When it burns, it needs trained people who have rehearsed fire extinguishing to the point where every handling has been practiced. You cannot start practicing in an emergency.

Associative thinking, which has a firm grip on us, is built on countless connections of brain cells, which have been established over decades. You cannot change them from one day to the next. The connections between the brain cells are "crystallized”, they do not dissolve on command. If we simply superimpose «positive thinking» or «uplifting ideas» on the processes of associative thinking, they have no power.

Associative thinking not only makes us yaw and seduce, clog and rob our substance, it also nails and paralyzes our ability to act. This is expressed drastically in the pictorial language of the Isenheimer Altar, in that on the crucifixion scene the hands of the crucified are nailed to the horizontal beam - which stands for the mental world.

It is not about us «jumping out» of associative thinking in an emergency and turning to God! What is going on in our brains through habitual trajectories will overtake us - we will be taken back to prison to old thought forms.

Building new paths of thinking is a life's work. It is an incessant vigilance that it takes to avoid going along with unnecessary and negative thoughts. Seeing through the entanglement in habitual sequences of associative thinking and then being awake enough to interrupt it right from the beginning requires continuous mindfulness.

The path leads through becoming empty – going into silence on a regular basis - and the regular uptake of ideas left behind by those who know. This «reconstructs» the brain. Such a time of reconstruction is again and again a fragile unstable state, which we call a crisis. On such stretches of the way, knowing what is happening and/or being accompanied can help us to go through with trust.

When the air is saturated with anxiety viruses, it is hardly possible to start with working on thinking. Fear and resistance create only a vicious circle, not a healing substance, which can make us free and capable of full authority and can protect us from viruses.

To be free from the prison of associative thinking is only possible by not giving it our attention but drawing our attention away from it. As Karlfried Graf Dürckheim formulated it: «When the knocks on you, do not resist. It is stronger that we are. Don’t run away, it is quicker than we. Don’t discuss with him, he is more intelligent than we. Offer him a place to sit down and let him sit drawing your attention away from him and turning consciously to something else.» The simplest way is: sensation of he body and conscious breathing

Yes, here we really need the "two feet»: Trust and endurance - during a long, fairly normal time.