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Dalton
Roberts |
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Recently I awoke with a nightmare. My heart was pounding and terror had a grip on me that took a few minutes to dissipate. My mind was so disrupted I had to read while before I could go back to sleep. It got me to thinking. How can something unreal have such a powerful emotional impact on me? I was terrified over nothing. Nothing had really happened. It was merely a subconscious bubbling up of some old fear image buried deep within. Once in a college psychology class I saw a research project where people described the most horrifying experiences of their lives. Then researchers checked the facts and discovered that people who are horrified embellish their fear images and make them even worse than they are. What we do with real life nightmares is add to the fear and terror by filing them away unfactually. We add to them. We describe them as being worse than they are. Over time we tend to keep adding to them. One reason we do this is to add drama to our lives. If we think our lives are too boring and uneventful, we add to real events by letting our imagination stack drama upon drama to them until some little mouse-type fear becomes a storming elephant. The first thing we can do to comb fears out of our minds is to realize this “stacking effect” tendency we all have for drama. We can simply throw cold water on old raging fears. Fear is never as bad as it seems and it needs to be whittled down to size by logical mind. Realize that mental illness is nothing but fear images gone to seed. A paranoid schizophrenic’s imagined terrors usually have some tiny element of truth that his mind has expanded and embellished. To the extent that we dramatize our fears, we are mentally ill. We all need at least one calm, levelheaded, undramatic friend. Someone who will not allow us to build ogres to inhabit all the rooms of our consciousness. Many of our nightmares are rooted in our most unpleasant real life experiences. That’s why it is so important for us to work through them as thoroughly as possible before filing them in memory. To forgive others and ourselves to the maximum extent possible is to take some of the fear images away that can erupt into real and imagined nightmares. We will see that the real life experiences we work through and make peace with tend to become the opposite of nightmares. They tend to become smaller. We look back on them and wonder why they hurt so badly at the time. Why? Because we have combed the cockleburs of fear, hurt and drama out of them. There is nothing more important in spiritual practice than combing fear out of our mind. Check out Dalton's
website at
www.daltonroberts.com. |
