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Excerpt From: | Living Enlightenment |
Chapter 1: | You Are Your Emotions |
Section 2: | There is nothing to worry – Living enlightenment is enjoying life without worry. |
Part 5: | Worry and dilemma – our inner software |
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Understand that the mind is like a piece of hardware programmed with the software called ‘worry’. For example, let us say you experience depression, or worry, every morning at ten o’clock when thinking of all your unfinished office work. Ten o’clock gets recorded as a low mood time for you. Everyday at exactly ten o’clock you will experience a disturbance in your mood. Many of you might have experienced this. The same low mood happens on Sunday when there is no office to go to. Then you tell yourself, ‘No, today is a Sunday. I don’t need to go to the office. I don’t need to think about those things.’ Then you have relief but the mind goes back again and again to the same mood, because our mind is programmed hardware.
The stress of suffering or worrying becomes part of our being. If the worry or stress is taken away from us, we feel lonely. We feel we are missing something. When we enter into old age, there won’t be much to worry about because no one will expect us to solve any problems. If you watch elderly people, even if their children are married, and sometimes even their grandchildren are married, they will sit religiously every day and read the ‘wanted bride and groom’ column in the newspaper!