Β20. Thus, I get liberated from my anxieties.

The State of Freedom
A journey of Truth into the mind’s sanctuary
with the destination of inner Freedom.

Β20.  Thus, I get liberated from my anxieties.

The abandonment of the expectations yielded, as we already saw, the relinquishment of the demands. Both the expectations and the demands had always constituted causes for big anxieties for the mind. As a result, since I have now learned how to make the expectations and the demands vanish gradually, I also start to become liberated from my anxieties.

Whenever my mind expected something, he used to attach himself to it with fixation. All his thoughts swiveled around the means by which he might be able to acquire the object of his desire. As long as the wanted acquisition did not occur, my inner stress gradually increased. My expectation heightened; the idea of failure caused me more and more dread, while the probability of success electrified me so much that my body shuddered excited by that particular substitute of joy which rather evokes a neurosis and triggers heart flutter, whenever I thought of the satisfaction I would receive by the obtainment of the desired good.

In a nutshell, the expectations used to induce great anxiety in me. Consequently, the anxiety, depending on the outcome, was converted either to uncontrolled excitement or to deep disappointment. The excitement lent the success inexistent dimensions of an imaginary recognition of my ego, whereas the disappointment sparked a chain reaction of negative mental associations which sank my mind to the bottom due to the arbitrary inference that I proved to be of no value at all in general and not only in the current particular issue.

Similarly, the demands also used to induce great anxiety in me. The mental overload, which I suffered while breaking my neck to constantly find new arguments so as to convince myself or whichever brother resisted and refused to satisfy each demand of mine, was far from a pleasant pursuit. A feeling of a knot in the throat, a pain deep in the eye sockets, continuous contractions of the shoulder and neck muscles and sudden numbness of the legs where some of the symptoms related to the anguish I underwent in such occasions.

In spite of the fact that all previous years I had been addicted to experience the bodily and emotional tension even for the most unimportant reasons, I now gladly notice that rather with a feeling of redemption than with a withdrawal syndrome I see in the new state of absence of expectations and demands, as well as of the anxieties these used to cause. Most obviously, the cycle of anguish had already been complemented; it seems that saturation had already intervened regarding the chemical secretions which physically compose the feeling of anxiety, and this must be the reason why I do not suffer a withdrawal syndrome now.

In this way, another harmful and painful habit was thrown by the mind into the waste basket or rather into the basket of futility[1]: the habit of anxiety. Its place has been now occupied by the joy of emotional detachment and the distant observa­tion of his inner proceedings.