There is one ingredient that I intentionally left out of the quick and easy recipe for Charred Self-Loathing in yesterday’s blog entry: Fear. Any human Being, with even a minimum of fear based experiences, could likely fill a cookbook with paralytic recipes, using just this one ingredient. Fear is immense, almost immeasurable, and yet it is seemingly immaterial. Our thought patterns create fear, and it is almost always created by our thoughts about the future. The future is immaterial until our individual consciousness, and the Universal Consciousness, collaborate to materialize it. If there were suddenly a Universal Understanding that we collectively create our shared reality, fear would be instantaneously irrelevant. It would have no purpose. Humans would stop projecting their fears on the world around them, and the Earth and Humanity would begin to heal.
There is a consensual understanding that Love is the polar opposite of Fear. When I was a child, I was taught by my peers that the opposite of Love is Hate, but I think that was a sly manipulation of the fearful folks, in order to keep the focus off of the root of the problem. It’s like the chicken and the egg all over again, except it is easy to conclude that hate is the offspring of fear – the fear of Others. Fear can be overwhelming to those living a fear-based existence. For those who learn to overcome their fears, to live fearlessly; they are left with the single omnipotent ingredient of Love. Once the fear subsides, there is only love. Love is considered to be the ultimate spiritual force in our Universe. I’ve chosen to choose Love over Fear in every circumstance and situation of my life.
How did I overcome fear? One recipe at a time, starting with simple phobias and superstitions. I confronted my fears one by one, exposing them for the psychological smokescreens they were. Usually this exposure of fear involved tracing the thought patterns to the root of that particular fear. Invariably, the tracing brought me to the doorstep of Death or Evil. When I realized that the overwhelming majority of my fears were linked to the fear of death or evil (“Evil” being the unknown malevolent monster out to get me), I came to the “knowing” that all Fear could be dissipated through the dismissal of one fear – the fear of death. Delving deeper on my internal exploration, I discovered that facing the smaller fears gave me the courage needed to conquer the mother of all fear – Death. And so, every time I was able to look one of my fears in the face, thus dispelling its power over my spirit, I considered it a feather to add to my budding wings of freedom. Feather by feather, I created my own wings from the lesser fears, until I was able to fly high above the awesome fear of death and to see it for the mirage that it Is. Death is the unknown Evil awaiting us all. We fear what will happen to “I Am” when our lives are finished here on the material plane of Earth. From that single fear, all others are spawned. Connect with the eternal life force of the Universe, and the fear of death becomes irrelevant. The fears, become, feaThers.
It takes courage to face fear, but once you gain confidence from the small victories over the lesser fears, there is genuine Joy to be found in freedom from fear. And, with Love as the reward for this conquest, it doesn’t get any better than that!
"Grand Providentia United" 