, but I’m getting there. I discovered that the anxiety and stress I created needed an antidote, or I would have dropped dead at age 20.
Recovery, prayer, meditation, and exposure to philosophies like yoga and Buddhism helped. I realized that societal pressures—having a nice car, getting married, being a functioning member of society—are just baggage. We can set ourselves free from these concepts, but it’s not easy. There is no drug, pill, ceremony, or dollar bill that can do it. Only oxygen and time, practicing what we need to succeed in life, can help.
Think about your first relationship, the times you got mad and said something bad, the times you hated yourself, dreaded taking action, or compared yourself to others. The mind is designed for comparison, a survival mechanism. But trauma traps us in negative processes. We fall from higher connected consciousness into lower consciousness, distorting our world.
This is the basis of every decision we make going forward. We must breathe and practice awareness to improve our lives and break free from fear and anxiety.