Fear Not, Love Inside Out
Chapter 2: "Standing In The Light of My Truth"
Few of us appreciate or are fully aware all the time of the enormous power of the mind. It never loses its power to create, and every instant it is creating. Therefore, there is no such thing as an idle mind because the mind is incapable of being inactive. When you consider it, a thought precedes every action, and every action is either a condition of fear or a condition of love.
My search for truth that would surely set me free has helped me to accept that if fear is present in the mind, love, more specifically self-love (God’s perfect love), is absent. They cannot exist in the same realm at the same time. They are conclusively opposites. Fear is nothing and love is everything. Nothing and everything cannot co-exist. Entertain the thought of this belief by relating it to walking into a dark room and turning on the light. When light enters darkness, darkness is brought to an end. Fear is darkness and love is light. I don’t believe there is a plausible compromise between love, which is everything, and fear, which is nothing. God, who is everything, cannot exist in nothingness. Therefore, if fear is in the mind, it prevents Him from giving us His control.
Love encompasses mind, body, and spirit. Only the mind can produce fear. It happens when negative thoughts stored in the body rise to the level of the mind. By the time those destructive thoughts reach the mind, all courage is lost. That happens when what we want conflicts with what we do. Wanting and doing are inharmonious.
For instance, in my twenties and early thirties I often behaved as I thought that I should, but not entirely wanting to do so. In my mind, I strongly rejected religious dogma [but believed strongly in God] and even more strongly resented society dictating personal responsibility. However, I went along with those who accepted those things to keep from being seen as an oddball. I kept my mouth shut and let them boldly proclaim their belief in something that I opposed. Therefore, my mind and my behavior were not in accord, which resulted in me doing what I didn’t completely want to do.
My mind was split. I felt coerced by intrusive thoughts to march to the beat of someone else’s expectations. And when I felt restrained from speaking truth as I saw it for the sake of someone’s feelings or peace in the family or because it wasn’t the professional thing to do, my thoughts turned on me. I felt angry and outraged because I had chosen to box myself into a way of behaving and thinking that was in conflict with who I thought I was. I felt under great strain. Something had to give.
When I eventually sought corrective action, I learned that I had to accept that I had chosen wrongly and the conflict in my mind was an expression of fear. I had to confront the many ways fear had surfaced in my mind. I was fearful of not being liked, so often times I chose not to speak the whole truth. I wanted more to be thought of as agreeable and kind instead of always looking for a deeper meaning to things. If I spoke my mind irrespective of the consequence for doing so, would people still be there for me? I was fearful that if I was seen as having a different viewpoint from the majority and secure in my own interpretations, then people would see my “thinking” as too controversial and me as strange. I was fearful they would mock me like they did the actress Shirley McClain. In the 1980’s, she publicly proclaimed her forward spiritual thinking and was unfairly ridiculed by the press and religious groups for it. Therefore, I was afraid of my own thoughts. I had lost all courage to speak. I had chosen not to love myself enough to stand confidently in my own light regardless of whether someone embraced that light or not or liked me or not, or the fear could not have arisen.
If our thoughts do not produce a condition that is a sign of love for one’s self and love for others, then the condition is an expression of fear. For instance, accepting someone without wanting to change them is a condition of self-love. However, envy and jealousy are both conditions of fear.
If you are hostile toward someone believed to have an advantage, it would suggest that your negative thoughts about your self-worth and value have risen to the level of your mind and produced fear. In your exterior life, the condition that others may see is a person who gossips about other people in order to weaken them. They may see a person who always talks about himself or herself and never compliments anyone else, a person who consistently criticizes and judges the action and behavior of others. By constantly undermining someone else distract people from finding out how emotionally deadlocked you are.
Envy is a bit more sinister than jealousy. Not only does one resent the advantage enjoyed by another, there is a desire at any cost to possess the same advantage. When you examine envy and jealousy in the context of self-investigation and self-discovery, fear is the culprit that emerges.
If we ask God to release us from fear, we are acknowledging that we believe that fear is something and greater than love. Instead, in the case of my situation, I eventually sought God’s guidance and help in resolving the conditions that brought about the fear in my mind.
As long as I simply recognized only the need to remedy fear, I remained fearful. My self-investigation helped me to discover that the reason I was fearful that people wouldn’t accept me because I had not accepted myself. Fear had surfaced because stored in my body were my own self-condemnations, self-criticisms, and self-judgments, which are forms of self-abuse. I was beating myself up for not doing everything perfectly or morally according to religious teachings of right and wrong. I was hard on myself when my choices didn’t bring about the results that I’d hoped for. Once those self-imposed destructive forces reached my mind, to relieve myself, I projected my disconnection onto others. I told myself it was all their fault that I couldn’t be myself around them. Once I was able to unconditionally accept all of me just as God accepts all of me, I connected to my own love inside me and a profound connection to God ensued.
I chose self-awareness so that I could knowself-love, thus rejecting fear. However, I learned quickly that corrective action happens by degrees because there are layers on top of layers of thoughts from all stages of our human and spiritual growth and development buried in our bodies. It takes time to get rid of those thoughts and heal. There’s no quick fix when it comes to things of the spirit; that is, if you want the change to become as strong inside you as the roots of a tree.
Correcting fear is an individual responsibility. For me, it entailed changing my mind and not my behavior. My behavior was a result of my thoughts, because what we think, we do. Therefore, correction had to occur in the mind—the only level where change is possible and God’s guidance is needed.
The spirit level is changeless, only the mind miscreates and misperceives God. Now that I live a much more spiritually rewarding life on my own terms and am not concerned with what others think about how I choose to live my life, before I put my thoughts into action, I seek God’s guidance.
I believe the way that we end fear is to overrun our mind with loving thoughts—all things good, inspiring, natural, positive, and uplifting, especially about one’s self—and retain in the mind all things supported by love. If we can do that, there is no reason for fear to remain.
Fear (darkness and nothingness) cannot exist where there is love (everything and light) for self and others.
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