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.
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