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Study of Text, Chapter 12: !. The Judgment of the Holy Spirit, P 9. 1-4-16

I. The Judgment of the Holy Spirit, P 9

9 Fear is a symptom of your own deep sense of loss. If when you perceive it in others you learn to supply the loss, the basic cause of fear is removed. Thereby you teach yourself that fear does not exist in you. The means for removing it is in yourself, and you have demonstrated this by giving it. Fear and love are the only emotions of which you are capable. One is false, for it was made out of denial; and denial depends on the belief in what is denied for its own existence. By interpreting fear correctly as a positive affirmation of the underlying belief it masks, you are undermining its perceived usefulness by rendering it useless. Defenses that do not work at all are automatically discarded. If you raise what fear conceals to clear-cut unequivocal predominance, fear becomes meaningless. You have denied its power to conceal love, which was its only purpose. The veil that you have drawn across the face of love has disappeared.

Journal
I have been putting off doing this paragraph because I didn’t understand everything I read, so I asked Jesus to bring me understanding. I am going to look with Jesus at this sentence-by-sentence.

“Fear is a symptom of your own deep sense of loss.”

I feel the loss of my identity and that means I feel the loss of Love, of God. The symptom of that loss is fear. I was thinking about this in a different way. What if I fell asleep tonight and when I woke up, I couldn’t remember who I was. I look around and don’t recognize anything. It’s like I am in a different world where nothing makes sense.

After a bit I acclimate to my surroundings, but there is still a profound sense of disconnect because I can’t remember where I came from or who I really am. I can’t remember how I came into existence or who brought me into existence. No matter how long I stay here, I will always feel uneasy because of what I don’t remember. And a little afraid, because I don’t actually remember what I did to get here. Maybe I am guilty of something and got kicked out of my real home.

“If when you perceive it in others you learn to supply the loss, the basic cause of fear is removed.”

At first I am confused about the people around me. I don’t know my place in the structure of society and I seem to need to fight for my place in it. I learn that to win, the other guy has to lose and everyone becomes my enemy. Life is very fearful as I war with everyone for what I think I need. I fight for the best job, the most money, the perfect husband. What about the one’s who don’t get the best because I got it? Not my problem. I have become very self-centered; everything is about me and my personal needs.

Then one day I begin to wake up to something. I notice that someone I care about is very unhappy and I feel a need to help. I sense that this person feels the same loss I feel, and is as fearful as me. I notice this person is unhappy because they feel unloved and unsafe. I feel compassion because I know that feeling, and so I begin to try to supply the love they need. I have become less self-centered as I accept that we share a basic need. As my love relieves my dear one of his fear, I begin to understand fear, and that fear is a lack of love, and that love undoes fear.

“Thereby you teach yourself that fear does not exist in you. The means for removing it is in yourself, and you have demonstrated this by giving it.”

Through giving love and seeing fear subside in the one who receives it, I have taught myself something important about fear. It is relieved through love, therefore, fear must be a lack of love. And if I gave love, I must have love, and if I have love, fear must not exist in me.

“Fear and love are the only emotions of which you are capable.”

I’ve learned that this is true. I think I am angry and I discover that I am simply afraid and the fear takes the form of anger. It is the same thing with jealousy and blame. I am in this strange world where everyone is in competition for everything, for life itself. Is it any wonder that I feel fearful, and yet, in giving love I discovered that I have love in me. These two emotions are diametrically opposed. I cannot have both. What is going on?

“One is false, for it was made out of denial; and denial depends on the belief in what is denied for its own existence.”

Oh my goodness. What convoluted thinking goes on in this strange world! Fear is false; I can make it seem real through my creative nature, but it cannot be real because it is not part of creation. Fear is made out of denial, and the only other thing that exists is love. So fear is the effect of knowing love as real but denying it. I can deny love all day, but the very act of denying it establishes it as something real to be denied. Yikes!

“By interpreting fear correctly as a positive affirmation of the underlying belief it masks, you are undermining its perceived usefulness by rendering it useless. Defenses that do not work at all are automatically discarded.”

So, here is my way out of this conundrum. I used love to relieve fear and in so doing, I realized that fear was simply a lack of love. I also realized that fear can’t be real, because if it were real, I couldn’t relieve it. I saw that fear, being the denial of love, is actually the affirmation that love exists, otherwise there would be nothing to deny. I have proven love to myself. So what I know now is that I have love in me, and I see that fear is simply the denial of what I know is in me, so fear is non-existent. It is useless now because it has been exposed as unreal.

“If you raise what fear conceals to clear-cut unequivocal predominance, fear becomes meaningless. You have denied its power to conceal love, which was its only purpose. The veil that you have drawn across the face of love has disappeared.”

Fear was always only concealing love. In order to become fully convinced that only love is real, I must practice this and raise love to predominance in my life. Each time I do this, I teach myself that love is what I am and that fear is nothing and of no use. I have feared all along that I don’t know what I am, but I was merely using fear to veil love. As I learn that I really do want to know my Self and to know my Creator and my real Life, I have no interest in veiling this from myself. Fear begins to naturally fall away.

I have seen this happen often, and the more often it happens, the less credence I give fear, of course. When I had a grievance against John at work, I got caught in the web of deceit that comes from the belief in fear. I felt competitive and so attack and defense was the extent of the relationship. I also knew that there is a better way, and I used this relationship to practice bringing love to predominance, as I asked the Holy Spirit to remove the dark thoughts from my mind.

With that veil lifted, I saw the light that I had concealed behind the fear of losing something to this man. I saw his light and it was brilliant. At the same time, I realized that the brilliant light I saw in him must also be in me, otherwise how could I have recognized it at all. I saw that the light was love. I lost interest in competing and so I lost interest in fear.

The competiveness, the hate, the resentment, were all simply various forms of fear. The fear was covering up love and when I realized that I desired love, the fear simply fell away because it didn’t actually exist anyway. Because I gave him love, and he accepted it, his fear disappeared, too. This reinforced the lesson for us both. The lesson that we are learning is that we have a true identity and it is love. We experience fear only when we deny the love we are, and only because we are denying love.

© 2016, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

Study of Text, Chapter 12: !. The Judgment of the Holy Spirit, P 8. 1-1-16

I. The Judgment of the Holy Spirit, P 8
8 By applying the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the reactions of others more and more consistently, you will gain an increasing awareness that His criteria are equally applicable to you. For to recognize fear is not enough to escape from it, although the recognition is necessary to demonstrate the need for escape. The Holy Spirit must still translate the fear into truth. If you were left with the fear, once you had recognized it, you would have taken a step away from reality, not towards it. Yet we have repeatedly emphasized the need to recognize fear and face it without disguise as a crucial step in the undoing of the ego. Consider how well the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the motives of others will serve you then. Having taught you to accept only loving thoughts in others and to regard everything else as an appeal for help, He has taught you that fear itself is an appeal for help. This is what recognizing fear really means. If you do not protect it, He will reinterpret it. That is the ultimate value in learning to perceive attack as a call for love. We have already learned that fear and attack are inevitably associated. If only attack produces fear, and if you see attack as the call for help that it is, the unreality of fear must dawn on you. For fear is a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied.

Journal
This is the perfect paragraph for me today. Something has been coming up for me to look at and now is the day I want to do so. Here is what has been going on.

For as long as I can remember, I suffered from depression. I am 66 years old now, and for a period of time from my teens until I began studying the Course I had moments of depression so intense that I was suicidal. There were days when I could only crawl into bed and pull the covers over me until these feelings began to pass. These bouts of intense depression seemed to just occur without reason. Anyone who has suffered depression probably recognizes these symptoms.

It was frightening because I had no warning. They would just come on. Even after I began to study the Course, I still got depressed a lot, just not so intensely, and I was no longer suicidal. However, I would still wake up in the morning and lay there waiting to see how I would feel. Would this be a good day? Or would it be day of sadness?

Eventually, though, through the practice of the Course, I began to understand that somehow and as a reaction to unconscious guilt, I was doing this to myself. Somewhere along the line I accepted enough healing that it all changed for me. I remember the moment I noticed, exactly where I was. I had just woken up and was laying in bed when I realized that I couldn’t remember when those old feelings last occurred. I couldn’t remember when I last wondered if today would be a day of depression.

Nothing like that has ever happened since. I do still have moments of depression, of feeling sad, of feeling doubtful and uncertain. Sometimes it is upsetting because of the meaning I give it. The difference is that I never stay there. I know that it is ego wanting to go back to those emotional responses to life, and I know I am not the ego and so I don’t have to do that.

I have even heard the ego say that death was the only option left, but I heard it. I heard it as if I was a third person watching and listening. I stood amazed at the lengths the ego mind will go to preserve itself. It tries that tactic from time to time and if I am really down, I feel the emotion of it, but I am never attracted to it. It is really a strange place to be when you have enough detachment to recognize that the thoughts in your mind are not yours, really, and can be meaningless if you don’t attach to them.

Which brings me to what has been going on lately. I began to notice that I will be doing very well during the day, watching my thoughts, accepting the Atonement, being peaceful and happy more than being attracted to the ego. But by the end of the day I would often times lose that detachment and start identifying with the ego reactions. I still had enough detachment to know what was going on and so it wasn’t awful the way depression used to be. I finally decided that enough was enough.

“For to recognize fear is not enough to escape from it, although the recognition is necessary to demonstrate the need for escape.”

I began to ask Holy Spirit for help with these emotional reactions. I asked that my mind be healed. It has been kind of rocky. I do well and then I fall back into the old way of thinking, and then start over. This is not an unfamiliar pattern for me, but it has gone on for longer than is normal. I seem to have become really attached to this ego personality trait of Myron’s, this desire to feel sad and sorry for herself.

When I read this morning’s paragraph, something clicked. I have chosen to see my brother asking for help more than I see him attacking me. I have done this over and over for a long time now. I have had a couple of circumstances that seemed very hard, but I was persistent in my practice and even those have fallen away. I traded resentment and defensiveness for love. As a result, I see that I have learned to see my own errors as a call for love, and nothing else.  I am not guilty, and because I am not guilty, I have nothing to fear.

This morning I woke up feeling down. There is no reason for this feeling, at least no reason the ego could point to, and I started to push it away and get on with day, but as I read today’s paragraph I felt strongly that this would be helpful in ending the ego feelings of sadness and depression. I am only asking for love, and through giving love instead of punishment, instead of blame and guilt, I know that this is what I can do for myself, too.

“Yet we have repeatedly emphasized the need to recognize fear and face it without disguise as a crucial step in the undoing of the ego.”

Sometimes I write my way through these problems, but today, Spirit sent me away from my computer and into my sanctuary. I sat in my chair and waited. What came were tears, then wracking sobs. It was the recognition that I believed the ego reaction of depression meant something about me. It was also the release of that belief. It was just a call for love.

“Having taught you to accept only loving thoughts in others and to regard everything else as an appeal for help, He has taught you that fear itself is an appeal for help. This is what recognizing fear really means. If you do not protect it, He will reinterpret it.”

I suddenly felt panicky because I couldn’t think what to do about this, how to think about it. I called out for help, and was reminded that it is not my job to heal myself, only to want healing. What a relief it was to remember that! Then what I heard in my mind is that I cannot keep depression if I want to wake up. I must give up the story of “Myron is depressed” if I want to remember who I am.

“If only attack produces fear, and if you see attack as the call for help that it is, the unreality of fear must dawn on you. For fear is a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied.”

This is a choice I make, just like peace is a choice I make. There can be no compromise in this. I either decide to retain my sense of identity as a depressed person or I let it go. I choose to know myself or I choose to remain stuck in the dream of Myron. I had fallen for the old ego trick of thinking that because I had let go of part of the idea, that I had done everything. In holding onto even a little depression, I was still attacking myself and this morning, I remembered that fear is a call for love. It is a call to remember I am the love I had been denying, but to know that love there can be no compromise where I am love and something else.

© 2016, Pathways of Light. https://dev.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice is included.

Tell a friend about this post.

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Posted by Rev. Myron Jones.

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