Someone emailed me this question:

I replied:

The problem with our fears is that they are all true. Anything we can imagine could happen, and so all of our fears have some truth to them. However, none of our fears have much truth. In fact they have very little truth, and most of them have a ridiculously small amount of truth to them.

First of all, none of our fears have come true yet. If they had,we would not be fearing them anymore! So in that sense, all fear only exists as thoughts in our minds. Fear only exists right now as the movement of thought and feeling, and that is a very small existence. Yet, it is something that we have been taught to focus on. We have been asked over and over, "What do you think?" and "What do you feel?" As a result we pay close attention to the movements of thought and feelings in our mind and body. What do I think about this? What do I think about that? So even though their actual existence is very slight, they can seem much more important and true than they really are. We even use the argument, "Well, that's what I think!" to make a point, as if the mere fact that I think something makes it true!

Secondly, even when a fearful thought comes true, our ideas about what that will be like are usually very incomplete and inaccurate. Using your example of the debt crisis in the news right now, if the worst case scenario happens and the debt ceiling is not raised, it is still unlikely that all of the disasters predicted would actually come true. For example, it is unlikely that the debt ceiling would never be raised. Many of the terrible scenarios depicted by the media would only happen if the government was unable to borrow more money for months and months. And most likely the congress would finally act after the deadline passed and then fix the problem That is what happened back when the TARP program was only passed after the first attempt failed and then the stock market dropped dramatically. A few days later the congress passed TARP on the second try. And who knows, this whole dramatic episode might even shift our political process into a new and more productive direction. So the specific content of our fears is never a very complete picture of what will happen or can happen.

When we shrink our fears down to actual size, they turn out to be cute little unimportant thoughts. However, because they are actually such small truths, they're very effective at contracting our awareness. In this way, they can provide a lot of intensity and drama to our existence. It is this intensity and drama that fuels our tendency to become hypnotized by the media and its focus on the fear producing stories out there. The contraction of awareness is truly a kind of hypnosis or trance that fear triggers in us.

With any form of hypnosis, the antidote is awareness. The more aware you become of your thoughts and fears, the less hypnotized you become by the content of your thoughts and fears. You can also become aware of the underlying structure of thought and feelings. Thought mostly functions to contract our awareness and put us into various trance states. This is not a mistake, but like any other game, it does get old after a while. And then we naturally feel drawn to experiencing more often the flow of awareness without any illusions getting in the way.

The key again is awareness. Years ago, I studied a form of therapeutic hypnosis. As we learned how to induce a hypnotic trance, the instructor explained that by understanding more about how hypnotic trances are triggered, we would become less susceptible to them. We would recognize that someone or something is hypnotizing us and then we could choose whether to follow the suggestions or other trance inducing process.

One of the methods for inducing a trance is to get someone to focus their awareness. One example is the classic method of telling someone to focus on a swinging object like a pocket watch. Similarly, the dramatic and extreme images of dire possible future outcomes get us to focus intently on the images on the television. We are hypnotized by the images on the TV. Television uses many of the techniques I learned for hypnosis. And even more amazing is how our own mind uses those same techniques to shape our own awareness. We have learned what images and thoughts will trigger the deepest trances and so we become hypnotized by our own thoughts! Again this is ultimately not a mistake as consciousness wants to experience all of the different states that are possible, including all of the trance states we call fear.

But there is also no reason not to wake up from your fear trances. Notice the contraction of awareness that comes with every fear. This is a direct sign that your awareness is leaving something out. The more contracted your awareness is, the more expanded your unawareness is! You can wake up from a fear induced trance by simply noticing what else is true besides the content of your fearful thoughts, or by becoming very curious about the feelings and sensations in your body. How true is the content of your thought? What else is true? What else is possible? How do you even know what you are thinking right now? How do you know you are afraid? What sensations are present that let you know you are afraid? Are they really bad sensations or just different sensations? 

It is a bit tricky, because directing your awareness in this way to the mental structures and visceral sensations of the fear can start dissolving the fear. It is like the mirages of water you sometimes see on the highway: as you get closer they always disappear. As we get closer to and more curious about our fears, they tend to disappear. All that has disappeared is a thought or feeling that was patterning your awareness. Without that thought or feeling, your awareness expands again to include more of the truth. And it just turns out that the biggest truths here are the truths of love, divine intelligence and the mystery and beauty of life. These bigger truths are not very scary at all! At any moment, you can turn away from the television screen, or from the "television screen" of your own mind, and then you can see what else is here besides your thoughts and fears.

Personally, I am fascinated by all of this. I enjoy occasionally watching or reading the news and especially enjoy watching all of the reactions it can trigger in me and in others. I also enjoy the moments where awareness penetrates into all of this in a new way. For example, as you become more curious about your own fear, you may start to see how much of our society is driven by fear. These political battles are often between one set of fears and another set of fears. And both sides cannot see how their fears limit their view, which naturally leads to extreme or imbalanced approaches. The antidote is always more awareness and truth. The truth really does set you free.

I hope this helps.