CHAPTER 3

Fear and Self Loathing

What is essentially the only obstacle to being fully in the flow of Divine Will from this very moment on into the infinite is your fear. Each moment of your existence carries the potential for the full realization of eternity. Buried in that eternity is the equally powerful full realization of oblivion. The state of non-being is an integral part of an infinite reality. It reflects the pulsing of creation in a very fundamental form. Each shocking experience of fear in your life comes directly from the awareness of not being. It may be rather decorously dressed in side issues and personal points of reference but it is oblivion at the core. Fear is intrinsic. It is not the enemy. It does not need to be rejected or eradicated. Fear simply needs to be lived with. In a way, you must be with not being. Only faith bridges the gap between the most primordial state of being and not being. Only faith can overcome fear.

From our perspective as a spiritually identified personality, we recognize the natural flow of awareness as blinking on and off. We are not separated from this flow as you are and so we do not hold such fear as you. Our moments of separation from unity flow with so little effort. We pulse into and out of rapport with our being in joyous rhythmic dance. We have no doubt that we will once more expand into the unity. We learned to be aware of this natural rhythm the same way you will learn. We faced our own destruction many times. We experienced the ultimate terror over and over until our faith in life became unshakeable.

It is the experience of fear that makes the dimension of physical matter possible. There is tremendous screaming terror in slowing spirit to the near stand still of matter. What you conceive of as existence, a concrete physical realm, we, as spirit, experience as a devilishly tantalizing near obliteration. See the attraction? This world of yours is a grand experiment because it exists so close to non-existence. It lies on the edges of the body of God. You bravely explore that boundary marked by terror and oblivion. Every day of your life you face the "mini death" of sleep. Every day you experience moments of not being that you rarely identify. Every moment of your life is colored to some degree by the knowledge that your life will eventually end and only faith can sustain you through to that day. Your religions arise as a context which justifies that faith. Eventually, though, you must find within yourself the awareness of truth, that life has intrinsic continuity and meaning. That will sustain your faith when knowledge fails you.

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Once more, enter a meditative state. Call your inner resources to align with your body. From the depths of your heart, ask for a direct experience of not being. Watch carefully all of the responses you have to this request. Perhaps you are reading this with a strong emotional response. You may be saying to yourself, "I'm not gonna do that!" Pay attention! Let that existential fear come to the surface. Feel its contours. Consider how deeply ingrained your fear of death really is. You have known this fear for as long as you have known that you exist as an "independent" being. The deeper you can push yourself into inner silence, the more subtle fear you can gain access to. The more fear you can access, the more you can learn to be free to act in the face of fear. It is not fear that is the enemy in your struggle for self awareness. It is the belief that you are insufficient to overcome the fear and the destruction from which the fear springs.

While fear is intrinsic to identity, or self realized existence, self-loathing is learned. A newborn human quickly experiences its separation and total helplessness. Its burgeoning self awareness results immediately in the certainty that its survival depends on others. The awareness of the flow of power is primal in infants. The fear which is sparked by power flowing away from the infant and toward another is also very primal and follows the child into adulthood. Discovering that its survival depends on another leads to a belief in insufficiency. The sense of power departs with each expansion of this feeling of not being enough to survive on its own. A fundamental distrust of self is learned. "I am not worthy!" Each rejection, however small, adds a new layer of self loathing to the identity of the growing child.

As soon as the child discovers punishment, an action however pleasurable that is followed quickly by pain, it begins to make a connection between punishment and life itself. The child makes an assumption that is expressed well in the concept of original sin. "I am intrinsically evil and my life is a punishment!" Of course, this identification is not as articulate as this statement implies. This is a feeling lodged in the child's energy field and will be added to as life continues. The human condition is to play in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. We cut our teeth on the effort to prove ourselves worthy. Deep down inside, all humans doubt that they have the right to exist. That in spite of the evidence of their senses to the contrary.

Choosing the Tree of Life, the unconditional acceptance of all life, even self, is the ultimate goal. Confronting and embracing self loathing is a major obstacle in the path. Whenever you feel paralysed by doubt or fear; whenever you encounter pain of any kind, look for the self loathing at its core. Your belief in insufficiency and unworthiness is central to each experience of pain. Find that belief and acknowledge it freely. To deny it is to pile another layer on top of the first. Your belief in your unworthiness doesn't make you unworthy.

Self loathing is insidious. It began before words and logic and common sense began. It functions through you now in the habits of the unconscious. It bubbles up and colors your responses to life when you are not paying attention to your inner experience. When you feel like you "can't help it," you just feel "that way", that is your unconscious bleeding through. All these meditative techniques we are suggesting to you are designed to move you into states of constant awareness of who you really are. When you are truly aware of your identity, these buried feelings are available to you on the surface. They do not go away. Indeed, as you grow into your self awareness, these pockets of inner trauma come back around again and again to show you more subtle layers. Each new layer tunes your perception and opens your awareness to a wider focus. You take in more of the infinite scope of self.

The real trick to dredging up and dealing with the fear and shame that blocks your appreciation of All Things is developing the willingness to confront these dark places in your soul. In the lives of many people, crisis is the catalyst that forces this confrontation. If you resist looking at your fears and shame because it hurts to do so, it will build tension just like damming up a river or blocking a pipe. This tension makes the feelings being repressed seem even more daunting. Then you must struggle even more to hold them back. In fact, you get to be pretty adept at denying this energy even exists within you. When it erupts at last in crisis, be it divorce, illness, financial failures or accidents, it may come as a shock which defies your understandings of its origins. The wonderful thing about crisis is that it relieves all kinds of tensions. Taking the opportunity to investigate all the areas of life where the experience of feeling has been withheld at this time will prove very helpful.

We suggest that, while crisis can serve as a catalyst to opening your eyes to feelings you have suppressed, it is not either necessary or the best method to pursue, consciously or otherwise. Each small act of courage you make in facing your feelings as they are, not judging or condemning, relieves the tension in small increments, promoting health, self awareness and trust in the integrity of your being. Consider the difference in your experience between:

(1) the agony of having a toothache (on a weekend no less) and all the rigamarole that accompanies a dental crisis; the hassles in getting an appointment, the actual painful probing and diagnosis followed by the traumatic treatment and the joy of the dentist's bill and the long hours of waiting for the pain to subside and the healing to be complete.

(2) The anticipation preceding your regular visits to the dentist for the probing and pricking of the checkup and the occasional cleaning, filling and so on, followed, of course, by the bill.

(3) The daily loving care of your teeth with brushing and flossing and good nutritional practices.

Caring for your emotional body is not much different than caring for your teeth. Being in constant loving touch with your feelings is much like proper brushing, flossing, and watching your sugar intake. Sharing your feelings with those around you and being open to their sharing in return is much like regularly visiting the dentist to fix the little things that may go awry due to breakdowns in the loving care you offer yourself. However, regularly withholding your feelings from yourself and others will lead to crisis as surely as bad dental hygiene will eventually lead to toothache.

Where you fall individually on this continuum of emotional health is a pretty good reflection of how much self loathing you actually harbor. Assessing your spot on this yardstick is as easy as looking at the people who populate your life. Do they speak freely to you of their feelings? Do you enjoy such sharing from them and want to reciprocate by being emotionally self-revealing with them? If instead, you see yourself surrounded by stiff, results oriented,"type A", unhappy, closed people that you really don't know and who don't really know you, you may want to ask why you don't deserve more. If the people closest to you have not seen the "real" you, because you are too involved with pleasing them to risk self-revelation, you may ask yourself why you don't deserve real love in your life.

When you ask such a question of yourself, you set in motion a healing process that will reveal your fears to you. Any action you take to self-nurture, be it quitting smoking, starting a new positive routine like exercise or meditation or actively pursuing new, loving relationships, will bring to the surface the fears that led you to your present state. You can let those fears continue to paralyse you and keep you mired in habits that do not honor your divinity. You certainly can breakdown and buy cigarettes, roll over in bed and skip your day's workout or do something for someone else instead of meditating. We suggest letting your fears come to the surface and really looking at them. See them from the perspective of your spiritual self. "If I am God, what does this feeling really mean to me?" Fear is just a feeling to which you have attached a personal definition. That definition is arbitrary and you can change it whenever you wish.

We refer once more to our friend here. He renewed his relationship with tobacco at the funeral for his mother. Frequent contacts with his family for the next two years, culminating in his father's death and the disposition of the estate, crystallized the smoking behaviors. He observed himself as his relationships with the women in his life affected his behavior. The smoking itself brought up a deep sadness which he did not immediately equate with his mother's death (both literally and metaphorically). It was not until he looked back at his very first encounters with smoking at the age of fifteen, that the emotional pattern started to shine through. The desire to assert independence from his parents, mother especially, mingled with his fear of inadequacy, propelled him into finding rebellious outlets that were acceptable to his peers. Smoking was one of these acts of rebellion. He forced himself through the nausea and dizziness of the drug in cigarettes in order to prove his manhood. This was the unconscious sub-text for him. It was a way of distancing himself from "mother" and hence an act of transition into manhood.

The grieving process was again a stimulus to break away from the parent image into full adulthood. His spiritual goals amount to much the same subconscious thrust. In part, smoking provided an emotional replacement for the secure feeling that being orphaned temporarily took away. It became a way to distance himself from really feeling those waves of grief and loss. Interestingly, the behavior went from a burgeoning habit on the fringes of addiction to a full fledged addiction after the death of his father, the departing of his youngest child to university and the breakup of his primary relationship (at her instigation), all in a three month period.

So now we see the security aspect of this behavior. It is a fairly easy leap to tie it to the nursing behavior of infants. The first feelings of being securely loved come from the act of feeding at the mother's breast. Aberrant activities of an oral nature, smoking, overeating or undereating, nail biting etc., begin here and become buried in the subconscious to erupt later in times of stress. To truly change these patterns of behavior (without substituting one for another) you must heal the original hurt and trauma. As this trauma occurs at pre-verbal stages of awareness, it is there in your deepest feelings that you must go. You must really allow these primal feelings to surface, be embraced and expressed. Then you can forgive self and others and release the trapped energy which has powered your actions for so long. As long as you hold onto the sense of shame, "I am bad for smoking", for instance, you cannot accept the fear which powers that feeling. The fear, "If I don't put this in my mouth, I will die!", is irrational. It doesn't make sense directly. If it is ignored because it doesn't make sense, it will not be released.

As we have suggested before, there are no "shoulds" that apply to human life. We encourage you to follow your heart and do what you want to do. If faced with a conflict of urges such as "I want to be healthy", and "I want a cigarette", follow whichever you most want in the moment, but do so consciously. Allow the feelings which accompany this urge to become conscious. If they are not readily apparent, take a deep breath, relax, and ask sincerely what those feelings are. This will bubble up as much as you allow it to. Really feel these feelings, don't judge or refuse them. They are not bad in any way. They just are. They have ruled you in the past and to be free of their power, you must face and embrace them.

As we have mentioned, the immediacy of your feelings in crisis make them difficult to ignore. Your pain is a stimulus to let go of the resistance which brought about your crisis in the first place. You can make the most of personal tragedy by using the resignation and acceptance which allows you to survive your trauma to go deeper into your past hurts. As in the previous technique of time compression, you simply allow an emotionally charged episode from your past to become the complete focus of your present moment. Let that episode slowly unfold in your mind's eye. Let yourself really feel the emotion of that event. Give voice to those feelings, especially those that you withheld at the time. You know that you are safe now. You know that you survived those emotions and the energetic charge that felt so threatening then. Accepting that charge now will allow the energy of it, that you held in your body since then, to be relived and released. By imagining this experience, you are setting up a resonance field which opens that energetic vortex created by feeling and withholding (expanding and contracting) and allowing that trapped point of motion to once again move through you. By addressing the inner person that you were then, forgiving and accepting them as yourself, you symbolically give permission for yourself to feel what you previously denied and it is released.

You can imagine that to take this approach all the way back to the womb and beyond is a large and daunting task. In actuality, it is remarkably quick and easy. Within three years, you can be accessing preverbal feelings. Five years can see the bulk of emotional body clearing accomplished. The process accelerates as your courage grows.

Because you are a universe in and of yourself, you need not fear destruction. Your present moment expands outwards into infinity and your spiritual self can always access your "personal self". Your feelings will not cause your extinction. It is safe to feel them and accept every bit of the largeness that you are. To be divine does not mean to be this or to be that. To be Divine means to be All That!

To Chapter Four