The most prevalent and inhibitive form of mental dis-ease? Worry, fear of the future, so common it’s thought to be normal. Well, imagine a dog if it compulsively worried about the future. The next time a worry thought floats to the surface, observe it closely. Don’t react to it, just observe it. When you watch a thought, you are out of the thought. Houdini unchained.
Fear. False Evidence Appearing Real. The runaway mind is both tremendously insecure and wildly inventive. It’s like the man who enters a dark room, steps on a coil of rope and immediately assumes he’s standing on a snake. The home of fear is the head. Fear seeks to legitimize itself in partialized truth, in truthiness, in something that could be true, might be true. But the truth is never partial. And fear is always a lie.
We die before we die when we completely reject our belief in anxiety.
The movement from innocence to ontic insecurity is fairly swift. By the time a child moves into his fort-building phase, it’s pretty much complete. At that point, personality has hardened, shell-like, around essence.
If I believe that I am a body, I will inhabit a world filled with bodies. At last count the world has 7,800,000,000 of these. I am perforce in a perilous position—perilous because the invisible substratum of ‘I am a body’ is fear.
Men's Work 