Fear is the mind killer
This week's post is going to be a bit shorter. It's been a month since I have written on here and I have realized that I need to get back into the swing of things.
I am simply going to leave you with a few short thoughts.
I have just been rejected from med school for the second time. I would be lying if I said I wasn't a bit scared about the future. But I think that fear and uncertainty are what fuel growth. If everything were comfortable, then we wouldn't be growing at all.
I am literally chanting this quote from Frank Herbert's Dune every single day. It is a good affirmation.
Another strategy that I have found to be very good for dealing with stress is reading children's novels: think Percy Jackson or Harry Potter. Really anything that you read as a child works.
I find that these books have a much larger therapeutic effect than reading new literature. I think that part of what makes these books therapeutic, apart from the wonderful stories that they contain are the fact that we associate these stories with a less busy or complicated time in our lives.
Here is a reflection on the monsters of Percy Jackson that I wrote about two years ago for literally no reason. I don't actually agree with everything that I wrote anymore, but I don't feel like editing it to reflect these changes (click to open toggle).
The monsters in Percy Jackson have very cyclical problems. Their punishment for their crime, whatever that is is just doing the same thing over and over without autonomy. This is driven often by a fear of the alternative, which in many cases is getting a worse fate.
But in of itself, making someone do the same thing as punishment for their crimes doesn't allow them to absolve/atone themselves of their sin. They live in fear of what will happen to them. Super villains and people who go from bad to good do not live in this fear, which is why even if we hate or love them, we do not think that they are pathetic.
This is for a lot of reasons, people who do mindless tasks have a lot of time to think, too much thought is bad.
Real life is worse than these myths when people voluntarily choose to give up their free will and do things that involve no thought and that are monotonous. And they don't break out of this.
The heroes in the Percy Jackson novels probably have worse tasks than the monsters have as punishments. But they have autonomy, to a certain extent. They do different stuff. They are guided by a vision of a better world
In Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says that we should do stuff and focus on the doing rather than the result. If we think of the result, we will always live in fear.
To become something, we have to stop fearing about the consequences of our actions and trust that our actions are in and of themselves are good. We should detach ourselves from their fruit.
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