Develop a personal truth that is unassailable from outside forces. Simply declare your own agreement to practice truth and to be independent of the good opinion of others.
When you do not fear rejection because you know you always will encounter some disapproval, whatever your position, then you are free to be yourself as God created you.
Keep turning to the sacred and holy nature of your loving presence whenever you feel tempted to camouflage yourself. You do not need outside approval. More important, you need the truth so you can be in alignment with your higher self.
Resist the need to boast and talk about yourself. Strive to be interested rather than interesting. This is the way of the higher self. Become the listener—the one who is interested in the accomplishments and activities of others—and you will not need to boast and to distort your personal story line.
If you find yourself exaggerating, stop. Just stop and verbally correct yourself. You don’t need to explain that you are breaking your habit of exaggeration. Just correct the statement. Make this personal attempt to bring truth into your conversations by removing the petty distortions. As you do this you allow ego to know how unnecessary its exaggerations are.
Write your own personal honor code. In your words, describe your intention to make truth the way of your thoughts and actions by suspending your need to deceive yourself and others. Then internalize your code of honor by reading or reciting it to yourself on some regular basis.
You will eventually radiate your inner spirituality and you will have discovered a blissful way of being in this physical plane.
Know that being credited is unimportant. Finally, remind yourself that when you are fulfilling your life mission, credit and accolades are unimportant.
The irony here is that the more you seek approval, the less you receive. No one really approves of an approval seeker. Letting go of the need for approval leaves you open to embrace the truth.
The journey of the sacred quest involves letting go of the ego. Your ego has been entrenched in many of the behaviors you have read about in this chapter. Even admitting that they are true about you is a step in the direction of your higher self.
Rumi’s words sum up this subject of truth versus deception:
When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, “This is certainly not like we thought it was.”
The veils are the distortions. Use your personal honor code to shed them. Then you will agree with Rumi, “This is not like I thought it was.” It will be more than you ever might have imagined when your ego was leading you away from the way of your sacred self.
10
FROM FEAR TO LOVE
I have seen the truth
It is not as though I had invented it with my mind.
I have seen it, SEEN IT,
and the living image of it
has filled my soul forever…
If in one day, one hour,
everything could be arranged at once.
THE CHIEF THING IS TO LOVE.
—FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
I know that the very essence of my being and the way of transforming my life is love.
You may believe that the opposite of love is hate. I do not see these two emotions as opposites. In fact, love and hate are often closely aligned. To me, the opposite of love is fear.
Love and hate are powerful emotions that can be present simultaneously. There are things that we love. There are things that we hate. Why pretend otherwise? There are times when we love what we hate and times when we hate what we love.
But when you have fear, you do not have love. Ego uses fear as a way to keep authentic love out of your life. When love is not present in your life, you have succumbed to ego and allowed fear in where love could be. You have allowed ego to replace God.
Love, as Dostoyevsky alluded, is the chief thing in life. It is the essence of the universe. It is the glue that holds everything together. It is the substance of your higher self. “God is love” is a tautology because the sentence has exactly the same meaning when read forward or backward.
Ego tries to keep you disconnected from the loving presence inside of yourself because ego’s area of concern has become focused on the outer world. Ego is afraid it will die if you begin to develop a relationship with the inner part of yourself. To be able to love fear-based ego even while it is promoting fear as its survival technique could be one of the most difficult challenges of your sacred quest.
Causing fear is a tactic of the ego, whether it be your own ego or the world’s ego. The world’s ego is a reflection of individual ego power and the amount of fear that is active. Fear is present when we do not know we are a part of God’s divine design. Ego causes us to transmit fear energy instead of love energy. This is a part of the divine plan we’ve all signed on for during our brief visit in now-here.
Learning to experience authentic love means abandoning ego’s insistence that you have much to fear and that you are in an unfriendly world. This begins with an assessment of your reluctance to embrace love.
SO WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE?
Mother Teresa says that love is the central point of our existence. She has written: “For this purpose we have been created: to love and to be loved.” These are helpful words to recall as you begin to restrain your ego. You are here for the purpose of loving and being loved.
If you are not experiencing love in your life, it is because you are, in some way, afraid. You need to examine your fears with honesty and with love. When you do, you will transform your fears with love into love. You will open up a space within you that can only be occupied by love. In this space you are on purpose, walking the way of the sacred self. But first you must see how you substitute fear for love.
Your ego steadfastly promotes fear because it fears authentic love itself. This false self helps you convince yourself that you are in some way incomplete. That is the source of all fear. So you, like many people, attempt to fill that emptiness with ego’s solutions.
Afraid of having your emptiness, your incompleteness, exposed, you expend a lot of energy creating a false image of happiness. But if you were to stop and do a realistic assessment, you could sense that the feeling of incompleteness is a call from a disowned part of yourself.
What’s not to like about the universal intelligence that flows through you? Greeting the spiritual being that you are, having a human experience and feeling the love that is there—what’s not to like about that?
The fear about exposing the emptiness keeps you seeking relationships that ego tells you will satisfy the longing within you. What happens is that you enter a relationship, starved for the love that is your higher self. Your inner hunger is masked, pretending to be something else. No wonder so many people repeatedly think they have found love and repeatedly declare they’ve lost it.
How different it is when you can notice the inner emptiness and think, “What’s not to like? This longing is part of being human and knowing love.” Then you will let ego know that fear is not your choice. Love is your choice. Just imagine how our system might be if people knew they were already complete.
What would you need to purchase? What would you have to own? Who would you have to impress? Who would you need to have on your arm? The answers give you an idea of how much we rely on the fear that we are incomplete and unacceptable as we are, and how unaware we are of our divine connection.
The fear that is a substitute for love is simply a fear of being unacceptable. Virtually all fears can be traced directly back to self-esteem. If you love yourself, you will be able to transform your fears with love rather than allow them to direct your life.
If you have an inner feeling of being complete and whole, knowing the loving presence that is there, then fear becomes a loving invitation to know more or to change something in your life. Fear will no longer threaten you as it did when you were unacquainted with your higher self.
Recently my wife spent a week in silent
meditation at a monastery in northern California. She went there for a deeper experience of God; to work on her book about a spiritual approach to childbirth and infant care; and to experience a total week of silence, prayer and meditation. She was deeply affected by the sense of contentment and love within the community of people who had lived there for decades. She described feeling none of the fear that is so often an acceptable part of life.
When you know your higher self intimately, a deeper sense of love is available to you, and fear as you knew it becomes impossible. With this in mind, the answer to the rhetorical question “So what’s not to like?” is that there is absolutely nothing not to like. There is nothing to fear when you know you are already divine and complete and do not have to do anything to prove it.
You do not have to join a monastery and live in silence to come to this awareness. You simply have to vow to replace fear with love. When you are able to do this, you are consulting your spirit rather than listening to ego.
THE FOCUS ON FEAR AND THE FOCUS ON LOVE
When you spend time and energy concerned about how others are viewing you, you are in the clutches of your ego. Fear will be your constant companion. A focus on fear is the vehicle that you use for the expression of your humanity. The vehicle is the career you have chosen, the clothes you wear, the possessions you have accumulated, the money you have and all the ways you are expressing yourself.
These vehicles can become the total focus of your life. They are attempts to let the world and yourself know how important you are and to satisfy your ego’s insistence on recognition.
A focus on love does not concern itself with needing to impress or with the external status symbols of your life. Love is always expressed in the service of God and in the service of others. It cares not how you dress it up, what you deliver it in or what others think about it. It is concerned only with giving and sharing with others. Love asks nothing in return. Love is secure within itself so it does not fear how it is perceived.
Fear says that what it has to give is never enough because it comes from lack. Love says that it was created by God and is perfect. What it has to give away will always be replenished in a healthy relationship.
When fear is released, the focus of your life shifts from the vehicles of your expression—the approval seeking and avoidance of rejection—to the divine you and what the authentic you is expressing.
Your fear-driven ego will try to convince you that love is not the answer. You will notice thoughts about proving something to others, about shopping and owning grand things or about bills that can’t be taken care of with love. These inner dialogues with yourself are your ego telling you to abandon your higher inclinations. It is trying to put you into scarcity consciousness, where fear reigns.
When you are experiencing these kinds of thoughts, you must remind yourself not to accept this false picture. It is an illusion to think that the way of preventing poverty and rejection is having fear instead of love directing your life. When you are on purpose, focused on expressing yourself in a loving way and unconcerned about the manner in which that expression is manifested, the universe begins to handle the details. You are guided, and abundance flows into your life. Your relationships become spiritual partnerships.
When the focus of your life is fear-based, you tend to believe that your value is based upon your performance. If you perform well, you are worthy; if you fail to perform well, you are worthless. Thus, fear will drive you to perform better and better in order to validate yourself.
Childhood ego development occurs in us to provide a feeling of security. In childhood, the fear of not being loved translated to dangerous insecurity. Your ego took on the job of keeping you feeling safe by teaching you how to get love.
So if you were praised and told that you were loved only when you got gold stars or good grades or when you put away your toys, your ego chose performing as the way to be safe or to be loved. Ego still threatens you today with the fear of being unsafe if you are not loved.
What ego does not realize is that fear was valid then because you were without your adult capabilities of survival. That was then and this is now. You are a grown-up in the now-here, and your survival does not depend on the love of an external person. But ego can lead you to believe that your very survival is threatened, as it was in childhood, without the safety of external love.
That fear can cause you to spend your life trying to get the adult equivalent of the childhood gold star, which represents love and security. But this is true only if you continue to allow the fear-driven ego to take care of what was true then but is different now.
When love is the focus of your life, you don’t need to fear a poor performance. You know in your heart that you are much more than how you perform. You have grown out of the fear and into love. You know that your worth is never on the line.
This inner knowing allows you to proceed with your higher self at the helm of your life. Your higher self does not require you to perform for love. Fears are taken in stride just as storms are on the sea. They are simply a part of the hero’s journey.
When fear is the focus of your life, you will be disappointed and offended if you fail to receive when you give, because you do what you do for positive feedback about yourself. If you are not recognized or acknowledged by others, you live with the possibility that it is because you are inadequate or unloved.
When the focus of your life is on love, you have no expectations about how others should respond to your acts of love. You are about giving and serving, because that is what love is. Your higher self invites you to serve and give without any anticipation of reward. I like what the psychologist Rollo May said about this focus of love. He calls it the essence of life: “But the essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things.”
When you are focused on fear, you concern yourself with the vehicles of your expression, evaluate your worth based on your performance and withdraw your love if it is unreciprocated. These are all ways of the ego, of the false self. Your real self, the loving presence, focuses on radiating love outward from a center of yourself, which cannot be depleted.
In every living thing there are cells, molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. Within each of these life-giving configurations there is empty space between the particles of matter. When these are examined, we realize that something holds them all together. Some invisible force is in the empty spaces where those particles roam. This force was described by Teilhard de Chardin with these words: “Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world…. Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.”
This invisible force, the glue of the universe, is love. When it is absent, fear exists, as do all of the ego-driven behaviors that are associated with fear. When love is present, you have no fear, and ego has the opportunity to acquire a different job description.
SOME TYPICAL FEAR-BASED BEHAVIORS
As you proceed to identify, understand and change your fear-based thoughts and behaviors and replace them with love, think about this quotation from The Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East: “When the son of man is lifted up to that realm in which he rises above the fallacies of the physical realm, he thinks and acts on the plane of pure intelligence. There he discriminates between those instincts which he shares with every other animal and those divine intuitions which he has in common with God.” Those divine intuitions are love-based. Your higher self is pleading with you to listen and know the spirit that resides in you.
The inability to rely on the love that is our very essence shows up in many forms. Listed below are some of the more common behaviors and thought patterns that indicate a dominant fear-based ego.
Choosing judgment instead of compassion. The fear of being, for example, destitute, ill, mentally dysfunctional, homeless or abused causes you to critically judge persons in those situations. The loving presence within you urges you toward love
and compassion.
An ongoing inner dialogue of self-criticism. Your ego keeps up a constant critical dialogue to keep you in a state of low-grade fear.
An external appearance reflecting your inner critic. Your ego wants you to believe that you are unacceptable and will gleefully assist you in creating an image to prove that is so. Manifestations like obesity and personal slovenliness often are the fear-based projection of yourself.
Avoidance of authentic intimacy. Ego can influence you to shun all efforts to be loved by others by refusing to allow the risk of an intimate encounter or the development of an intimate relationship.
An egocentric lifestyle. Ego often makes you selfishly pursue your own goals at others’ expense. You engage in perpetual conversation about yourself.
Excusing your selfish behavior. We often use economic, social and other types of excuses to defend behavior that does not extend love. For instance, you might excuse unloving or inconsiderate behavior because “it’s only my job” or because “everyone does it.”
Insensitivity and disrespect. Expressions of disgust or rudeness toward others are based on ego. They are heard in stores, on freeways, in offices, at airports, in restaurants—any place you are in your daily life.
These are some of the common expressions of a fear-based ego struggling to keep you away from the experience of love that is your true essence. Before you begin to change these behaviors and thought patterns, you need to examine the payoffs. What is some part of you receiving as a payoff for listening intently to ego?
THE PREMIUMS YOU RECEIVE FOR USING FEAR INSTEAD OF LOVE
Your ego works for its living. Its payoff is not money but in keeping alive. The following are some examples of the currency that the ego receives for keeping you in a state of fear and avoidance of love.
Your Sacred Self Page 21