If you follow sports, one of the things that happens every season before they begin to play is all of the sports writers predict what’s going to happen during the season. They tell you who is going to win, who is going to lose, and what kind of season the various teams are going to have. Like this, there is a constant prognostication of results. But this goes on in every part of the world, in every segment of the world. If you’re involved in finances, or in the stock market, you can pay thousands of dollars for different people to send you reports of what stocks are going to go up and what stocks are going to go down, and listen to the various doomsayers, naysayers, and yea-sayers as to what is going to happen.
On the radio right now they have sports talk, and they go on twenty-four hours a day, and in our city, we have three different stations that do this twenty-four hours a day. So, if you’re into sports, and some people are, you listen to this all day long and it becomes an obsession.
There’s also political shows and shows on the market, the stock market, and shows on the economy. If you listen with a discerning ear, you’ll note the prejudices of the different sports people, and the teams they like and the teams they dislike, and you’ll note that when they make their prognostications, their own personal feelings really come into who they predict to win or lose.
In politics you have the left and you have the right, and you have the far-left and you have the far-right, and you have the analysts who adhere to either the left, the right, the middle, the far-right, the far-left, and each of them, because of the way they feel, makes certain statements and predictions based on their own ideas of how things should be. They create a lot of worry, they make people anxious. Some are constantly bringing about all of the terrible things that can happen because the politics don’t adhere to their point of view.
Let’s talk about worry a little bit first because we need to understand what it is. Worry is feeling future pain now. You think about what’s going to happen next, and then you put a set of circumstances around it, and then you put yourself into that set of circumstances. And often because you’re worrying, you’ve made that set of circumstances negative, and you therefore react in a negative way now to things that haven’t happened yet but you’re sure they’re going to. You’re predicting the future. Not only have you joined the analysts who do this for a living and get paid, the difference is you’re not getting paid but you’re suffering from the emotional trauma of the exercise. And the exercise of predicting the future, if you are attached to outcomes, always carries emotional trauma. It makes you go through things.
One of the things that has happened is for a lot of people who don’t have religion, politics have become religion. For some, sports have become religion. For some, the stock market has become religion, economics has become religion. If you studied economics when you were in college, and they always do some socialism/communism/Marxism, what essentially happened is somebody took the point of view of Marx that there is no God, there is no religion, and the only factor in the happiness of humanity is your economic status…
