F or last week’s column I received many messages of appreciation. I need to say this — the appreciation wasn’t deserved. That’s because I seemed to have made the war against your fears appear easier than it actually is. I went through my column again and got the impression that by merely reading it I had done half the job.
In truth, I hadn’t even started, for that war is almost impossible to win, which is why so few attempt it, and fewer still emerge victorious.
Strange isn’t it, the world of abstract, the world of things that cannot be seen or touched, things that are not real in the sense that stone and wood is real, things like thoughts and emotions and the airy stuff of the mind — mere glowing blips on a billion nerve tips —strange that this is actually impenetrable, unfathomable and undecipherable. You can drill a tunnel into a mountain easier than you can penetrate the subtle firewalls inside your own mind. And even though you may be unaware of it, your mind works according to some steely rules that cannot be broken or altered.
One of those rules is — once a fear settles down deep inside the vault of your mind, it cannot be removed. All your intellect, your reading and discussing cannot crack open the codes to that vault. You will spend the rest of your life trying to fathom the code, most of your daily thoughts will be influenced by the effort, you will read books and columns that tell you that you need to pull out those fears by the roots and throw it away. You yourself will understand that your life has been controlled for far too long and you are not enjoying your present moment because of them. Yes, you will figure out all this. But you will still have no clue about how you can open that vault and take that fear out and you will continue to remain the way you are till the end of your days.
Gear up for the real battle. So, what do you fight fear with? Where do you begin? Step one — declare war. Yes, well done, you have declared war. Jump forward to step two. Understand that your mind will fight back, using many clever strategies. Too much. Jump back to step one-and-a-half — understand that you are not your mind. The notion of “you” is just a floating fragment of consciousness in the stormy sea of the mind. You can no more control the mind than a boat can control the ocean. All you can do is ride the ocean like a pro — unmindful of the weather. Yes. You need to understand this deeply. Know how to ride the ocean of your mind like a pro. Let’s stick to this goal for a while till we get good at it. More next week.