Worlds We Create

There is a direct relationship between anxiety and peering too far into the future. They are synonymous with one another. We start looking (guessing really) into the future...survival instinct tells us to expect the worst....so we do that automatically...before we know it we are deep into our thoughts feeling anxious, frustrated, fearful, lacking, and unhappy. These future based thoughts create present anxiety. In our minds we are working out game plans to avoid the "negative circumstance", but there isn't a negative circumstance....its just our creation...its our guess; a guess that is full of instinctual fear. We are combining two things that served us well over the years (thousands of year)....fear has got us this far....and our ability to predict has got us this far. Fear kept us sharp and alert to predators and our ability to predict outcomes quickly made us the top predator. However, as we have changed, these things are starting to give us psychological trouble. We are creating worlds that do not exist....not a big deal really if these worlds were not problematic and full of fear. Every future thought is an alternate world. We live most of our lives in our heads, bouncing back and forth from happy worlds to sad worlds, a world where i am king and worlds where i am ugly and rejected. Its just virtual worlds that we create. Even the "real world" is our creation or interpretation.

This is such a new concept for me and a challenge to recognize in my own life. It is easy to become absorbed in our created world...generally we think we are doing ourselves good by taking life so seriously, but we aren't living because we are preoccupied with preventing these negative worlds from becoming reality. Our obsession with prevention actually makes this negativity manifest into our present moment. In other words, we bring about all the negative we're trying to avoid because we think about it constantly.