Fear and Conflict

[Seeking ET]

From "A Course in Miracles":

 Being afraid seems to be involuntary; something beyond your own control.  Yet I have said already that only constructive acts should be involuntary.  My control can take over everything that does not matter, while my guidance can direct everything that does, if you so choose.  Fear cannot be controlled by me, but it can be self-controlled.  Fear prevents me from giving you my control.  The presence of fear shows that you have raised body thoughts to the level of the mind.  This removes them from my control, and makes you feel personally responsible for them.  This is an obvious confusion of levels.

 I do not foster level confusion, but you must choose to correct it.  You would not excuse insane behavior on your part by saying you could not help it.  Why should you condone insane thinking?  There is a confusion here that you would do well to look at clearly.  You may believe that you are responsible for what you do, but not for what you think.  The truth is that you are responsible for what you think, because it is only at this level that you can exercise choice.  What you do comes from what you think.  You cannot separate yourself from the truth by "giving'' autonomy to behavior.  This is controlled by me automatically as soon as you place what you think under my guidance.  Whenever you are afraid, it is a sure sign that you have allowed your mind to miscreate and have not allowed me to guide it.

 It is pointless to believe that controlling the outcome of misthought can result in healing.  When you are fearful, you have chosen wrongly.  That is why you feel responsible for it.  You must change your mind, not  your behavior, and this is a matter of willingness.  You do not need guidance except at the mind level.  Correction belongs only at the level where change is possible.  Change does not mean anything at the symptom level, where it cannot work.  

 The correction of fear is your responsibility.  When you ask for release from fear, you are implying that it is not.  You should ask, instead, for help in the conditions that have brought the fear about.  These conditions always entail a willingness to be separate.  At that level you can help it.  You are much too tolerant of mind wandering, and are passively condoning your minds miscreations.  The particular result does not matter, but the fundamental error does.  The correction is always the same.  Before you choose to do anything, ask me if your choice is in accord with mine.  If you are sure that it is, there will be no fear.

 Fear is always a sign of strain, arising whenever what you want conflicts with what you do.  This situation arises in two ways: First, you can choose to do conflicting things, either simultaneously or successively.  This produces consistent behavior, but entails great strain.  Second, you can behave as you think you should, but without entirely wanting to do so.  This produces consistent behavior, but entails great strain.  In both cases, the mind and the behavior are out of accord, resulting in a situation in which are you doing what you do not wholly want to do.  This arouses a sense of coercion that usually produces rage, and projection is likely to follow.  Whenever there is fear, it is because you have not made up your mind. Your mind is therefor split, and your behavior inevitably becomes erratic.  Correcting at the behavioral level can excrement the error from the first to the second type, but will not obliterate the fear.

 It is possible to reach a state in which you bring your mind under my guidance without conscious effort, but this implies a willingness that you have not yet developed.  The Holy Spirit cannot ask more than you are willing to do.  The strength to do comes from your undivided decision.  There is no strain in doings God's Will as soon as you recognize that it is also your own.  The lesson here is quite simple, but particularly apt to be overlooked.  I will therefor repeat it, urging you to listen.  Only your mind can produce fear.  It does so whenever it is conflicted in what it wants, producing inevitable strain because wanting and doing are discordant.  This can be corrected only by accepting a unified goal.  

 The first corrective step in undoing the error is to know first that the conflict is an expression of fear.  Say to yourself that you must somehow have chosen not to love, or the fear could not have arisen.  Then the whole process of correction becomes nothing more than a series of pragmatic steps in the larger process of accepting the Atonement as the remedy.  These steps may be summarized in this way:

Know first that this is fear.
Fear arises from lack of love.
The only remedy for lack of love is perfect love.
Perfect love is the Atonement.

 I have emphasized that the miracle, or the expression of Atonement, is always a sign of respect FROM the worthy TO the worthy.  The recognition of this worth is reestablished by the Atonement.  It is obvious, then, that when you are afraid, you have placed yourself in a position where you need Atonement.  You have done something loveless, having chosen without love.  This is precisely the situation for which the Atonement was offered.  The need for the remedy inspired its establishment.  As long as you recognize only the need for the remedy, you will remain fearful.  However, as soon as you accept the remedy, you have abolished the fear.  This is how true healing occurs.

 Everyone experiences fear.  Yet it would take very little right thinking to realize why fear occurs.  Few appreciate the real power of the mind, and no one remains fully aware of it at all time.  However, if you hope to spare yourself from fear there are some thing you must realize, and realize fully.  The mind is very powerful, and never loses it creative force.  It never sleeps.  Every instant it is creating.  It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power surge that can literally move mountains.  It appears at first glance that to believe such power about yourself is arrogant, but that is not the real reason you do not believe it.  You prefer to believe that your thoughts cannot exert real influence because you are actually afraid of them.  This may allay awareness of the guilt, but at the cost of perceiving the mind as impotent.  If you believe that what you think of is ineffectual you may cease to be afraid of it, but you are hardly likely to respect it.  There are no idle thoughts.  All thinking produces form at some level.

[Lionheart]

 Excellent post Seeking ET. It's our fears that cause personal limitations, it's conquering them that helps us grow and thrive!  

[Seeking ET]

While reading this recall that "Atonement" can translate into "At-one-ment", corresponding to the unification of thought and action in the fearless.

[Rudolph]

Fear is one of the primary motivators in this world.

Ultimately the easy evaluation is to link it to a lack of 'love' as that article said, but that's like saying that land is dry because it doesn't have enough water. A more practical approach might be to see the connection to laziness. Somehow individuals must find the energy to push through the barriers that Life throws in the path. It seems that by the time most kids reach the age of seven they have suffered so many defeats and enjoyed so few successes that their creative side is all but completely shut down.

We can see the obvious and blatant use and abuse of the masses through fear based manipulations in everything from TV commercials to global warming deception as in An Inconvenient Truth, Health Insurance, retirement, all manner of 'social safety nets' etc., etc.

The control factor in the fear of Hell in modern religion is nowhere nearly so insidious and pervasive as the fear based manipulations of the masses by the Church of Liberalism.

[Ihopeso]

Fear is necessary, without it you wouldn't feel, but like any other human emotion don't let it overwhelm you. You need balance to much Ying and your Yang will be put on tourette's and vice versa. Yes fear is an unpleasant thing I agree but without you wouldn't be able to distinguish the difference in your emotions, but that doesn't mean well you go and overload yourself with Love because believe it or not too much of anything is a bad thing. Drink to much water and you will die. In this human condition it can only handle so much very fragile so when venturing out in the realm of madness be sure to bring a towel.

[Seeking ET]

"A Course in Miracles" continued...

   You may still complain about fear, but you persist in making yourself fearful.  I have already indicated that you cannot ask Me to release you from fear.  I know it does not exist, but you do not.  If I intervened between your thoughts and their results, I would be tampering with the basic law of 'cause and effect'; the most fundamental law there is.  I would hardly help you if I depreciated the power of your own thinking.  This would be in direct opposition to the purpose of this course.  It is much more helpful to remind you that you do not guard your thoughts carefully enough.  You may feel that at this point it would take a miracle to enable you to do this, which is perfectly true.  You are not used to  thinking, but you can be trained to think that way.  All miracle workers need that kind of training.

   I cannot let you leave your mind unguarded, or you will not be able to help me.  Miracle working entails a full realization of the power of thought in order to avoid miscreation.  Otherwise a miracle will be necessary to set the mind itself straight, a circular process that would not foster the time collapse for which the miracle was intended.  The miracle worker must have genuine respect for true cause and effect as a necessary condition for the miracle to occur.

   Both miracles and fears come from thoughts.  If you are not free to choose one, you would also not be free to choose the other.  By choosing the miracle you HAVE rejected fear, if only temporarily.  You have been fearful of everyone and everything.  You are afraid of God, of Me and of Yourself.  You have mispercieved or miscreated Us, and believe in what you have made.  You would not have done this if you were not afraid of your own thoughts.  The fearful MUST miscreate, because they mispercieve creation.  When you miscreate you are in pain.  The cause and effect principle now becomes a real expediter, though only temporarily.  Actually, "Cause'' is a term properly belonging to God, and His "Effect" is His Child.  This entails a set of Cause and Effect relationships totally different from those you introduce into miscreation.  The fundamental conflict in this world, then, is between creation and miscreation.  All fear is implicit in the second, and all Love in the first.  The conflict is therefore between Love and fear. 

   It has already been said that you believe you cannot control fear because you yourself made it, and your belief in it seems to render it out of your control.  Yet any attempt to resolve the error through attempting the mastery of fear is useless.  In fact, it asserts that power of fear by the very assumption that it need be mastered.  The true resolution rests entirely on mastery through Love.  In the interim, however, the sense of conflict is inevitable, since you have placed yourself in a position where you believe in the power of what does not exist.

   Nothing and everything cannot coexist.  To believe in one is to deny the other.  Fear is really nothing, and Love is everything.  Whenever light enters darkness, the darkness is abolished.  What you believe is true for you.  In this sense the separation HAS occured, and to deny it is merely to use denial inappropriately.  However, to concentrate on error is only a further error.  The initial corrective procedure is to recognize temporarily that there is a problem, but only as in indication that immediate correction is needed.  This establishes as state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay.  It should be emphasized, however, that ultimately no compromise is possible between everything and nothing.  Time is essentially a deceive by which all compromise in this respect can be given up.  It only seems to be abolished by degrees, because time itself involves intervals that do not exist.  Miscreation made this necessary as a corrective device.  The statement "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life" needs only one slight correction to be meaningful in this context; "He gave it TO His only begotten Son".

   It should especially be noted that God has only ONE Child.  All His creations are His Children, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship.  The Sonship is its Oneness transcends the sum of its parts.  However, this is obscured as long as any of its parts is missing.  That is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all the parts of the Sonship have returned.  Only then can the meaning of wholeness in the true sense be understood.  Any part of the Sonship can believe in error or incompleteness if he so chooses.  However, if he does so, he is believing in the existence of nothingness.  The correction of this error is the Atonement.

   I have already briefly spoken about readiness, but some additional points might be helpful here.  Readiness is only the prerequisite for accomplishment.  The two should not be confused.  As soon as a state of readiness occurs, there is usually some degree of desire to accomplish, but it is by no means necessarily undivided.  The state does not imply more than potential for a change of mind.  Confidence cannot develop fully until mastery has been accomplished.  We have already attempted to correct the fundamental error that fear can be mastered, and have emphasized that the only real mastery of through Love.  Readiness is only the beginning of confidence.  You may think this implies that an enormous amount of time is necessary between readiness and mastery, but let me remind you that time and space are under my control.