anxiety

Anxiety means ‘There is nobody to look after me. I have to carry the whole burden on my own shoulders. If I don’t carry it then I am finished.’ The anxious person thinks, ‘Everybody is against me. Somehow, everybody is conspiring against me, everybody is at my throat. I have to protect myself. I have to be watchful, I have to plan, I have to move in such a way that I become the winner. Everybody is a competitor and they are all bent upon defeating me.’ 

This attitude creates anxiety, and it is the attitude of an irreligious person. When I say an irreligious person I don’t mean a person who does not go to church or read the Bible – that is not the point. A Person may go to church, but if he remains in anxiety he is not religious. He may be praying to God and reading the Bible just because of his anxiety. He may do it as a kind of protection, security. But such a person is not religious. He is pathological and his religion will be pathological. 

The truly religious person knows nothing of anxiety; he changes the whole gestalt. He says, ‘I am part of this whole existence, and if trees are not worried and the birds are not going crazy and mad and the animals are utterly happy, why can’t I be? I belong to this existence, I am an essential part of it.’ This trust this understanding, this faith means that anxiety simply disappears, you have stopped creating it. 
Then so much energy is released that it starts overflowing. It is so abundant, so exuberant, that life becomes a festival. It becomes a dance. Then you are religious, then you are drunk with the devine.


-Esteni de Wet