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.

"truly loving concern springs from a bright, objective state of consciousness called presence of mind."

It is hard, I know, to wake up from sinking in your thinking and drowning in your dreams. If you are prideful, you will need all your schemes and dreams to distract you from seeing the guilt that your ambition has created for you.

You will crave stimulants, such as alcohol, drugs, music, and tobacco to keep you excited and upset, to spin your thoughts at a faster pace, to insure your remaining emotionally secure, safely locked up in your delusions, incapable of realizing how weak, lost, and helpless you really are.

A prideful person never wants to be aware. He rejects the gift of presence of mind because awareness would show him what a fool he is. In his dreaming he never has to be wrong; he never needs to repent. Too proud to experience guilt graciously, he goes on scheming and dreaming, fancying himself to be a god or a martyr.

Proud people need illusion and deception to make them feel secure. You will be hated for any attempt to change them, for your awareness pierces their dream bubble and tends to wake them up.

You cannot help them, but don’t let them cause you to doubt yourself. Leave them alone to die in their folly. Leave them to the demon of their dreamworld.

If you have had the stomach to read this far, you can not be one of those dreamers. You are seeking your true identity, your lost state of dignity and awareness. You may even be tuning in to my radio programs and meditating by my technique.

Or you may be one of the cautious souls who have to test the water, toe by toe, before jumping in. Whoever you are, and wherever you come from, I know that I can help you on the road to understanding. Welcome aboard.