The Fear
Since I’ve written about guilt in the last two articles, it seems only natural now to write about its conjoined twin, fear. There is no guilt without fear and no fear without guilt. You feel guilty for separating from God and you expect to be punished for it. This is the source of all fear. Fear is the symptom, or proof, that you feel guilty. And, of course, it is inherent in your identification with a personal self, which is the “proof” that you have successfully snapped off part of God for yourself.
A long while ago I wrote about students who would say to me that they didn’t fear God. I’d ask them if they were 100% at Peace 100% of the time. They’d say no, and I’d ask them why not? What was their obstacle to Peace if not fear of God? If they didn’t fear God, they’d just accept God right now. Fear of God is ultimately the only obstacle to Peace, and if you look deeply enough into your mind, you will always find it when you are not at Peace. Fear of God is why you are resistant to meditating, to practicing the lessons in the Workbook consistently, to calling on the Holy Spirit for guidance, to extending God’s Love in your awareness, and to simply accepting the Peace that is always here with you. You believe that God demands some sacrifice of you: either payment beforehand (you must earn God’s Love), or payment afterward. It is why you experience what I call “ego-rebound” or “ego-backlash” when you have experienced God. The personal mind has no power of its own, so if you are experiencing it, it is because you are choosing it. Why does it seem that you can only accept so much of God before you turn again to the personal mind? It’s because you wonder what it is going to “cost” you to experience God’s Love. The more you experience It, the more you think you will have to “pay” for It afterward.
Sometimes the fear takes the form of you not wanting to give up the personal self. You don’t want to give it up because you are afraid that the experience of God is even worse. I realized a long while ago that I have two gods in my mind: The God of my experience, Which is Wholly Loving; and the frightening, inconsistent, punishing god that I have made in the image of the personal self. I don’t fear What God really is; I fear the god that I have made and that I project onto God. Overcoming guilt/fear, then, is a process of reminding myself of this again and again. This is the catch-22: You have to experience God to learn that God is not what you fear, yet fear keeps you from being willing to experience God. This is where teachings like A Course in Miracles come in. By reassuring you again and again that you are One with God, and that God is Only Love, it helps you to let down your fear just enough to let the Holy Spirit into your experience. From there you can begin to build trust.
Sometimes it seems that guilt and fear are immovable, but remember that God is your Truth, and you know this on some level. It is inevitable that you will work through guilt and fear and be your Self again because you already are your Self. Guilt and fear are just made-up ideas; they have no reality. When you let them go, you find that Peace is Present.
>>>>
Read The Message of A Course in Miracles: A translation of the Text in plain language at www.themessageofacim.com.
A long while ago I wrote about students who would say to me that they didn’t fear God. I’d ask them if they were 100% at Peace 100% of the time. They’d say no, and I’d ask them why not? What was their obstacle to Peace if not fear of God? If they didn’t fear God, they’d just accept God right now. Fear of God is ultimately the only obstacle to Peace, and if you look deeply enough into your mind, you will always find it when you are not at Peace. Fear of God is why you are resistant to meditating, to practicing the lessons in the Workbook consistently, to calling on the Holy Spirit for guidance, to extending God’s Love in your awareness, and to simply accepting the Peace that is always here with you. You believe that God demands some sacrifice of you: either payment beforehand (you must earn God’s Love), or payment afterward. It is why you experience what I call “ego-rebound” or “ego-backlash” when you have experienced God. The personal mind has no power of its own, so if you are experiencing it, it is because you are choosing it. Why does it seem that you can only accept so much of God before you turn again to the personal mind? It’s because you wonder what it is going to “cost” you to experience God’s Love. The more you experience It, the more you think you will have to “pay” for It afterward.
Sometimes the fear takes the form of you not wanting to give up the personal self. You don’t want to give it up because you are afraid that the experience of God is even worse. I realized a long while ago that I have two gods in my mind: The God of my experience, Which is Wholly Loving; and the frightening, inconsistent, punishing god that I have made in the image of the personal self. I don’t fear What God really is; I fear the god that I have made and that I project onto God. Overcoming guilt/fear, then, is a process of reminding myself of this again and again. This is the catch-22: You have to experience God to learn that God is not what you fear, yet fear keeps you from being willing to experience God. This is where teachings like A Course in Miracles come in. By reassuring you again and again that you are One with God, and that God is Only Love, it helps you to let down your fear just enough to let the Holy Spirit into your experience. From there you can begin to build trust.
Sometimes it seems that guilt and fear are immovable, but remember that God is your Truth, and you know this on some level. It is inevitable that you will work through guilt and fear and be your Self again because you already are your Self. Guilt and fear are just made-up ideas; they have no reality. When you let them go, you find that Peace is Present.
>>>>
Read The Message of A Course in Miracles: A translation of the Text in plain language at www.themessageofacim.com.
Comments
Liz if you have a minute to answer this for me though. My son's wedding is next week. I want to not cry but be filled with the joy I feel, so why the choking up on joyous occasions? Is it like you say here, fear of God, which I may be feeling close too when being joyful?
Thank, Cindy
Also, in life-transition events like weddings there is also always an element of loss for everyone closely involved. All change involves loss of some kind.
We kill animals for food every day. Why not offer my body as food for them as a loving gesture of goodbye and just be One with God in complete peace?
If you were aware that you are One with God then you would have no questions about the world at all; you would see right through it. And you certainly would not need to think about destroying the body because it would not be anything to you and you would know that there is no one there to feed it to. The only "loving gesture" that you can make, as the Course puts it, is to accept "the Atonement" for yourself - which means to accept correction of your perception that you are separate from God. You can be sure that, if you have accepted this as your goal, then the Holy Spirit will take care of all of your needs, worldly or otherwise. But this will be done in terms of what is best for your awakening, not on the personal mind's terms.