How does one eliminate negative thoughts, psychological fears, and feelings with a “single move”?
Tons of digital and regular ink has been spilled on all subdivisions of psychological fears and negative thoughts. To catch you up, dear reader, by “psychological fears,” I mean anything that affects your thoughts, feelings, and actions.
That is anything that takes over and controls you thoroughly on all levels. How does one get rid of psychological fears and negative thoughts? Let’s take them individually, get inside them, and look at them in depth, as Jindu Krishnamurti would say. I suggest you don’t agree or disagree with these writings. Just take the information and observe.
Are psychological fears anything other than either memories from the past or projections into the future? You may have heard this expression before, but how much have you thought about and observed it?
Where is it located when a situation occurs in your mind (even if it’s not a fear) and affects your emotions and thoughts?
Is it in the now? At this moment? Or is it a memory or a thought about the future, but through memories? How much are you here right now when an issue arises within you? If you are here and now, is there any “thing” that occurs within you?
What is this here and now? Is it a point that then belongs to the past or a continuous here and now? A moment, a point in space and time where you don’t want to think about the future through the past, nor the past through the future.
There is at this particular moment when you are reading this text, the past in reality, or is it just thoughts? Memories of your own or the collective unconscious of how you were or should have been or should be? And since it belongs to the past, it doesn’t exist. The fact doesn’t live now; at this moment, you’re reading. Only the memory of the event makes it a thought, not a current event. Do you understand the difference?
Let’s go to the future now. Does the future exist? Since you are currently thinking about something in the future, the future is… now. There is no future. Not even the next split second. It’s a moment that lasts a moment. Can you feel something like that? Not as a thought but as a sense of presence.
So, if fear is a series of thoughts, memories, and projections, where is this particular moment? That has a place and substance, when – in fact – (this is key), there is none of the two at the moment. Don’t try to expand the moment to fit them in by force. They have no substance at all at this moment.
Yeah, but I’ll think about it briefly; you’ll tell me. No, there’s no such thing as briefly. The “briefly” is your attempt to expand the moment and make it a “plus one minute with thoughts of the past and future” moment. Notice what I wrote and think hard about it. There is no other time or space. Only the perpetual moment, where memories and projections are entirely nonexistent. It always has been. They either happened or haven’t happened yet, so they are absent.
So, how do you base your thinking about anything on nonexistent evidence? But I will not deny a memory, you will say. Of course, you won’t deny something like learning to drive or making a meal. Mechanical skills you have acquired that are useful are one thing and situations that are created in your head and you are not here, now, present to function without their memories and projections are another.
This is the “present moment,” which you’ve probably read in thousands of books. And it is only from this moment that you can begin a real journey of unloading. This unloading will leave with observation and understanding, not thoughts of “you are perfect as you are.”
Are negative thoughts valid? Not the thoughts (or fears) that pop up when you see a bus coming towards you and have to act. Do negative thoughts about people, situations, or things have a basis? Do they exist right now? Are they in front of you in the flesh? Are they objects you can grasp?
Look at them carefully. Why do you need them, as perhaps Gurdjieff, Uspensky, or Maurice Nicoll would say?
Why do we really “need” to have negative thoughts? What good do they do us if all they do is make us feel bad? What is the point of feeling, thinking, and acting badly through virtual negative thoughts?
We think something bad about a person who has harmed us, we feel anger, shame, hatred, jealousy. We also think about what harm we would do them if we saw them or what bad things we would say to them. In extreme situations, we act accordingly. Inside our heads, we set up a movie with virtual projections where we do what we like to them.
But why? Do we like it? Do we feel the power, the “control,” the power to “act” on others in this way without any reaction from them since the movie with all the protagonists, wronged, perpetrators, and victims, are controlled by us? “Fighting” in our heads?
And how accurate is this movie? Here is the crucial question? How clean is the script, and have we not unilaterally mixed in our feelings of justice, reward, and entitlement?
Are the negative thoughts real? Do they have any basis as thoughts? I am not saying if you were wronged. I’m referring to the negative thoughts generated afterward and how they keep you from sleeping. How much they act like a movie that you project in front of your eyes, and you can’t see where you are. How many times have you gotten lost having “the movie” playing in front of you?
Is there a way to escape negative thoughts and live another life? A more present, meaningful, and joyful life?
Have you noticed? We start doing one thing. In one minute, we feel “five” different emotions about that same thing. Then we do another thing from the one we thought and from the one of the feelings we momentarily chose.
By walking another five steps (even in the house or at work), we have thought and felt something else (extra) about the same thing. Consider it in relationships, work and business decisions, friendships, and the simplest things.
We go around and around, think, do different things, and feel other things. Sometimes, we get so “lost” that we don’t remember why we left the chair to do something until we got to the room. “What did I come here to do?” we say.
No alignment of thought, feeling, or action. Thousands of branches and offshoots like 1000 different people taking turns behind each other and throwing us a thought, an emotion, an action.
Fear is a liar and a thief in our lives, and it manifests itself in thousands of places (including negative thoughts) in our lives, where, in most of them, we don’t even realize it exists. So, learn and do the practical unloading. Subscribe to the Unstoppable list for tips.
For twenty years, I have been observing these situations in people (including myself) through my professional involvement in business growth services, marketing consulting, and my journey of self-discovery. I wrote the book to show what a liar fear is. The title is “Fear This Liar” (available on Amazon as an ebook to carry with you and as a paperback). You can read the details and chapters from here.
