hope and worry – two sides of a coin

HOPE AND WORRY

two sides of a coin

Your state of mind is the currency that purchases your future experiences.

Worry and Hope are like two sides of a coin. Choose your side based on the kind of outcome you desire and focus upon.

Which makes the best investment?

Worry is a negative activity that preoccupies itself with the possibility that things might not turn out the way you want. It is fear put into action. Many people see the uselessness of worry, but struggle with abandoning it for good.

It doesn’t matter whether the subject of worry is “important” or not; worrying begins only when you focus on bad outcomes.

Worry is always a negative action and creates negative potentialities. Negative potentialities eventually cash out as unpleasant experiences… unless you act to counteract them.

Hope is a positive activity that preoccupies itself with the possibility that things might turn out the way you want. It is positive belief put into action. Hope is very useful.

Hope pays the dividend of pleasant experiences. It can cause your wildest dreams to arise as your reality, and can even counteract anger and worry (for as long as you keep making positive belief deposits). One moment of hope is all you need to counteract weeks of worry.

You can exchange worry and hope.

In any given moment, your present state of mind generates your world, your experience. Future posts will explain this in more detail; but if you’ve made emotional investments, you probably understand how the latest “financials” can affect your mood almost instantly.

People prefer to invest wisely.

It might be tempting to believe that worry pays off in wisdom, because worry seems shrewder than hope; But shrewdness differs from wisdom.

Let’s “reason” through it.

People avoid embarrassment, and people tend to feel more embarrassed by being incorrect than by being pleasantly surprised.

People like certainty. Some even prefer the certainty of a negative (or less positive) outcome to the uncertainty of a positive outcome.

When we worry, the negative outcome somehow feels more certain. Plus, if we discover we worried needlessly, the result still satisfies. When we hope, the positive outcome feels more elusive. And if our hopes get dashed, we feel embarrassed.

Therefore, when people worry about something “bad” happening, they stand a good chance of accurately predicting the “market” of their experience. Embarrassment avoided; all is well.

As soon as we worry, that negativity creates the cause for the “bad” thing to arise. Our negative focus flips through the files of our karma, and highlights all of our karmic toxic assets instead of the sound investments. If we’re worrying about and predicting disappointment, worry combines with negative karma to actualize our prediction. When this happens, we might feel a perverse sense of relief when our worries come to fruition.

Wait… why doesn’t hope seem to combine with our karma similarly, to ensure cheerful success? Because we’re so connected with everyone else in the world. Our thoughts affect others – constantly. The prevailing current view in this world seems overall more negative than positive, and that tips the scales. Now let’s move on, lest we end up focusing on the very negativity we’re hoping to eradicate!

In the case of choosing whether to invest your future in worry or hope, it’s similar to deciding how to invest in the stock market. Do you wish to invest your future in a “company” with a high rate of return (since it’s very likely we’ll be “right”) and a huge exploitative impact (worry), or a venture that offers less certainty of a high rate of return yet brings benefit to the world (hope)?

Writing a post about this topic presents a poignant irony: it perpetuates the situation on a subtle level, by asserting that a predominately-negative situation exists. We often have to weigh positive and negative along the path, and the hope remains that if this explanation succeeds in encouraging others to rely upon positive views, there’s a phenomenal chance that the balance will shift more towards positive thoughts and actions. Hope eradicates worry!

You can exchange worry for hope.

All virtuous success is built on a foundation of hope. All failure is built on the foundation of worry. All success comes from positive energy and potentiality, and all failure comes from negative energy and potentiality. Positive and negative cancel each other out according to whichever is in the mind at any given moment.

Again: Worry is useless; Hope is very useful.

Do you worry about worrying? Many people do. Is worrying about worrying a negative action? Yes. So how do we overcome this apparently endless cycle of negativity?

If you catch yourself worrying – and catching that is a good thing – simply change your focus from negative to positive.

Your best investment strategy against worry is simply to flip the coin.

Switch from worry to hope. Distract yourself. Engage in something that you enjoy very much, and you’ll relax. A relaxed mind does not worry. A tense or agitated mind naturally gravitates towards worry and other negative activities.

When your mind rests in positive thoughts, negativity cannot reap dividends in your mind – negative karma disappears. All that matters is what is active in your mind at this moment. And this moment.

Change your mind, change your future.