weirdway

In my dealings with my own fear and reticence I have found one really cool trick that is subtle, but appears to gradually help over time with constant repeated application.

The time to perform this trick is when you are feeling ordinary. You probably do not want to do this if you're in the middle of a strange experience.

Basically the trick is to consider whatever the thing I fear as already a done deal. So, if I fear death, as I walk around contemplating, I consider that maybe I am already dead and this is what afterlife feels like? And if I fear insanity, I contemplate the possibility that maybe my real body is strapped into a gurney in a looney asylum, I am heavily medicated, and this experience of walking along the street is just a hallucination I am experiencing.

I might fear losing the world. Then I consider what if the world has already been lost? What if I already can't recover anything? After all, each moment is at least somewhat new, right? The old world is passing away every moment.

This is also why I sometimes visualized myself as a disabled person, missing limbs or faculties, a sick person, even a partially decomposing corpse that's discarded on the side of the road. In all this I think: what is so bad about it? And then I think, what about mind? Can mind be restrained or chained up by any of these scenarios?

Well, the last paragraph may be a little grisly for some, but I think most people can enjoy the contemplations I mentioned at the beginning.

The idea is to consider that the worst thing that you may fear has already happened, or is already the case and has always been the case, and then to investigate one's experience and possibilities from that context.