The real determining factors as to how much we’re going to suffer come back to our intentions. If you act on unskillful intentions, you just make things worse. If you act on skillful intentions, though, there’s a way out.

"Just look at your body. Every part of the body has at least one disease to go with it, sometimes more than one. It’s ready to fall apart, even though we do our best to keep it going. And the mind is even more changeable than that. So it’s no wonder that these are the things that grab our attention right away.

But, the Buddha says, those aren’t the things to be afraid of. The real thing to be afraid of is that you’re going to do something unskillful — particularly in trying to protect this identity you’ve taken on, to ward off whatever you think is going to be the next big danger to threaten it.

There are a lot of really horrible things that people do out of fear. And it turns out the horrible things are the things they really should be fearing more than the other fears they have.

This is why a large part of our training as meditators is to learn to see how our ordinary old fears are not nearly as scary as we think. Of course, the dangers are there — there’s instability, there are uncertainties built into the fact that we’ve taken on an identity. But the real determining factors as to how much we’re going to suffer come back to our intentions. If you act on unskillful intentions, you just make things worse. If you act on skillful intentions, though, there’s a way out."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Fear & Insecurity"

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