Fears are imagination. They are real only so far as you say. In general, you make much of them.

There is a difference between fear and common sense. I recommend that you not cross a trafficked street without looking both ways.

You need not overcome all your fears. Your life is for more than undoing your fears. But your fears do not need to be the foundation of your life either. You do not need to spend your life dodging them. Are fears really so ominous?

If you think you must vanquish all your fears, you are giving them too much importance. They are not a mighty magnificent opponent. They are only fears. You have nothing to prove to them or about them.

You can consider them like potholes. You do not get frantic every time you come across a pothole. You go over it or around it, and you do not write in your journal about it. Potholes are just there, that's all.

Imagined fears are baseless. Certainly the one about speaking before groups is baseless. Are you really so fearful of public opinion? Do you think that an audience will stone you? Your ego is at risk, that's all. What is the big deal if you fall flat on your face? What do you think will happen? Do you think the whole world will banish you? They might even applaud you.

Is this the same fear as worrying what someone will think of you but magnified?

Fear of loss of finances. This hovers over you. You think money and public opinion are your livelihood.

The fear of loss of health. Oh, that's real, you say. It has been made real. Do not give so much awe to illness. Do not suffer it ahead of time.

The fear of death of the body? That is the most baseless of all. That is only another fear of change. That is only fear of breaking boundaries. That is only fear of letting go of the body and the outer life that you complain about so much. It is big fear that says you can lose anything.

That is the premise for your fears. Your worship of loss. You worship it even when you know that you cannot lose that which is yours eternally. And you cannot lose that which was never yours to own anyway. Even so, you put loss on a platform, and you worship the possibility of it.

When you return a book to the library, you do not feel that you have had a loss. You merely returned something that all parties understood you would. You do not become so attached to the books you know you will have to return. Read them, enjoy them, for that is what they are for. They are not for the purpose of holding or shelving in your house. They are to go back from where they came.

When you shake hands with someone, do you feel you have lost your hand? Or when you finish shaking hands, have you lost the hand you shook? What can be taken from you that is yours?

Your life is indubitably yours. It is yours forever, as it always has been. Your body can pass away, but not you. That is such an impossibility, it is not worth considering.

You have ownership of your thoughts, your actions, your responses, your heart, your eternal life. Anything else you think you own is a false presumption. That is why you worry so much about losing it; you know it isn't really yours to keep forever or even as long as you may want. You keep waiting for what is not yours to be taken away.

Right now, in your heart, fling to the skies all that which is not really yours. Instead of fearing for it in your imagination, let go of it now in your imagination. No longer need you worry about the hour of your body's demise or the state of it while on earth or of any other thing you hold to you so tightly that is not yours by Divine right.