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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE? Program 134 Freedom From Worry and Anxiety by Ernest O’Neill
Have you ever been worried about money? Have you ever gone to sleep one night knowing that you had an overdraft at the bank and that it was beyond anything you could handle and you couldn’t see a way through it? You know how the night passes. You get to sleep for an hour. Then you wake up utterly preoccupied with the overdraft. Then you start thinking through it and you try to work out how you’re going to meet the overdraft. You see that you can’t do it.
Then you begin to philosophize and persuade yourself that you’re not doing yourself any good by worrying and being anxious. You’d be better to get some sleep, so that you were more fitted the next day to do something that would help to get some money to deal with the problem. Then you find yourself going through the whole situation again in your mind, trying to work out if you can do anything.
Then you tell yourself, “No, you can’t do anything. You’re only making trouble for yourself by being worried and anxious. This is just senseless. You can’t do anything by thinking about the problem.” So at last you get down to some kind of sleep for about fifteen minutes or half an hour. So, the night passes in off-and-on sleep and off-and-on wakefulness.
You get up the next morning utterly worn out. You go to work and try to concentrate on what you’re going, but your mind keeps going back at every opportunity to the problem of the overdraft. It seems as if something has got a grip on your mind that is stronger than you yourself. You can’t understand why it is. You can’t understand what to do about it, but somehow you can’t stop yourself thinking about that worrisome financial position that you’re in.
You begin to wonder, is your mind under your control at all? Or, is it absolutely out of your control. Here you are doing everything possible to try to stop worrying and yet you find your mind repeatedly going back to the issue of this overdraft. Even though you know all the worry and anxiety in the world won’t do a bit of good, yet you find the mind goes back to it repeatedly.
You come to the point where you wonder, “Am I going absolutely crazy? This is ridiculous. Even though I have an overdraft, there are ways in which, if I sell my house, or I sell my car, there are ways in which I somehow can get through it. Yet my mind seems intent on almost torturing me, by going around and around the same circles again and again and again. Why is that?”
It seems as if there is part of you that can see this isn’t sensible. Yet, there is another part of you that seems to be fascinated and mesmerized by the hideous position that you find yourself in financially. Why does that kind of situation occur with so many of us? Almost any of us could tell the same story as we’ve outlined to each other just these past few minutes. Why is that so?
Well, the fact is that there is in your personality something that seems almost intractable, something that makes you feel there is no way that I can clear myself from this worry, unless I get this twist out of my personality, out of my mental makeup. There seems to be some crookedness, some flaw that has begun to work in my mental makeup that prevents me even being able to control my mind. It seems that even though you exercise your will to control your thoughts, yet your mind refuses to be controlled. It is as if it is running out of control itself.
What we have been sharing, of course, is that the reason for that is there has occurred in our personalities a basic perversion that was not there at the beginning. In other words, we were, as Wordsworth describes in his poem, “we came trailing clouds of glory behind us”. As little children we came with minds that would work the way they were meant to work, that would work under the control of our wills.
But as we lived more and more in dependence on the things that we could obtain in this world to establish our security, as we depended more and more on a reasonable bank account, for a good job, for money, as we depended more and more on our clothing and a good supply of shelter for ourselves to establish our security, so we became more and more entangled in attitudes and compulsions that govern the whole society of mankind.
Until, we have reached the point where when it gets to a matter of money, we are almost controlled by outside feelings and outside attitudes. It’s the same kind of thing that takes hold of Wall Street or takes hold of the City, when the economy begins to get shaky. It’s as if there is a corporate psyche that begins to get twisted. It’s as if there is a corporate neurosis that takes hold of us all and makes us worry illogically about certain issues.
It’s that that has taken hold of many of us. In fact, you might say all of us. We have developed certain twists in our personalities that prevent our minds working in the same logical fashion they were meant to when we first came to the earth. Many of us think, “This is crazy! It seems as I myself am twisted. It seems as if I almost have to be changed utterly and completely. It seems as if I almost have to check this mind in and check out a new one. If I could only go and trade it across the counter for a completely new mind that would work sanely and sensibly, then perhaps I could exercise my will freely.”
It’s interesting, but that is exactly our situation. In fact, what has happened is, so many of us have lived so dependent on the things that we can obtain in the world and the things that we can obtain from the world for our security, that we have come to the point where we are absolutely unable to operate in a sane, sensible fashion with the twisted, perverted mental apparatus that we now have.
What we have been saying is that the one who made us, the Maker of the world, the one who made you and made your mind and made your body, that Person knows that that was going to happen to you. He knew that you were going to so depend on the things that you could obtain in the world for your security that eventually your own mind would become twisted and would become perverted itself. It would have to be remade completely. This is what He did in a cosmic miracle that He worked before even He put you on the earth.
You were not only a twinkle in your father’s eye before you were born, but you were a concept in the Creator’s mind. He had conceived of the perversion that would take place in your mind during this lifetime. He at that moment recreated you in His Son. That’s what a certain verse in the old book called the Bible says. It says, “Our old self was crucified with Christ.” (Romans 6:6) It means that the old mind that you have developed over the years was destroyed in Jesus before the foundation of the world and you were recreated completely new.
There actually is a new you that is available in timelessness and you are able to receive that new self, hid with Christ in God, into your life today. You can. It’s amazing! It’s the only way you can ever be free from that psychological twist that has developed in your whole being. It is the only way you can receive again a mind that will work properly and that will work in a balanced way. How do you do it?
Well, the only way possible for this to become real in you is as we’ve said in previous days… through faith. Through believing that the Creator has, in fact, remade you. That’s what it really means when people say that you must be born again. That’s what they really mean. You must be made over again. That’s what God the Creator
has done just in a cosmic miracle in timelessness, in the Lamb that was slain from before the foundation of the world. How do you enable that to become real in your own life today? Through faith.
What is faith? Faith is believing that the Creator has actually done this for you and then, trusting the Holy Spirit, His own life power, to make that real in your life this very moment. It’s amazing, but that can take place now if you believe it and if you begin to respect this supernatural Spirit of God to make that deliverance real in you, this very day. Let’s talk a little more about that tomorrow.
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