Emotion-based mental activity is strangely compelling because we are so guilty, and the only relief from guilt, other than repentance, lies in escape from the awareness of it.

We manage to do that (or so we think) by delving deeper into our mind stuff with a greater determination to plan and scheme and make things work out, to “get even.” After all, “thinking will make it so,” or so we think.

The nagging, barely conscious awareness that it won’t drives us to worry, and all worry can do is set off another flurry of mental activity.

In the beginning, your hope, a primitive kind of faith, was that your dreams would lead you to the reality of a material, ego-satisfying paradise of success and happiness, but they never do.

As failure follows failure, you become upset and frustrated, and your frustration drives you to a constant preoccupation with the defense mechanisms of thinking, dreaming, and worrying.

You may even see more tragedy ahead, the inevitable end of the road you have chosen to take, but you don’t know how to turn around. When you try, it’s like driving with the brakes on.

You keep “willing” all of your schemes to “work,” but you will be caught in a vicious cycle until you become committed to waking up.

Your ego’s need to escape from reality, the truth about its condition, is what gives the world of thought its magnetic power to suck you in. Thought whirlpools are terribly inviting, fascinating, and soothing to the ego.

For a little while, they can make you feel innocent and secure. But only for a little while, for every dream carries the seed of future shock and is a bad trip that will bottom out on the hard rock of reality.

All your bad reactions to life are having a bad effect on your physical nature and on your very identity.

The ego that dreams and schemes and sets things in motion sets all the wrong things in motion. If you were not so involved in your thinking, you could know the truth about things.

"to worry is to dream more deeply, to become subject to the demon of worry."

You could see clearly because your perception would not be clouded by conditioning, training, and emotional prejudice. You would be free to do what is wise.

There are no problems in reality for the person who faces it from an objective point of view. Reality poses a problem to you only because you are lost in your thoughts, busily shaping a counterfeit image of reality to bring it closer to your pride’s desire.

As long as you stay so busy with the do-it-yourself project of recreating Reality, you are estranging yourself from the courage required to face it as it is. That courage would be available to you in the objective state of awareness that I hope to bring you to.

Worry is one of the favorite escape mechanisms for those who are not ready to face themselves. It is a preoccupation with the guilts, anxieties, and resentments that well up from past memories, a kind of “cud chewing” that keeps one’s attention riveted to the problems of the past as an escape from meeting the present.

The proud ego looks on worry as a kind of loving concern, which it most certainly is not.

A truly loving concern springs from a bright, objective state of consciousness called presence of mind. It is never ambitious. The ambitious person worries, and sees only problems, whereas the loving person shows his concern by looking only to the solution.

Actually, there are no big problems in life, only a lot of little ones that accumulate when a person loses awareness and starts responding like a lost soul, with resentment, toward other lost souls.

You probably fell into your thinking as the result of a preoccupation with some prideful goal.

Then, as the gap widened between reality and the dream, you began to react against the truth of your having been deceived, and your frustration at being lost led to resentment and worry over the means of getting out of the trap you had fallen into.

But to worry is to dream more deeply, to become subject to the demon of worry.

Instead of giving in to worry, which never helps, you must allow the reason for your predicament to catch up with you. If you fail in this, it is because your pride insists on struggling willfully, without understanding.

The struggle will only involve you more deeply in the mire of your own thoughts and will lead to bigger problems.