"When you read the Gospels, you'll notice that much of what Jesus was teaching concerned where we choose to focus our mind's power of attention. When he said, 'Consider the lilies,' he was turning our attention to experience those lilies. When he said, 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand,' he was pointing to the exact place we can focus our attention in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.
"And when he said, 'Fear not — judge not — love one another,' he was clearly indicating that we are to shift our focus away from mental thoughts and images that generate fear and judgment toward the center of love in our own bodies — our hearts.
"At any given moment, most of our attention is devoted to focusing either on the past and the future (thinking, imagining, plotting, remembering, worrying, and all the rest) or on the present moment (sensing, feeling, and relating). When fear is closely examined, we find that it's almost always a past-future process in the mind. Unless we're physically threatened by a lion, a truck, or a bully in the present moment, our anxieties are all about what might happen in the future, based on bad things that have happened in the past.
"Worrying is clearly a past-future fixation. Conversely, love is something we feel in our hearts in the present moment. Anxiety is provoked by thoughts inside our minds. Love is an experience that comes to us as a whole-body feeling right here, right now.
"This means that if you want to follow Jesus' driving suggestion to stop being caught up in fear, you need to learn how to shift your focus away from thoughts about the past and the future, toward your experience right now in your heart. It's the same with judgment. Judgment is entirely a product of the thinking mind as it projects its own attitudes, judgments, and stereotypes on a person or a situation. Judgment is an associative thought that yanks you out of direct participation in the present moment and separates you from whatever you're encountering.
"Of course, we do need to keep discriminating between red lights and green lights. I'm sure Jesus wasn't talking about simple discrimination when he said, 'Judge not.' He was talking about our chronic habit of categorizing everything we encounter, of stuffing people and events into cubbyholes based on past experience, rather than opening up to a unique new experience in the present moment. In this light, he talked about how we need to have the minds of little children to enter the kingdom of heaven, that is, be so much in the present moment that we don't get sucked off into judgment or fear mode by everything we encounter."
