Worst-case scenario

Filed under Notes on 14. May 2007 »

I remember listening to a radio show with Byron Katie a few months ago, where she was taking calls from people and guiding them through their issues using The Work. A man called in with a list of potential problems and scenarios in his life situation, the usual sort of worries and dilemmas that people have regarding fulfillment and survival, how this might happen and that might happen; basically just the fearful and generic story of how everything might go wrong in the future.

So Katie asked him the question, “what is the worst that could happen?” He answered and she asked him “and then what?” Again he answered, and she repeated “and then what?,” again and again until the man had traced back his story, only to find that there wasn’t really anything there to be afraid of in the first place.

The thing with these fearful stories we tell ourselves about the future and how everything might come crashing down all around us, is that they are like a vague cloud of “something bad that might happen,” never really giving you a clear image of what exactly it is you are afraid of.
This is because the fear isn’t really about the particular content of your story — it is built into the structure of the conditioned sense of self, and so it doesn’t really matter what your story is about because the element of fear is independent of the content.

The method of writing out your stories of worst-case scenarios is briefly mentioned in Katie’s book Loving What Is, where she writes:

“... imagine the worst outcome that reality could hand you. Imagine your worst fears lived out on paper. Be thourough. Take it to the limit. ... After each frightening scenario that comes to mind, imagine what could happen next. And then what could happen? And then what? Be a frightened child. Don’t hold back.”

When we do this, grab a hold of the cloud of fear and dissect it by going through the worst-case scenarios step-by-step, it helps us peel back the layers of fear and illusion we’ve constructed for ourselves, only to reveal nothing but thin air.

So ask yourself, again and again, “what is the worst that could happen? And then what?”