I. Right Teaching and Right Learning, P 10
10 The ego is afraid of the spirit’s joy because once you have experienced it you will withdraw all protection from the ego, and become totally without investment in fear. Your investment is great now because fear is a witness to the separation, and your ego rejoices when you witness to it. Leave it behind! Do not listen to it and do not preserve it. Listen only to God, Who is as incapable of deception as is the spirit He created. Release yourself and release others. Do not present a false and unworthy picture of yourself to others, and do not accept such a picture of them yourself.
Journal
Jesus says that once we experience spirit’s joy we will lose all interest in the ego, and our investment in fear. Certainly, this seems to be true for people who have done this; Byron Katie, Jan Frazier, Eckhart Tolle, John Mark Stroud, Cate Grieves, Bentinho Massaro, Regina Dawn Akers and others. I can’t know exactly how it feels to them, but judging from their writing and their interviews this seems to be true.
Jesus also says that the reason our investment in fear is so great now is that it is a witness to separation and the ego really likes that. The ego is always pushing for fear. Because fear is always its first choice, I see that I must be vigilant about making another choice. The more I simply accept fear as real and unavoidable, the more fear I will experience. By accepting fear I am teaching myself (and everyone else) that fear is real.
My goal is to listen only to God and to do so at all times. Until that goal has been mastered, I continue the practice of noticing thoughts that are not of God and letting them be healed. One morning a while back, I had an experience with looking at fear and making a decision with God instead. The following is what I wrote in my journal.
Past Entry
Before I began my meditation, I checked my bank account. I check it every day, but usually, I do this after my meditation. Once I did that I started to turn to this work, but I had the thought to check my credit card account. I used to check it daily but got out of the habit. I started to ignore that prompt, thinking I needed to get to my writing, but I have formed the habit of paying attention to those little taps on the shoulder.
What I discovered is that there have been several charges to my card that I didn’t make. My first (ego) reaction was fear. Then I set that feeling aside. Perhaps I would not be held responsible for the charges since I didn’t make them. I searched carefully for three months and found all the charges. They were to a particular company. The first charge was legitimate and the rest were not.
I noticed the fear kept coming up. I guess setting it aside is not the same as letting it go. I also noticed anger. The first charge was one I (reluctantly) made for a young woman I know. I didn’t feel comfortable using my card on a website I wasn’t familiar with, but let myself get talked into it.
Now I felt fear that expressed itself as anger and then moved into resentment. I was very quickly back to feeling like a victim.
I’ve noticed that fear, guilt, and victimhood seem to be part of my classroom here, and while I have made great progress in undoing them, there is still more belief that must be let go.
The difference now is that I don’t hold as tightly to the belief and for not as long. I feel the reaction, but I also watch the reaction with a bit of detachment. I asked for help seeing this. I was reminded that I am never a victim of the world I see. The world is a projection of my beliefs, and through my beliefs, I decide on everything that is in my life. This situation is really my story so why am I blaming someone else. If I continued to blame this other person, all my energy would be directed toward keeping my victim story alive and none toward healing these beliefs.
I was also reminded that the fear I feel is not a real thing. It is just a feeling and the only meaning it has is what I give it. As I remember that it is just a feeling I stop fighting it and being afraid of it and it just moves through me. In doing this I am allowing myself to be taught that fear is not real. The credit card problem and the money loss are important only in the illusion. I will take care of it because that is what we do here. But my real goal is to stop believing in fear, and I am also doing that. This morning I took another important step toward leaving fear behind.