Love And Fear

How do you release your fear? There is a universal principle that is essential to understanding the process of releasing our fear. That principle is: homeostasis – the tendency of an organism to maintain internal equilibrium. How does this apply? As a pastor and counselor for many years, I have discovered that you cannot simply release your fears. Whatever we release creates a vacuum, and that empty place will quickly fill with something else. Fears released often mean fears replaced by new fear. Picture a pail of water. You place your fist into the water. The water in one part of the pail is replaced by your fist. Then you withdraw your fist, and behold, the water returns to equilibrium, or homeostasis. The law of internal emptiness requires that it be instantly refilled by something unless you make the choice to fill it yourself. Jesus taught this in Matthew 12:43-45, “When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none. Then he says, 'I will return to my house from which I came.' And when he comes, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first.” Applying this text to our original question, if we release one fear we are apt to find that homeostasis applies and eight fears now haunt us. Have you experienced this? Somehow we must replace the fear with something else that is more powerful and more permanent. So I find that the original principle must be restated to this: How do you replace your fear? The Bible has much to say about this. The text that applies is found in 1 John 4:18, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love.” Just as your fist will force the water from a portion of the pail, so love will force out fear. I would rephrase the title of the article to say: How do you force out your fear? The answer is that perfect love will force fear out. So again we must answer another question. What is perfect love? Perfect love is agape love, or the pure unconditional love of God. We are all the children of a loving God who wants only our best. He does not want us to live in fear and to suffer all the time without relief. The understanding of why we suffer—and how we can move beyond that suffering—is one of the great gifts from Buddhism. As the Buddha himself said, “I teach one thing, and one thing only: suffering and its resolution….” We suffer when we allow our fears to control us, and suffering ends when we revel in the absolute love that fills our universe. It is normal of any human being to suffer initially when being hurt, but becoming frozen in that suffering is not normal. Fear and suffering are, in the final analysis simply the result of a twisted view of our circumstances that arises from our limbic brain where our immature childhood memories reside.

What is often called the subconscious mind is in actuality the limbic brain making damaging emotional impact on our conscious mind. This kind of emotion is immature and harmful. Damaged limbic system emotions stand- in direct contrast to our passions arising from our super-conscious spirit. The healing of fears occurs when the love of God, the love that holds the atom and the universe together, is received by the human spirit, understood by the super-conscious mind, released into our souls, and then overpowers the fear that, like the unclean spirit Jesus taught about, is then cast out. The love of God is like the fist, it will replace the water. The great good news from Jesus, as well as Buddhism, is that we don’t have to live dominated by the fears that squelch our passions! This struggle with duality, fear over passion, can be brought to an end. We can step out of the process via the Buddha’s early teaching of nirvana, which can be translated as “the end of misery.” This end of dualistic distortion—the struggle with the external potential of love and internal domination by fear—is the goal of Buddhist practice. While Buddhism explains the process, it is still somewhat dependent on human choice for the end of misery. What Jesus and John offer, I find, is even more powerful. I do not simply make a choice to end my fear and misery, instead, I can choose to receive and saturate my total self in the love of God. His love fills my super-conscious spirit-mind, my limbic dominated sub-conscious mind and my rational conscious mind. I am so filled with love that I become love. This is the power of the alignment of all three levels of consciousness. All power and freedom is the result of the alignment of the subconscious, conscious, and super-conscious minds. What is being illustrated here is the difference between information and transformation. I can be informed about my ability to choose to release fear, or I can be transformed by the overpowering flow of the love of God. I can best prepare for the love transformation by knowing: 1. I really do have a choice of experiencing either love and peace or fear and conflict. The choice is between truth and illusion. Fear comes when I feel alone, and that is an illusion. Love teaches me that God is always near me, as near as the air I breathe. 2. Anxiety is the only alternative to trusting God in whatever happens. As Jesus taught, I can, “Be anxious for nothing.” After all, God supplies even the lilies of the field and the birds of the air with all they need in abundance. 3. I want to experience peace, but I keep trying to predict and control my life. This results in my feeling alone and insecure. I can let go and let God. 4. What is most real? Fear always distorts our perception and confuses us. 5. I am confused by fear because I see only a fragment of the present overlaid by tons of old memories that distort current reality. 6. Often I put more value on my prediction of coming disaster and trying to take control to prevent disaster, than on peace of mind. Jesus said, “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” 7. Love and peace are a choice, but they are based upon spiritual reality, while fear and conflict are responses to the illusion that I am alone and unloved. 8. Fear is really a call for help, a request for love. Why fear, we already have love? We try to control because we fear; we fear because we do not trust in love. In His love, Theron Messer M.Litt. www.freelifepath.com