ACE UP YOUR SLEEVE

Chapter 6

FEAR

“Healing” is improving things, bringing things “up” as opposed to “down.” It is important to understand which way is up and which is down. Seems obvious but it isn’t by far. Some may consider “up” is to be accepted by the cool kids at school or moving to a specific neighborhood. We are concerned with the spiritual and mental makeover here. In that realm, down is toward Fear, into and through layers upon layers of Fear down into ever-deepening states of insanity. That is the direction down.

The emotional tone of fear is the corresponding tone level to the state of confusion. Where confusion is the ever-deepening state of insanity, so is fear on the emotional level. There are no emotions below fear, or, rather, all the emotions below fear are the ever-deepening states of fear. That is “down.”

The opposite of fear, the only fundamental, primary emotion, is unconditional love. That is our native state, the only true emotion. Anything else is a derivative, which is why I call Unconditional Love a “primary” emotion. Unconditional love is not just love. You may “love” French fries but not burnt or undercooked and they must be sliced and salted just right. That is the opposite of unconditional. Unconditional love is all-accepting, all-agreeing, all-encouraging gentle affection or a sense of adoration, kind of like a mother’s love for a child.      

All sickness is disharmony, a confusion of flows and so is all pain, physical or emotional. Healing is unconfusing the flows. Healing is the opposite of confusion. Healing is the opposite of Fear.

Note that the opposite of fear is not bravery. Fight or flight—neither response is the embodiment of sanity. Baring your teeth at someone or your chest to bullets is not the opposite of fear. This brand of bravery, although needed at times, lives right next to fear in the realm of insanity. The opposite of fear is unconditional love. It may be counter-intuitive but it is true and can be easily proven in practice by any meditations that increase unconditional love, which feels to you as diminishing or complete elimination of your fears and insecurities, as well as your compulsion for fault-finding. Fear, worries and insecurity go hand in hand with the urge to criticize, marginalize and discriminate anybody for any reason. Those are all one and the same side of the medal. Unconditional Love goes hand in hand with Understanding. Fear is the opposite of Understanding.

Bravery comes in many packages. It isn’t limited to a mad charge onto the enemy positions bristling with automatic weapons shooting bullets at you. But I am referring to the brand of bravery here which corresponds to the “fight or flight” behavior.  

Bravery, as in blindly risking one’s life for a cause or to save oneself from imminent danger, may sometimes be called for in life to protect loved ones and preserve your own life or integrity, but that normally comes as the direct result of you pulling such situations into your own life to begin with by being an irresponsible dic…, pardon, by habitually assigning causes elsewhere. Now, here is a truly abrasive statement! How dare I insinuate that you create your own life! The amount of cussing from some in my general direction right this second is proportionate to this being true. Keep your noses clean in all areas of your lives, help others, strive to improve yourself as a spiritual being, take responsibility, be your own policeman and you’ll find this to be very close to the truth.       

Your native emotional state and the only devoid of confusion state of being is unconditional love. That is up. Baring your chest to bullets and charging the enemy ramparts with intent to kill them or be killed is a long way down.

Fear is simply the result of losing some of that clarity of unconditional love and gaining some confusion. Unconditional love is all-knowing. Confusion is the introduction of an element of not-knowing in your life. So, fear starts immediately below the very top and, as the confusion expands, fear becomes progressively stronger on the way down the emotional scale, until we start recognizing it as such at the very gateway to insanity. Any degree of presence of fear is simply that degree of absence of unconditional love. You add fear, you reduce unconditional love by the same amount. You add unconditional love, you reduce fear by the same amount. You can identify the stopgap emotions along the way down as curiosity, boredom, anger or grief.

Any meditation techniques that increase unconditional love and reduce fear will quickly bring you up and straighten out your energy flows. You expel fear, you automatically gain unconditional love. That way you are unconfusing yourself, you gain clarity, you gain happiness. There are several effective meditations to that effect contained in this book and several teachers, such as Wayne Dyer, Christie Marie Sheldon and Michael Beckwith and others, who can help you. The more you put into learning from them, the more you get out of it. Listen to each Dyer audio book at least a hundred times; you’ll find something new every time. When listening, stop and think every time you stumble on an “Aha!” revelation, which should be on average every eleven seconds or so. 

Getting rid of fear is highly beneficial. All meditations help with that. Some meditations fully accomplish that. There is a specific meditation, Breathing Light, which will completely, albeit temporarily, free you of ALL fear, worries and any sense of insecurity. Do not worry (ha!) about losing your fears. You do not need fear; it is all irrational. If you encounter something to be afraid of in a dark alley, you’ll recognize it, no worries in that regard.

Everyday worries and fears are irrational. They are more than just a nuisance. They are the poison that ruins your life and your health. What are you afraid of? Spiders? Snakes? Clowns? What are your chances of being killed by a clown? Zero. What are your chances of being killed by a snake? Zero or very close to that, considering how often you run into poisonous snakes in your life and how far you are located from the nearest Starbucks. Now consider for a moment your chances of being killed by French fries. A clear and present danger. About six hundred thousand people die of heart disease annually in the United States. Here is something to be terrified of. Are you scared to death of French fries? Do you wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweat and screaming because of the heart-pounding French-fry nightmares? Of course not. You have no fear of French fries. You are scared to death of clowns and spiders instead. That is insane. Fears are ALWAYS irrational. Fears are the harbingers of confusion and insanity. Everything that comes in contact with fears will carry the marks of insanity.

This data is important as it defines the direction up, which is toward Unconditional Love. “Down” is toward fear, criticism, cynicism, marginalizing, racism, hate and ever-deepening states of confusion.

For a normal, relatively sane and reasonably cognizant person, banishing anything that drives them into fear from their lives is a good and responsible thing to do—and absolutely necessary for their well-being. Things get a little more complicated, however. There are near-infinite layers of fear. To be driven from a deeper state of fear into a lighter state of fear is “up.” Thus, watching a terrifying horror movie could be the “up” direction for some. The way we know that we are moving up is by the way something makes us feel. If we feel uplifted and pleasantly excited or in some way enriched, he had been influenced in the upward direction. Any up is up, it is good for you. 

What about the fear of death? Deep, layered question terminating in immortality of the spirit, which is a whole different can of worms. In any case, I think Mark Twain said it best: “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” 

To summarize this chapter: fear is bad for you.