Close-up view of fear

This post has a timely message - in many ways. It shares ideas on how to overcome fear, it honors women by giving them a voice, it acknowledges that there is a Love, that is law - a law as fundamental and unavoidable as the law of gravity. I wrote this post few months ago and I am reposting it for its message. Thank you for being on the other side of fear, where everything is we really want.

Close-Up View of Fear

"Fear", my mother shared with me from an article she'd read a few days ago, "lives in the part of the brain which didn't go to College." We both exploded with laughter. I am sure you join in. Yes, we all know how true this is. And in order to make this laughter a permanent companion, we can take the laughter to the close-up view of fear and learn even more about its nothingness:

"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less," observed Marie Curie, and this is so true for fear itself! A close-up reveals the baseless, clueless nature of fear. 

I often pray about and mention in my practice how alert we have to be in order to never cooperate with fear. We never cooperate with the enemy. Fear is not a specific knowledge or an insight into reality. Fear is a feeling, which pretends to be substantial, but is hollow inside, an emotional opponent, an enemy that needs to be defeated. A resister that needs to be - resisted. The ultimate, unsurpassed, most mighty, universal antidote is love - not just love, but Love, God. The universal good that enables all of us to see the whole picture, to take a close-up look at fear and see it dwindling into the nothingness it came from. Love has a view which doesn't allow for fear to even come close to the heart. It helps to see some of its strategies to be perceived as reality. Here is a close-up view of fear from Seth Godin:

"Fear will push you to avert your eyes. Fear will make you think you have nothing to say. It will create a buzz that makes it impossible to meditate...or it will create a fog that makes it so you can do nothing but meditate.
Fear seduces us into losing our temper and fear belittles us into accepting unfairness. (...) It causes us to carelessly make typos, or obsessively look for them.
Fear pushes us to fit in, so we won't be noticed, but it also pushes us to rebel and to not be trustworthy, so we won't be on the hook to produce. It is subtle enough to trick us into thinking it isn't pulling the strings, that it doesn't exist, that it's not the cause of, 'I don't feel like it.' When in doubt, look for the fear."

And remove the fear. For that we open Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and on hundred eighty-two different pages fear is dealt with authoritatively and compassionately. A central part of the book is an allegory about an innocent man being arrested and sentenced to death by lies of false witnesses and a bribed jury. Can you imagine the part "fear" would play in this scenario? Fear is the sheriff handcuffing the innocent man and dragging him to this joke of a court void of integrity (see Science and Health, p. 437).

Anna-Zoë, our daughter, taught us early on, that moving forward with freedom has nothing to do with the absence of fear, but rather with a cultivated spiritual sense. It senses right through the mists of fear the openness and freedom of Love. God and fear are opposites, they are never in the same room. And moving beyond fear has to do with the insight that there is something more important than fear. Praying and listening and learning has boosted our trust in good and has helped us to detect fear behind many masks - fear often hiding in seemingly innocent states of mind or actions, like the ones described masterfully by Seth Godin and revealed with authority to Mary Baker Eddy, masks such as "ignorance", "desire", or "caution". Interesting, isn't it? (Science and Health (p. 586)

Three years ago I read an article about a healing of cancer which spoke eloquently about gratitude, but I cherish it because it conveys a particularly clear perspective on how to deal with fear, excruciating fear. I have never forgotten this article, went back to it several times and cherish its message very much. Pamela Herzer is a colleague, a Christian Science practitioner from Buena Vista, Colorado, with a big heart (you can see it on her website). Her article is entitled Gratitude and the Healing of Cancer and I highly recommend it for your consideration. It might change your life as much as it inspired mine. 

So when fear wells up - stand still and be clever! Take the standpoint of someone who analyses, taking a magnifier. The close-up look energizes our chutzpah to talk right back to fear! Because under the magnifier of spiritual sense we see false evidence disappearing. And the warmth and confidence of good grounding us in true intelligence which is Spirit, God. In this sense every spiritual idea went to College. And graduated with honors.

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