Wall Street bailout and your thoughts
- Fears about the Wall Street collapse
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Getting a grip on the media cultural hypnosis
Every phase of discord that comes into our experience is a hypnotic influence from which we do not know how to protect ourselves. In other words, when you are in the midst of an epidemic of any disease, you are not personally suffering from the disease but from the hypnotic influence of the media tactic to sell more newspapers. There are probably as many people dying of the it, and not influence of the disease itself. The same is true of catastrophic fires in tall buildings. We know that many who do not survive are victims of panic, fear, and a lust for life and not from the flames themselves.
We each have ideas about who we are, of events in our lives should go, and how other people should treat us. We believe that if everything goes according to our plan, we will be safe. By the same token, anything that threatens the fulfillment of the plan is seen as an enemy.
What might some of these enemies be? Other people who don’t give us the respect we deserve; an uncertain future; embarrassing events that prove we are not what we claim to be. In order to protect ourselves from the potential attacks of these enemies, we direct our lives along a path that will allow us to be more powerful than what we fear.
So we work to make money, excel, appear more intelligent — anything that will make us feel stronger than what we think has the power to punish us. These actions never bring permanent peace, and this is why. That enemy that would overpower as does not exist at all. The enemy is within; it is an intimate enemy the ego; it is nothing but a creation of our own uninvestigated thought nature.
A fearful self interprets a neutral event as being an enemy, and goes into action to protect itself. Regardless of the outcome of that action, the war continues; for is long as the fearful self continues to see enemies, there will be always be new battles.
Let’s look at an example. Perhaps your reading today’s newspaper when you come across an article on a Wall Street collapse. Suddenly, you hear a voice that starts as a whisper in your ear and sends a small shock wave all the way down to your toes. The fearful voice say as, “What if things get worse and I lose my job?”
Now this thought running through you has no real life of its own and would be harmless if allowed to simply pass through, just like snatches of a song that pass through your mind and disappear. Instead, you make the mistake of embracing that thought and all the emotions that accompany it. You have been taken over by hitchhiking cultural media hypnosis. It feels like the real you, and it feels as though you are under attack.
Now, more thoughts and feelings attracted into the gathering whirlpool and a new false self has been created. But the entire event, including the self that now suffers, was only a combination of thoughts, and nothing more.
When you hate or fear something, you are only reacting to a thought, and this reaction creates a sense of yourself as being a victim caught in a real battle with a real enemy. You can never defeat any such enemy outside yourself because there is none. It is a creation of your own mind.
Pascal writes that “we are troubled only by the fears which we, and not nature, give ourselves.” This can be very difficult to understand. After all, we think, there is a real enemy when that Wall Street collapse leads to a pink slip on the desk. Yes, there may be a pink slip on the desk that may require us to take certain practical action, but what we see is not just the slip.
We see a whole series of thoughts connected with an image we have of ourselves. “I’m a failure,” we say. “People will think less of me,” we worry. So we create the condition in which a pink slip has the power to tell us who we are, or that others’ opinions of a us will go a certain way, and that what they think defines our worth.
We see a whole series of thoughts connected with an image we have of ourselves. “I’m a failure,” we say. “People will think less of me,” we worry. So we create the condition in which a pink slip has the power to tell us who we are, or that others’ opinions of a us will go a certain way, and that what they think defines our worth.
What good does it do to spend our lives fighting a battle we cannot win because both sides of the war are raging within our own minds? Our perception of the event is the event for us. When we perceive things from the point of view of the victim, everything becomes an enemy — an enemy that we ourselves created. When we no longer believe in the victim self, we start to perceive life from our true self, and then events take on an entirely different meaning.
The sun is still shining, there are apples on the trees, the squirrel is still at my bird feeder . . . life goes on. No matter what, I’ll find shelter, love and nourishment. You’ll not only survive, you’ll thrive. Life has always been and will always be, a series of two steps forward and one step back. Our unwillingness to accept what is . . . is the cause for all of our suffering.
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