How to Walk Out of Any Dark Mental Movie

by Guy Finley

Imagine for a moment you’ve gone to a huge cineplex with eight separate theaters. You buy your ticket and walk into the show you came to see. But, before too long, you realize you don’t like what’s on the screen so you decide to change theaters. Unfortunately, the next movie’s just as pointless. So you change theaters again. And again. You move from one show to the next — all the while not remembering that the film you just walked into was unable to please you the first time you saw it.

Then, in a moment of clarity, another choice comes to you. You walk out of the movies. You take yourself out of the theater complex. Now you’re free to go enjoy the rest of your day in some other way.

Now, consider your own thinking for just a moment. Can you see how your mind loves to go over and over events that haven’t even happened yet? Each time your mind envisions some future event, it’s actually trying to find a feeling of security for itself. But the only security this lower nature can ever know is imaginary. So it has to dream up one scene after another where somehow you’ll come out a winner. But, the more victories it conjures up in this way, the more fear it feels that it won’t win the battles it just created. And the more agitated this low level of mind becomes from its own unconscious activity, the more it tries to settle itself with more mental movies.

No mere mental picture of security has any real power to make you feel secure. And this realization empowers you, effortlessly, to just walk out of your own mental movie.

Being able to consciously walk out of the moviemaking complex is the same as the power to free yourself. Why? Because once you walk out of this tiny darkened theater that your lower nature considers the whole world, you know for certain and at last: there is something outside the world of your usual mind; And once you walk into its light, you know that everything can be forever new for you.

Make a practice of catching yourself in front of the “big screen.” Learn to detect negative feelings that imply there’s nothing that can be done about the way you feel at the moment. Fear, anger, depression, and frustration are a few of the inner conflicts that the mind loves to project through your psychic system.

At the moment you catch these mental crooks stealing your life within the darkness of that mental movie, remember that you always have a higher option. Instead of looking for another self-created scene better than the one you’re in, deliberately take your mind off of the mental screen of thoughts before you. Wake yourself up! Here’s a good place to start.

Notice the tension in your hands, or the feel and temperature of the air around you. Become conscious of the expression on your face. Listen to the sound of your own voice as you speak.

Placing your attention in the fully present moment helps to snap whatever psychic spell you may have been under. Your wish to be awake and free, coupled with your new level of awareness, is the same as walking out of the theater all together.

Now, once you’re out, do your best to stay out! Allow the sunlight of your own momentarily awakened nature to gently warm you. Let the truth remind you of what real pleasures are. You’ll want more and more sunlight, and less and less of the mind’s dark back stage dramatics.