Excerpts - The Red Skelton Story (false pictures in the mind)

[notations in brackets have been added for clarification]

[excerpt from the workshop Consciousness, Health Wealth and Love]

(When we are experiencing great anger, guilt, fear or insecurity, it can be of great value to observe the thoughts and realize that we are creating a picture in our mind from misconceptions and misinformation. We think we know what ought to be; but, in fact, we don't. Once we can discover that it is just a picture and is not accurate, we can more easily let go of the picture and then experience a more creative action. And so we begin with the little story my teacher told at the workshop that illustrated what we do to ourselves. His little parables and stories often come to mind quicker than a teaching idea when I discover I'm emotional and have fallen asleep and caught up in a bunch of not I's……….from Marsha)

Red Skelton used to play a script in his radio shows where he would go as a mean little boy. He went out in the back yard and saw a stump or something and came into the house and told his mother that there was a bear or a lion in the back yard. She of course, would try to convince him that he was lying to her-that he was just making things up. In the midst of the conversation between he and his mother, he began to scream and she'd say, "What's the matter?" He'd then say, "I scared myself." Then everybody in the audience laughed.

Now, of course, we don't laugh very much when we do it to ourselves, huh? You can say, "What if this terrible thing is gonna happen." You can build it up and the next thing--it is happening and then you're full of fear and anxiety and you got all kinds of worries, is that right? That just happens.

Now we don't laugh the pictures we conjure up in our head like all the audience did when Red Skelton played his little part; but it's probably just as laughable isn't it-except we haven't seen the joke in it because we played the joke on ourselves.

Now we've created what's called a problem; and I get calls from all over the country from people that have problems.

Now the problem is that they've [we've] invented a picture in their [our] mind and become frightened or angry or guilty from the false picture-now what's really happening to them [us] is nothing. Their [we're] sitting somewhere in a room calling me and there are no wolves or tigers or lions or people with guns or machetes chopping on them [us] or anything like that-but they [we] have a terrible problem.

Now then, of course, they would like me to give them a solution; and of course, I don't do that. I make the problem disappear. Now when you don't have the picture, you no longer have the problem, is that right; because the whole problem was just a picture in your head. And you've had a lot of them. But you didn't think to laugh about them while they were going on.