Dealing with Anxiety

Q: What is Frank Yang’s Perspective on anxiety ?

A: All anxiety comes from a self thinking there is a version of the world available other than the one that is simply unfolding now without the possibility of an agent in control. “When we no longer imagine or hope that there is another version of what is simply happening right now, and see that there is no one that could do so”, then there is freedom from fear and anxiety. Death doesn’t even make sense.

Q: What do I do when anxiety arises ?

There’s not much you can do about the stuff that comes up except for applying compassion and love and let them be exactly as they are without resistance. Most importantly, realization that clinging and grasping is simply impossible without a center.

Sometimes it’s helpful to work with the content and release a story with another story. The way you use a thorn of a rose to remove another thorn and throw them both away. But other times it’s helpful to see that on the ultimate level, there is nothing to heal. There are no such thing as traumas or conditioning except for the story you are creating yourself right now. And it has nothing to do with what happened in a nonexistent past.

See, all traumas are the accumulation of expectations, which creates victimhood.

Every time you have an expectation, you instantly become a victim of a version of Reality that cannot possibly exist.

But at the level of pure being without time, none of it is possible. Nothing in your expectation will ever happen. Ever.

Expectations are just thoughts, and all thoughts are disjointed and have nothing to do with each other.

Whatever ties thoughts together is simply another thought. And thoughts don’t know anything.

They are simply assumptions about other thoughts and none of them have the awareness to know other thoughts, let alone what’s going on in the present moment Reality, is also unknowable, ungraspable, and empty.

This mystery is where beauty lies. Readers beware, you’re in for a scare!