Hmm. It's hard to explain, but I think in most cases, you can learn to stop your mind from doing this.
I don't know what kind of "fearful thoughts" you're talking about, though.
If you seem to have uncontrolled thoughts that are telling you to do violent things to yourself or other people, please see some kind of professional counselor about this -- soon. It could be a minister or priest or rabbi or mullah; it could be a social worker, could be a psychiatrist or psychology. But please find someone who will listen to you and help you control your "fearful" thoughts before you hurt somebody else or yourself.
If your "fearful thoughts" are mostly about fear, however, I think there are ways to control your experience of fear. It may take some time, however.
1. In some cases, you may keep thinking about some fearful thing because it's really important to you for some reason, although in your conscious mind, you really don't want to think about it. If this is the case -- if you're thinking something, but you're afraid of thinking it and trying to force yourself to stop -- MAYBE you just have to face the scary thought openly and honestly, and admit you're afraid, and then figure out consciously how you're going to respond to the danger that your mind is telling you about.
2. In certain other cases, you might feel alienated from other people, or from the world at large, or from God or nature, etc, and the fact that you feel small & alone in the face of "danger" may be making you upset. For me -- this may not work for you -- for me, I sometimes become less frightened when I give up the idea that I have to be a separate individual in total control of my fate, and with an urgent need to feed all of my desires.
By giving up on my desires, and by abandoning my sense of control for a moment, I may be able to just relax and think of myself as being "part of the universe" or "at one with God," and then I can focus on my own breathing, or on the ways the trees look this morning with the sunlight on them, or on the way the sunlight looks falling on the wall of the apartment building across the street. And this calms me down, at least for a moment, and enables me to stop feeling so frightened.
3. Step number 2 is something I do in connect with eastern mysticism, as I understand it. I try to think of myself as just being an extension of God, with no personality of my own, and feel liberated from fear as a result. But there's a more "western," more individualistic way to achieve roughly the same goal. This is the system recommended by the Stoic philosophers of ancient Rome.
As I understand it, these guys basically said that if you want to be happy, then focus your moral efforts and your desires on things that you yourself can control -- in many cases, this means just focusing on how you can react in a moral and reasonable way to things that happen to you. But you give up on trying to control the things, and that frees you from lots of unneeded fear.
I don't know what kind of "fearful thoughts" you're talking about, though.
If you seem to have uncontrolled thoughts that are telling you to do violent things to yourself or other people, please see some kind of professional counselor about this -- soon. It could be a minister or priest or rabbi or mullah; it could be a social worker, could be a psychiatrist or psychology. But please find someone who will listen to you and help you control your "fearful" thoughts before you hurt somebody else or yourself.
If your "fearful thoughts" are mostly about fear, however, I think there are ways to control your experience of fear. It may take some time, however.
1. In some cases, you may keep thinking about some fearful thing because it's really important to you for some reason, although in your conscious mind, you really don't want to think about it. If this is the case -- if you're thinking something, but you're afraid of thinking it and trying to force yourself to stop -- MAYBE you just have to face the scary thought openly and honestly, and admit you're afraid, and then figure out consciously how you're going to respond to the danger that your mind is telling you about.
2. In certain other cases, you might feel alienated from other people, or from the world at large, or from God or nature, etc, and the fact that you feel small & alone in the face of "danger" may be making you upset. For me -- this may not work for you -- for me, I sometimes become less frightened when I give up the idea that I have to be a separate individual in total control of my fate, and with an urgent need to feed all of my desires.
By giving up on my desires, and by abandoning my sense of control for a moment, I may be able to just relax and think of myself as being "part of the universe" or "at one with God," and then I can focus on my own breathing, or on the ways the trees look this morning with the sunlight on them, or on the way the sunlight looks falling on the wall of the apartment building across the street. And this calms me down, at least for a moment, and enables me to stop feeling so frightened.
3. Step number 2 is something I do in connect with eastern mysticism, as I understand it. I try to think of myself as just being an extension of God, with no personality of my own, and feel liberated from fear as a result. But there's a more "western," more individualistic way to achieve roughly the same goal. This is the system recommended by the Stoic philosophers of ancient Rome.
As I understand it, these guys basically said that if you want to be happy, then focus your moral efforts and your desires on things that you yourself can control -- in many cases, this means just focusing on how you can react in a moral and reasonable way to things that happen to you. But you give up on trying to control the things, and that frees you from lots of unneeded fear.