“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
-- Frank Herbert, Dune. Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.
Fear is the most crippling of human emotions, because it stops you dead in its track. Most of the time what we fear is fear itself and nothing concrete. Fear causes us to worry for nothing because the thing that we may be fearing is what we build up in our heads.
I would be the first one to acknowledge that to train the mind to move out of the darkness of fear into the light of faith and the present. Training the mind to think positively takes work and it is work that will pay you big dividends.
Never fear shadows... they simply mean there's a light shining somewhere nearby.
-- Unknown.
Why do we fear so much as human beings? What is it we fear that we will lose? Is it our life, our wealth, our sanity, our friends, our jobs – there is so much to fear and we embrace all of it. Maybe there was a time when fear was alright in our lives, when we were children or adolescent.
As a species, as a human race, we are now in the adult stage of our organic growth and it is time we learn the workings of the mind, and the veil that stands between us and our freedom. We fear things that we make up in our minds and suddenly they appear real and suddenly we manifest these fears and they become self-fulfilling prophecies. It’s all in the mind. Conquer your mind and you conquer the world.
You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along."
-- Eleanor Roosevelt.
The mind is like any muscle, it get’s stronger and better with practice. One of the ways of conquering the waywardness of the mind is not so much to fight the thoughts because that could be a daunting task, a better and more effective way to control the mind is to constantly replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts. Darkness and light do not dwell in the same place. Therefore replace negative thoughts with virtues and especially with love. When the Bible says love your enemies, it is a way of keeping your thoughts pure and positive. When you offer love to someone and genuinely try to create a feelings of love and warmth the hatred and discontent dissipates and leaves you feeling good.
This is enough for today.
For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. --II Timothy 1:7.
