Negative Imagination

There was once a family living on a large farm, growing corn crops. As the children grew up and the older ones would leave home, the younger ones would get to take better rooms in the house. One boy lived on the east side of the house until one of his brothers left and he was old enough to get his own room on the west side that looked out onto the corn field. The first night in the new room w...

Meekly submitting to any negative emotion in the hopes it will run its course and leave us alone just invites it to subjugate us again.

In any given moment there's always something higher to do with your life than sit there and suffer over what you think you can't have, do, or be.

Facing your fearful feelings brings them to an end because if you'll proceed while being afraid, you'll see all that's been scaring you... is you.

How many of us look out ahead of ourselves at some unwanted event that looms too large, and find ourselves feeling out of control... headed for what seems an unavoidable collision? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to reach down inside of ourselves, grab hold of the controls of our own consciousness, and pull ourselves up? To quietly watch that would-be mountain of a problem, whatever it is, jus...

Much of our time is spent identifying the so-called cause of our discontented states, and the rest of our time is taken up trying to change our unwanted situations into what we imagine will better suit our pleasure. Of course this description puts a kind of positive spin on what amounts to one's never-ending whirl of wishes, but the facts are that these dreams of a better time to come do not o...

Human beings suffer from a kind of spiritual amnesia produced by having assumed a false identity without knowing it. How is that possible? This temporary false self feels real. There's no mistake about that! It is animated and driven along by the flood of reactions we have as we run around seeking fulfillment. But the fact that this lower nature is driven doesn't mean it is alive. A bulldoze...

Before we can learn to free ourselves from our own fearful reactions to unwanted events, we must realize just how worthless fear actually is -- especially when we turn to it to protect us from what are essentially bad dreams wrought from the darkened works of our own imagination! When it comes to these stormy moments in life, what we resist always persists. In truth, it is our not wanting to...

Ultimately, all of our searching in life is for what we believe will release us from something that presently restricts us. If a man or woman is genuinely earnest, he or she will go down a countless number of different roads in order to find freedom. But you can't set out to find something without you being the one who is going to find it, which means that for each different pursuit, you assum...

The only creatures that we know of that feel psychological fear are human beings. Psychological fear is impossible without negative imagination. We all live with a certain kind of fear that we consistently feed only because we presently lack proper understanding. There is absolutely no value to any form of psychological measurement. There is value to practical measurement. If you are going to...

Do we resist or embrace events that we do not want? The answer is that we resist them. And how much time do we spend not wanting what the moment presents to us? If we're honest with ourselves, the majority of our time is spent not wanting the moment. So we must come to the conclusion that, in large part, our lives are spent resisting life. Can I get negative towards another person without fir...

Don't believe what the spiritual sharks and clever carnival hustlers tell you about fearless living: they lie. But you already sense this is true, or you wouldn't find yourself reading these words. The deepest parts of you know that if freedom from fear was as easy as "creating a new reality" for yourself, then *you would already be the fearless person you know in your heart that you're meant...