Worry/Hope

[Coordinate_Apotheosis]

Okay, I've taken a good amount of time.  I've been rolling the ideas around herein, and I find that I must find my own way.  Still, that way may be paved by the helpful tips and hints given as the gems of helpful knowledge others provide.

I am not certain I can help with anything, but I would like to share my coping method with anxiety.

My coping method is to accept the worst possibility, this being what I worry about.
Then I hope for the best possibility, that way I can still be surprised.

Determining which happens, I try to let go of. Now I do not mind the worst possibility and can only be pleasantly surprised.

Your coping method is MUCH better than mine.  When i'm in a panic attack I'll pretend my fingertip is a candle and I need to blow out the flame, the forceful exhalation to blow creates an instinctive need to take a deep breath, and this helps me breath.
However, I wonder if we utilize the aspect of Hope differently in unique ways?

I have noted that when people hope for something it gives them a sense of relief, that they have assigned an intent to something they desire.  This implies an attachment, a want to control the outcome some have said, but to me I see it as a simple human ego motion, the ego is the Humanity, and I have taken to listening to mine. Perhaps this is wrong, I cannot say there is a proper judgment to be had.

I find that hope is in it's means of providing relief to others through their own quiet attempt to move into a desired outcome, not something to be called attachment, or controlling.  Rather, I see it as a means to point the needle of our consciousness as it moves through the oceans of realities available for it to experience, towards a direction one might wish to sail towards on those oceans.  In this case, towards the light shining over the horizon in the distance, in hopes it's sunlight, and not fire.

For me, I find that hope incites anxiety, because for me it isn't about aiming myself towards a better outcome, but it seems linked with the fear of such not occurring.  A rather intensive...Distortion of experiencing if I do say so myself.  when I hope, for say, my mother to be in a good mode when she comes home, the anxiety stems from the fear that the opposite will happen.  I don't feel the means to control the situation in regards to my 'hopes', my hopes are not able to create control over something, and it is actually that which seems to create the fear in myself.  I don't want the control, I just want to know I'm not moving myself into a painful experience by not doing something.

It's simple. Expectations. To love unconditionally is to love without expectation.

Think about how you could feel if you felt for humanity as if it was a single being. All the people reflect all the colors of that being in what it can feel. Worry and hope are emotions tainted by control, they are not unconditional.

I agree with your first line of reasoning, but disagree with the idea that hope and worry are linked to a need to control.  Can one worry about the life of their child without being controlling of the child?

Huh.  Actually perhaps you are right in some ways, but I feel not ALWAYS does worry and hope coincide with a lack of control over a situation.

As for expectations, that makes much more sense to me, in the instance of trying to make sense of hope, I've found that it is a major measurement of expecting something, or at least expecting it in potential, for me it comes as...How do I explain this...

I find that hope leads me to desire for something expected to happen, but the anxiety caused by it comes from that expectation possibly not being able to occur.  I don't respond with trying to change the outcome to what I expect, but rather I respond by moving away from the situation, because I don't want to deal with the pain it might inflict back.

This is the problem, hypothetical's for me seem to affect me as if they were legitimate.  I am just as scared at the idea of being robbed as I have felt when actually being robbed.

I don't know if that makes me super sensitive or in denial of the extremeness of my desire to not be out of control, but I have come to find that this is an extremely complicated string of knots.

I see that no matter what happens, things will be okay somehow someway, but this very human part of me says 'even so.'  Even so, it would not be okay with me, I would be so greatly distraught at such a situation going horribly awry, perhaps I am sensitive and easily breakable, but to think of traumatic things is enough to be traumatizing to me, so when I have such an over thoughtful mind as one that seeks out even the things going bump in the darkness under the bed, things like worry and hope just seem to be very powerful tools of avoidance of pain.

Yet, in that avoidance of pain, I still find pain of a different kind.

I wonder if...Fear...Is of itself a painful emotion.

And while it sounds hypocritical to not claim a desire to control the outcome then belay a fear of pain resulting in me responding a specific way to a situation, I truly do not intend to control the situation, as much as control myself to avoid such situations despite walking consensually right into them...  It is...Another irony of my personality.

There's a very simple solution to this all, and it eludes me.

There's a part of the Chödrön book I keep talking about that discusses this directly.  She says hope and fear (worry is a kind of fear) are two sides of the same coin:

The word in Tibetan for hope is rewa; the word for fear is dokpa. More commonly, the word re-dok is used, which combines the two. Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there is one, there is always the other. This re-dok is the root of our pain. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.

This ties directly in with the points about expectations and acceptance, as ably pointed out by the previous two otherselves.  But I think you'd have your interest piqued by the whole book, which you can find online here.

Thank you for the links.

I...Find it hard to come to terms with the idea that one needs to come to acceptance with things like, child sex trafficking, or...  Mass animal genocide.  Yet the idea here is that to avoid the pain that comes from witnessing such situations, I need to accept that situation.

I am greatly trained in this concept, it is called becoming Jaded.  Hardened.  One accepts the reality that they live in a f***** up reality.

If that is the answer, I find it to be an error of logic.  I cannot bring myself to just accept that things are these ways, and that's that, that the world is unfair and cruel and unusual.

I reject that, because it simply is not true to me.  I see creation...I see Earth...As many things, but above all, it is Humanity that is the fire, and Earth, the home that shelters it while being burned down at the same time.

I see that humanity is more good than bad, and not as evil as it is benevolent.  We have not blown ourselves completely up, we struggle in parts to slow the disasters we inflict upon our own home and selves.  We poison ourselves to heal ourselves.  We are not supposed to just accept the madness, we are here intended to fight it, whether it be with passive resistance or active resistance, we are here feeling these feelings of things being wrong en large, so that we will act on those feelings, make motions to a better tomorrow, and give our children a damn reason to not just give up on the darkness and accept it's presence.

One day, there won't be a child being raped, and one day, there won't be animals being slaughtered for their byproducts.

Acceptance as such in that mentality, to plainly accept without objection or rejection, is akin to 'following orders' as you shoot innocent people.  You have accepted that reality and are happy suddenly to be within it.

I am not happy within such a reality, and further I am not so...Empty inside, that I am fine when others are suffering.  The person need not be my friend, my family, someone close to me, or even someone I know.  They are me.  I do not want to be raped.  I do not want to be slaughtered.  The worries of these things happening plague me because I know they happen to others all the time.  The hopes that they won't occur to me are painful in that they are still happening to others.

It's not good enough for me, to just be safe and sound, I am hurt by other's pain.  I am anxious of my neighbors being harmed.  I am anxious of their children being taken.  I am anxious of anyone and everyone being hurt.

Because to me, there is already enough hurt out there, and it drives me up a wall, down a hole, to insanity and beyond then back again.  I want to go out there and vigilante, I want to be a healer to those hurt, I want to be a soldier and forcefully stop the suffering.

Sometimes, I even want to be the monster and kill the other monsters, because in a lot of ways I am so greatly distressed by the idea that right now, in this moment, there is suffering, enough to knock a person out of consciousness, and that pisses me off.  Brings me to tears.  Makes me scared.

Hope and Worry, or plainly just Fear, have...Such a focusing ability about them.  To worry about my son being taken, to hope that he is happy instead, all focused by the fear that comes at the idea, the mere idea, that such things can happen to him.  I don't want him, or anyone else to suffer.  Even the bad people can be rehabilitated, and at the least watched over by those willing to come to such a calling.

I don't feel that my fear is isolated, and I honestly often feel that my emotional responses are atypical, unusual, because where someone cares about leaving a classroom on time, I cared about cleaning it up on time for the next group of students coming in.  And where one looked away at terror, of videos of buildings falling and people dying, I stared on almost numb to the reality unfolding before me because a part of me can't register it.

I remember, on 9/11, the first thing I said when the first tower fell was 'I guess now there's only one.', then the other fell.  It took me ten years before the depth of the suffering from that event became fully deeply ingrained inside of me, and it came from watching a video of one guy trying to climb his way out of the top of that building, only to slip, slide, and plummet to his death.

I, in that moment, recall internalizing that.  The shadow of an idea of the fear that person was experiencing, the numbness they were going through trying to just 'get through it'.  There's fire everywhere, no exist is available except a window so high up people look like ants.  There's no question, the anxiety comes with the entire scenario.  Grasping desperately with shaking hands, your face is blank with utmost concentration, even fear isn't coming through.  Slipping out to open air, you don't even know what you'll do next, and it doesn't matter because your grip slips, there's nothing to grab on to, you slide off the only solid thing you had available, and that's it, you already know it's it, but that's not it, the experience isn't over there and then just yet, reality continues.  You listen to the sound of wind flying by, and the tension of clenching every muscle from total terror, then whether or not you're alive long enough to feel the impact is another thing.

These kinds of things, very vividly replay in my mind again and again because it wants to dissect the reality and nature behind those situations.  The raping of children, the slaughtering of animals, you could play a heavy metal soundtrack to the carnage and chaos I have chosen not to suppress in my mind in an attempt to find the reason and meaning behind it.

That leads me to a lot of anxiety, and I often hope 'everyone will be okay', even as I just thought 'I want to kill everyone'.

It's a very confusing life I've chosen to uptake, and the anxiety that comes with it seems to have something to say.  A reason for being with me.

Is it that I should be less thoughtful of such horror?  That I shouldn't try to find a way to ease the suffering of that soul?  The suffering of that situation?  Is it that I have this anxiety to keep myself safe?  Is it that I feel these things to spur me towards movement and action?

Do I take up martial arts and join the police?
Do I take up meditation and join the peace?

Is there anything I can even do but sit here in worry that we're all going to fall victim to poor government, poor leadership, and greedy zealous economic changes at the large and at the small the violence of everyday unhappy people?

Do I just accept that everything happening will happen, is supposed to happen, and has already happened?  That it's all okay because in the end it's all a dream of a game in an illusion to better learn how to do something?

What's...  There to do about anything when you are told by those whom are clearly good that the best thing to do is forget about the very real stuff that pains you?  It doesn't add up to me, the equation is incomplete, incorrect.  It boggles my mind, the mathematics of ethics...

I think worry implies a lack of trust, and also a lack of acceptance. We were actually chatting about this yesterday afternoon. If we go from the supposition that you are a wanderer who came here, then you knew exactly what kind of a situation you were coming into, and you knew exactly what the evolutionary level of earthlings are. The biggest disservice you can do this place, is constantly thinking and commenting on what is wrong with it, thereby rejecting it. It's not trusting the evolutionary mechanisms that were put in place, and the game playing itself out. It's not understanding creation and destruction, while knowing that there is no loss.

Ra: It is to be kept in the forefront of the faculties of intelligence that there is one creation in which there is no loss.

Ra: This is why we iterate quite often, when asked for specific information, that it pales to insignificance, just as the grass withers and dies while the love and the light of the One Infinite Creator redounds to the very infinite realms of creation forever and ever, creating and creating itself in perpetuity.

Why then be concerned with the grass that blooms, withers and dies in its season only to grow once again due to the infinite love and light of the One Creator? This is the message we bring. Each entity is only superficially that which blooms and dies. In the deeper sense there is no end to beingness.

I am reminded of an argument between Alan Watts and Margaret Mead.

I once had a terrible argument with Margaret Mead. She was holding forth one evening on the absolute horror of the atomic bomb, and how everybody should spring into action and abolish it, but she was getting so furious about it that I said to her: "You scare me because I think you are the kind of person who will push the button in order to get rid of the other people who were going to push it first."

So she told me that I had no love for my future generations, that I had no responsibility for my children, and that I was a phony swami who believed in retreating from facts. But I maintained my position. As Robert Oppenheimer said a short while before he died, "It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so." You see, many of the troubles going on in the world right now are being supervised by people with very good intentions whose attempts are to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The more we try to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. Maybe that is the way it has got to be. Maybe I should not say anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right but simply, on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise.

He was trying to teach her something in that moment, something which is at the cornerstone of his teaching - acceptance and letting go - but she didn't get it.

I agree with Elros that worry has an element of control in it, and it is the opposite of letting go, of acceptance. The freedom lies in surrendering and letting go. Let the world be, let the evolution happen. The design is perfect. You were also once at a very primitive evolutionary level compared to where you are now, but you were allowed to evolve, allow them the same. Let each creator, each sub-logos, create to their heart's content, taste the fruit of their creations, and learn from it.

Ra: I am Ra. Your opinion is an eloquent one although somewhat confused in its connections between the freedom expressed by subjective knowing and the freedom expressed by subjective acceptance. There is a significant distinction between the two.

This is not a dimension of knowing, even subjectively, due to the lack of overview of cosmic and other inpourings which affect each and every situation which produces catalyst. The subjective acceptance of that which is at the moment and the finding of love within that moment is the greater freedom.

That known as the subjective knowing without proof is, in some degree, a poor friend for there will be anomalies no matter how much information is garnered due to the distortions which form third density.

This is a very helpful line of reasoning, anxiety implies a lack of trust.  This sounds true, a lack of trust in the greater plan of God so to speak?

I have thought of this a lot.  Trust.

Fear/Hope can be implied to mean one lacks trust of the goodness in the outcome regardless of what the outcome is.  The death of many leads to more lives saved in the long run, the illness of some leads to a cure for all.  The means justify the ends.

It is interesting, how there is a distinct lacking overlap of ethics in metaphysical created constructs and physical reality.  How easy it is to handle loss and death.  One death is a tragedy, A Thousands deaths is a statistic.

We lack the depth of emotional being to handle the full total reality.  For some, trust in god is manipulated, and has long ago been discarded in lieu of one's own gut feelings.  It is not okay, even from a spiritual point of view, to deny the reality that death and suffering are not necessary to retrieve the same results, and that in denying that, such becomes so much easier to be used to manipulate us.  We don't need a bunch of people shot to acquire gun control laws, we may not even need such laws if everyone had and knew about guns, and the crimes associated with guns may even change without violence or laws by and for guns being needed as an attitude towards them changed.

In that same sense, I look at the world at large, I see a small percentage of the darkness on it, and that alone is enough to be allocated as needing to be healed.  Planetary collective healing...  What did Quo say about this process?  To perform the Ra teaching of taking one's emotions to a thesis then anti-thesis of an associated situation, only instead of a personal memory, of a planetary memory?

Does a group of people meditating with such in mind be all that is required to end the suffering then?  Can we heal the pain inside of each of us by ourselves?

If it's that simple, that we all sit down in consideration and contemplation and meditation towards discovering a solution and push for it, that it brings an end to a majority of the suffering?  That it awakens those touched by the distant efforts of others to become more kind and thoughtful...  Then why, is it wrong to struggle against those which incite people to such actions?

Is struggle wrong?  Is it wrong to fear something?  Is it wrong not to trust the creator?  Perhaps the creator's plan is unnecessarily violent or painful in the present moment than when it was conceived.  If we can change reality, then is it impudent to accept the present reality?  Or wrong to not accept it?

Loss.  It's interesting how Ra speaks, but it seems that their information is based on their viewpoint.  If Ra were to walk as one of us, do you think they'd agree that there is no loss?  From our viewpoint this is not true, from theirs it is.

When illusion is the only reality you have, it becomes your reality, it becomes real, this 'illusion' we live in, where loss occurs to us, it is real enough to in this moment be worthy of affecting us.

I could even point out the various quotes where Ra refers to our experiences as being yellow ray oriented with a yellow ray body, and that this identity is an activated 'personality shell' of the yellow ray, and in death this personality shell deactivates.  Who we are now, will be lost.  Lost to the memories of eternity.

Loss is real, whether or not Ra see's this in their reality, well their reality is far different from ours in our various perspectives, they see grass that withers, dies, then is reborn.  I see animals who wither, die, and are gone.  Their soul is reborn, their personality shell, it is gone.

The tree's are not all uniform, the grass not all similar, and in the same way so are human beings and animals, yet when one withers and dies, the tree's can come back, the grass can regrow, animals cannot do this.  The 3D energies of self awareness present in 2D and 3D seem to provide a means of a sense of 'loss'.  Death is not rebirth, it is loss.  Death is transformation, and when one changes, they lose what they used to be, they do, you may still have the memories and experiences, but the being of those things isn't alive.  The soul is not the human ego, the ego is a clear construct, and it is who we are, and in it's loss there is clarity, but in it's death, there is something more than just clarity.

As someone who's gone through an ego death, I find it is sad, and still something worth mourning for.  For who we are is temporary, and we will one day die and fade away into nothing more than a memory of an eternal being, and all of our sufferings and pleasures will be for that being.  We are puppets and cannon fodder as much as we are worthy divine beings.  We are all one.

The sorrow that comes with that realization is somewhat dizzying.  Loss is a very real existential state of being.

Essentially what Ra is asking of me in those quotes, is to find peace and acceptance in the realization of death and destruction.  To view loss as an illusion, when it may not actually be so.

Ra also asks us to disregard any of their words that we do not agree with, in that light it's worth noting that many of Ra's words are Opinions, so arguably they may be right in some ways and wrong in others along the same subject matter.  When they speak of no loss, I understand and agree with it from a purely metaphysical point of view.  The personality shell, the yellow ray ego can be reconstructed, re-activated, it isn't permanently gone, but physically...  Here on Earth...  Loss, is very real to the denizens of this illusion.

If the point of this illusion is to better learn how to provide love, and what's more to learn wisdom and unity for those wanderers present, then how is it wrong to look at that illusion and attempt to push it into a direction where more people will be happy?  How is it right to just accept the suffering when one can move to ameliorate it at the desire of those wanting such suffering to end?

I find that overall I must find trust in my anxiety, rather than suppress it or rationalize it with objective or subjective associations.

I have found all of the advice given to be in my opinion, correct however.  That everyone has their unique individual ways of handling these experiences, and all of you sharing such as helped me greatly in coming to realize how...Asleep I have become.

I do not seek to control the life of others, I only wish to provide relief and comfort to those lives.  My fear of other's suffering does not seem to me to feel...Incorrect or wrong.  My fear of other's loss does not feel incorrect or wrong.  I have known of God's presence in my life for a long time, it is unmistakable, and so my trust in that God is for the most part, stable and resolute, I however am tasked with an incarnation of judgments it'd seem, of perceptions of vivid monsters and gods, of demons and angels, of goblins and fairies, of seeing in the One Infinite Loving Creator monstrosity, to see in the Great Monstrous Beast, the Infinite Love.  Yet I see the inflicting of pain and I stumble in that faith, I see the darkness in the light and I stumble.

I do not deny the existence of God, or believe God to be inherently evil, and in many ways there's more evidence pointing to a benevolent unified creation than a chaotic desolate one, yet I fear that creator, and fear its plan, and fear its being, because I am aware now that The Beast and The Creator are one in the same, and that for all the love that is manifest, there is in potential equal amounts of darkness.

I do not know these things but feel them as I experience reality, I can't prove it, I can't say there is anything to prove or disprove in this matter, but I can say I have come to find in my experience in my life, my rather short 25 years of life, that God is not Lover or Monster, but everything, and anything.

I fear this in that my darkness is it's darkness, my destructive potential is it's own.  My shadow and darkness are not my own but God's, and all of my Love and experiences are not my own but God's, and it is somewhat crippling, when I am shrouded in a thick flurry of anxiety and fear at these realizations.

It's not so hard to realize that the reason the grass withers and dies is because it isn't cared for.  That it is reborn to have another chance, perhaps an infinite array of them, to experience.

Is the higher self so innocent?  Is the creator so innocent?  Are we so innocent?

Fearing that which is, I do so not out of a lack of control, but out of something more perhaps.  I do trust the Creator in that it doesn't put itself up against something vastly beyond it's ability to handle, or as Ra says no one is given more than they can handle, even if that does not seem so, perhaps it is simply that exceptions exist, and they are forgiven.

Still, I am here, I know I am safe and sound, I know through the pain and suffering I will end up safe and sound, I know that all will be okay in the long run in the end, even if none of it matters or all of it does, and I know life is not as bad as it could be, that we're in the most peaceful times of our recorded history supposedly, and that the road forward besides a few warnings of another World War or Economic Collapse is mostly one leading to peace.

Yet, I am distraught with the Moment in the now at the small amounts of darkness contrasting the vast amounts of light.  At the few million being harmed before the billions who are well.

Perhaps that is one of my flaws, my great problem I'm here to balance.  To find the serenity and serendipity in those millions being harmed and to find forgiveness to the harmers, and to find love and peace and healing for them.

I...  I think my anxiety is a compass.  Leading me to focus on those things that...  I feel a desire to help.

Speak of control and lacking trust, these are all valid conditions and symptoms, yet I feel unique or strangely different, like for me it's not about control and trust, but...  Wanting to do the right thing, the thing I'd want done for me.  For someone to stop someone raping me, for someone to save me from a killer, and for someone to rescue me from another hurting me.  For someone to politely point me in the right direction in a grocery store.  For someone to apologize to me for something dumb like walking in front of me.  For someone to find peace and pleasure in seeing another treat them the way they'd want to be treated.

I am encumbered by the fear and 'care' I have for others I suppose.

Perhaps those who love the most, are also those who hurt the most.  Perhaps pain is inescapable in this reality.

And perhaps, the only thing I seek to control is how much pain I experience.

I think I'll keep it that way, since I seem to have a personality that demands such for my own safety.

I think it goes to say, if balance is key, then total acceptance is an imbalance, and a necessary mixture of perhaps things like self control and acceptance of situations is needed to find an appropriate balance of behavioral responded to experiences.  Such as a want to control a situation to a good outcome with a mixture of accepting that the good outcome may not be the outcome, so one may push for a circumstance without being called 'controlling' when they make no further motions beyond a point to create a specific outcome.

I'm sorry everyone if I basically just blew off all of your opinions for my own.  I just don't feel like these emotions are linked to things like being controlling or trusting or anything like that.  Rather I find some emotions to be rather innocent, with fear being one of those.

It's hard to imagine for one who is immortal, but pain and death is a massive consideration towards survival and comfort in 3D life of mortals.  If you as a 3D being believe yourself to be wholly immortal, please realize your life was not programmed with that consideration in mind in regards to physical, mental, and emotional catalyst.

There will be experiences that stick with us to the day we die, and others we forget the next day.  Fear does not imply control or lack of trust, but self awareness of one's vulnerability.  Worry doesn't imply the same to me, and neither does hope.  Overall I would say that the emotions Fear and Hope are tied to one's own feelings of vulnerability as well as others.  Fear may mean we Love someone, and Hope may mean we're hoping for a bad outcome.

Animals in fear are not controlling anything more than their own prolongation of life.
Humans being animals, in fear are not controlling unless they intend to be, but by itself, Fear is a simple cog in the gearwork of emotional being to help the overall incarnated being most properly work within their reality.

One feels fear at a dangerous sight, that does not mean one wishes to control the danger.

I like how you all perceived these emotions, I had NO IDEA I saw things so differently from everyone else.  This has actually really helped me make sense of things in my mind...

Even if...I still can't convey them in an accurate organized manner...