Thoughts on anxiety are thoughts

by Vic Shayne
author,
The Self is a Belief

Anxiety is the new plague. Millions suffer from it. They’re taking pills, seeing therapists, and going on retreats. It’s nothing new, really. Just more out in the open these days.

Lots of people take medications, because drug companies love this sort of plague — citalopram (Celexa, escitalopram (Lexapro), fluoxetine (Prozac), fluvoxamine (Luvox), paroxetine (Paxil, Pexeva), sertraline (Zoloft) and lots more. Or you can go buy a bottle of beer and sit on your porch at the end of a long day and talk to your doggie. There’s also marijuana, but that can cause anxiety as much as relieve it for some people. Maybe mushroom microdosing is preferable.

Still, none of the above addresses anxiety in the least, as you well know.

What is anxiety?
Anxiety is based upon thoughts.

Your very sense of self is made of an accretion of thoughts — ideas that you are connected to, associated with, or identified with other people, things, possessions, awards, wins, losses, relatives, jobs, hobbies, and your body. Carl Jung called this sense of a self the persona. It is the person you take yourself to be. But you are not really this at all. So what are you?

There’s the biological body, which is made of tissues, organs, blood, guts, guts, a brain, and all that jazz. And there is consciousness, which is the awareness that there is existence. But the person you call “me,” or “I,” is only a belief that doesn’t really exist at all. It changes, adds new thoughts and drops old ones, and it is highly influenced by memories and knowledge.

Memories are way back there
Memories are thoughts from the past. The self, which you may also call the egoic mind, or the egoic self, (or “me”) focuses on memories. All memories are things you’ve learned and/or experienced. They are thought-impressions. They are fleeting. They come and they go. They are recalled but not really in your awareness at all times. But one thing for certain is that these thoughts cause suffering.

Because the egoic self does not know that it is actually the totality of consciousness, it feels incomplete and therefore unhappy. So it is preoccupied with two things: the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. It’s an endless cycle that is problematic in many ways.

Back to anxiety. Anxiety is the projection of thought into the future. It is the “what if” thought of the egoic self. What if this happens to me? What if that happens to me? What if I don’t get that thing? It’s self-centered and has only to do with the persona, which perceives itself as vulnerable, incomplete, and in need of pleasure.

Anxiety is the fear that you will not have pleasure and may have pain in the future. Conversely, depression is the experience of no-pleasure right now, based upon the desires that the egoic mind thinks it needs to be satisfied or happy. Depression is lamenting over the past that has led you to this present. Anxiety is the fear of not having your desires met in the future; and depression is the perceived pain of not having your desires met right now.

Pain and pleasure is the cycle that causes anxiety.

The Buddha taught about “the middle way.” This is a great metaphor that has a great number of applications. Apropos of this topic of anxiety, the middle way is to keep the mind between the opposites of pain and pleasure.

True happiness is not pleasure
True happiness is not pleasure. Pleasure is a fleeting state. How many millions, if not billions, of people sit alone at night wishing they were rich so their problems would all go away? Money would make you happy, right? Not really. It would give you pleasure, but that’s not a permanent state. It takes a lot more than pleasure to quell the habit of chasing pleasure and running from pain. Or maybe your issue is a relationship problem and you are anxious that you will never find the love of your life. If you do, though, you won’t find permanent happiness. This is because a love life is not fulfilling enough for the egoic mind.

So aim for the middle. You don’t have to become a Buddhist, of course, but you do have to understand the roller coaster ride you are on. When you do, then maybe you can find some healthy ways to bring your thoughts into the immediate moment without projecting them into the future or dragging them back to the past.

Perhaps the oldest and most fruitful way to find the middle is through meditation. It’s an exercise to recondition your conditioned egoic mind. You can retrain it to seem objective in its subjectivity. If you can see this cycle of pain and pleasure — if you can step back and see that everything is one movement called consciousness — then maybe you can begin to know that your anxiety is rooted in the illusion of the egoic self and its thoughts. You are the permanent within the impermanent. If you can hold the attention here then you are in the middle way.