Just One Look Forum Archives

Hi John and Carla

one thing I would like to understand a bit more is, how does the Looking heal us from the Fear of Life?

kind regards

janosh

The fear of life is like an autoimmune psychological disease. It seems is to be in place to protect you from life, but it actually turns life miserable. It kills what it is supposed to protect.

When you direct your attention to the actual feeling of "me," the invisible assumption that you need to be protected at any cost is invalidated and the foundation of fear of life that is the ground upon which your mind has developed over time is at once destroyed.

Once that assumption that life is dangerous and I am at stake in anything I think, say, feel or do is dissipated, the old mental mechanisms stained by the fear of life begin to lose their power over you. And the less you give them your attention, the quicker they will fade away. The only thing that has kept them in place all these years was your attention. By declining to attend to them every time they appear, you starve them to death.

We don't know exactly how it happens, but this is the best way we have found so far to explain what has happened to us and to many hundreds of people who have told us about their experience before and after looking at themselves.

Thank you for bringing this into question, Janosh. I too do that from time to time in an effort to prove the Method beyond doubt on a logical level. However, I had always come to the conclusion that the most useful root statement to base any logic on is intuition, a gut feeling that something is right for me even against my better judgement. Over the years, it turned out that I don't need logical proof that much anymore since my subjective everyday experience, which is a general sense of lightness, almost completely excludes any explanation other than the looking and its subsequent effects. And I do have my history of trying out methods that were supposed to heal my mind from the ground up and failed to produce any long-lasting result.

I'm happy about your courage to ask your questions here rather than in a private session. Thereby, everyone can profit from this interaction and bring about even more knowledgeability about the Method in the process. In my experience, it can be hard to believe that such a simple act should have such an extreme influence on our subconscious as being described in John and Carlas books, especially when some change happens in life or difficult decisions need to be made. But those phases always disembogued into lightness again once their air time was over which does happen eventually even without doing any training like Self-Directed Attention. It's less painful with it, though.

Felix