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.
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