Imagine all the worries you can think of as like wild horses running off into the future. Get on the back of one of those and you’ll be in trouble. These wild horses are a big reason that people get stuck in life. They can’t decide what to do, or they become so scared of the future with all of its impending trouble that they miss life’s true opportunities.

Lucky you

If you’re lucky enough to grow up among people who tell you things about what you fear which make sense and make you feel better you are unlikely to be plagued by these horses. A major tragedy, some kind of awful traumatic event, might let them loose but rather you’re more likely to have the odd stray cat than a field full of wild horses.

These wild horses are your projections about how life might be. People who ‘catastrophise’ have a herd of them ready to go at the drop of a hat (or the thought of a worry).

Where conspiracy theories come from

Think about it like this. If I am six years old and I think there’s a monster under my bed, and nobody is around to convince me that there isn’t one, I  will still be finding the equivalents of monsters under my bed when I am sixty-six. Conspiracy theories, paranoias, mistrust, and all those kinds of thing come about when people get on a wild horse and ride off into the sunset like some kind of crazy cowboy.

Glamour, lies and necessary invention

There’s a certain glamour to the idea of riding a wild horse.  People who get lost in projections can become so attached to them they convince others around them of the most peculiar things. Beware of gurus. They are very good at this. On the other hand, someone who is able to summon up the power of projection temporarily and harness it for a specific reason can be very helpful. Great leaders can do this in seemingly impossible situations.

Wild horses get in the way of people being able to make good decisions. Life is nearly always lived a long way outside of the moment. Important new information, differences, are likely to be overlooked. Different conclusions will be very hard to draw (conspiracy theories always seem to be about proving some kind of fear rather than resolving it).

What to do

Sit and listen to all the sounds around you. Notice the furthest away sound and slowly move your way to the closest sound … but WITHOUT trying to understand what each sound is. Notice the sounds as things you are making contact with. Think of them in terms of their intensity, their volume, their texture, their resonance or their pitch. Knowing them like this, as things in the present, will tell you a lot more than you think. You’re not allowing yourself to get lost, as I so often did as a child growing up under one of the main flight paths radiating out of London, in the adventures of someone on a jet flying off on an adventure.

Let the sounds present themselves like this rather than represent something you can only know less certainly based on what you already know.

There’s an indispensable place in your experience for deduction, but what you infer from a sound will be all the more useful if you grow accustomed to hearing every sound, as far as you can, as it is. Projections overtake careful listening. They will transform a sound into a general symbol: a ‘jet’ rather than a particular kind of aeroplane traveling in a certain direction at a specific height. And so on. Work with projections.

Mindfulness works like this, but mindfulness can all-too-easily become a way of making your/self a symbol.