September 24, 2016
Shifting from Fear to Love
Shifting from Fear to Love
by Gabrielle Bernstein For more information visit:
The following is an excerpt from the "Shifting from Fear to Love" on-line course. If you would like to enroll in the course, click here.
"All shallow roots must be uprooted, because they are not deep enough to sustain you" - A Course in Miracles
Love is where we all begin. When we are born all we know is love. Our ~ing is on! (If you haven't read my book, Add More ~ing to Your Life, allow me to translate: ~ing is your inner guide, which is the voice of intuition, inspiration and love. Throughout this course I'll refer to love, spirit and ~ing interchangeably.) At one time our thoughts are aligned with love and our minds are peaceful. Our loving mind believes that all people are equal and that we are part of something larger than ourselves. We believe that we are supported and connected to everything everywhere. We believe that only love is real. We believe in miracles.
A Tiny Mad Idea
So we are born into love, and then pretty soon thereafter fear is introduced. We begin to pick up the fear around us and are led to deny love. One tiny mad idea can hijack our loving mindset, and as the A Course in Miracles says, "we forgot to laugh." This tiny mad idea could have arrived as early as infancy. Maybe Mom was anxious or Dad yelled a lot. As innocent babies we pick up fear from the outside world. All it takes is one tiny mad idea to make us detour into fear. A thought like, "I'm not smart enough," or "Daddy doesn't like me because he left," or "I'm not pretty enough" can separate us from love. The moment we take this tiny mad idea seriously, we get caught in a nightmare and forget to wake up.
A Course in Miracles says, "You cannot be faithful to two masters who ask conflicting things of you." Therefore we have to choose between the tiny mad idea and the love we came from. Most of the time we choose fear. This choice splits off our mind into another way of thinking, which the Course calls the "ego." In an instant we are separated from love and allow the ego to take over. The ego becomes like a bully in our minds. The ego's goal is to shut down the love parade and keep us in the dark by making us believe we're separate from the loving mindset we were born with. The ego cannot survive in the light of our loving mind, so it will do whatever it takes to keep the light off. When referencing the ego, the Course states, "Listen to what the ego says, and see what it directs you to see, and it is sure that you will see yourself as tiny, vulnerable and afraid. You will experience depression, a sense of worthlessness, and feelings of impermanence and unreality."
The ego's sole purpose is to convince us that love isn't real so that we believe in the fearful thinking of the world. The ego is always revving up its game to take us down in a major way. (This is not to be confused with the ego of psychology.)
The Course says, "...the ego is totally confused and totally confusing." To keep us in the dark the ego separates us from love. We're convinced to deny love by believing in issues around body image, relationships, career, low self-esteem, and so on. The ego convinces us that we are better or worse than everyone around us. The ego's illusion convinces us to believe thoughts like, "I'm not good enough to get into that school," or "I'm incomplete without a man," or "I'm way more popular than that girl." Deep down we know these thoughts are false but we believe in them nonetheless. To further keep us in the dark, the ego's illusion leads us to attack others and ourselves.
Projection Makes Perception
The ego's main job is to make sure we don't change our mind about fear. The fearful projection that the ego inflicts on us becomes what we perceive to be our reality. As it says in the Course, "The world you see is an outside picture of an inward condition." When we choose the ego's projection of sin, guilt, anger, attack and fear that's all we'll perceive. It's a nightmare. The Coursestates, "Perception is a choice and not a fact."
We all have our own individual projections and perceptions. For instance, two different people get upset after watching a TV show together. Even though they watched the same show they're upset for uniquely different reasons. One person may have been upset over the romantic struggles of the characters, whereas the other person was worked up over the violence. Each person was projecting their own ego onto the television show, and therefore perceived what they chose to project. Choice is the operative word. That's right: we choose to believe in this crazy shit. We choose to project ideas like "I'm too fat," "I'm unworthy," and "I'm just not smart." We made a decision to forget about love and we fell for the mad idea instead. As a result, we live in a world that is based on these limiting projections. We project these thoughts and therefore perceive them to be real. Worst of all, we believe deeply in our perceptions because we're the ones who put them there.
We project a belief system based on grades, cliques, bullies and societal crap about body image. We have no choice but to ignore our ~ing because the voice of love cannot coexist with fear. Fear spreads like a virus, contaminating our minds. All it takes is one tiny mad idea to separate our mind from love and create a pattern of thinking in which fear always wins. The ego also recreates your past fears in the present.
The ego is crafty. There are a number of tricks the ego turns to in order to keep us in the dark, such as causing us to believe that others are more special than we are, causing us to attack others, or getting us into the nasty habits of denying our greatness and believing we are inadequate. These tricks are cunning and baffling. Each trick convinces us to believe in fear and forget about love. Eventually we get so hooked into the ego's illusion that we cannot remember the loving mind we came from. It's as if we've been roofied by the ego.
This sounds totally effed up, right? Of course it does, but let's face it: in one or more ways we've all fallen for the ego's mad idea. One fearful thought takes over our minds and creates our very own illusions. We were all innocent children who once believed in love. But there comes a point at which we forget love ever existed. We choose fear instead. We fear just about everything. We fear our careers, our family, our friends—we even fear the possibility that love could be real. Most of all we fear our own greatness.
The truthful voice of our ~ing can only comprehend love. But because our minds detoured into fear, love became an afterthought. Our ~ing became a mere murmur in the midst of the ego's inner riot. It's safe to say that most people have more faith in fear than love. Whenever you think something like, "I know there is a better way, but I just can't find it," it means that deep down you remember that all the love you need is inside you, but the darkness of the ego has smothered that truth.
You need to take a look at the wreckage from your past to fully understand how to transform the ego's patterns. Accepting the fact that you chose fear and turned your back on love is the first step. Don't beat yourself up about this. You couldn't have known any better and you've been doing the best you can to cope with the ego's projections for your entire life. But now it's time to fully understand what went down in order to create change.
Please know that even if you've forgotten about love, it never actually left you. Your mind just separated from it. This separation ignited the spark that became the fire that burns through your loving mind. Yet the separation was merely a choice. Unfortunately, you chose to detour into Fear Land when you took sides with the ego and turned your back on love.
The Ego Isn't Real
Over time fear becomes our companion. The ego literally goes buck wild taking over the loving part of our minds and convincing us of what the Course calls "the real world." The ego's real world is the illusory nightmare that we've bought into.
The world that the ego creates for all of us is based on belief in sin, attack, fear, competition, lack, sickness, and so on. The ego convinces us that we're all a bunch of separate bodies out to make more money, find a better spouse, or look better than the next person. None of this is real. It's all an illusion that our ego creates in our minds and repeats enough so that we believe in it. The repetition of the ego's illusion becomes a bad dream that we reinforce with every fear-based idea. We've saved our faith for fear. But deep inside each of us lives a soft voice reminding us that love is real.
Quick Review:
• We are all born into a state of love, in which we see everyone as equal and we feel at ease all the time.
• One tiny mad idea can hijack our loving mindset. We chose fear instead of love.
• This choice splits off our mind into another way of thinking called the "ego." The ego's goal is to shut down the love parade and keep us in the dark by making us believe we're separate from the loving mindset we were born with.
• The repetition of the ego's illusion becomes a bad dream that we reinforce with every fear-based idea. But deep inside each of us lives a soft voice reminding us that love is real.
• Recognizing that the ego's projections are false illusions is the first step to restoring our mind back to love.
Homework
The First Step Out of the Ego's World of Illusion
The only problems we have are the thoughts we project. What's happened is that we think these funky thoughts enough times that we believe them to be true. Then the thoughts create anxiety, fear, anger, attack, guilt. By recognizing that the thought isn't real we can release the perception. We must understand that the thought is something we created a long time ago and that we've just projected it onto our present and future.
Recognizing that the ego's projections are false illusions is the first step to restoring your mind back to love. This was major for me, and it will be for you, too. By looking closely at your fears, you'll be able to stop perceiving them as real. When you can witness a fearful thought without judgment, you'll weaken its power and be able to do awesome things.
I want these messages to sink in and I hope to guide you to see how the ego has played a role in your own nightmare. At this point in the process let's shine light on your own tiny mad ideas.
Exercise One:
Close your eyes. Think of the negative thought patterns that cross your mind. Name each one as it occurs to you and then call it out.
Deny its reality by following the fearful thought with the loving response, "Love did not create it, and so it is not real."
Examples:
Ego thought: I am unworthy of happiness.
Loving response: Love did not create the belief that I'm unworthy, and so it is not real.
Ego thought: I am poor.
Loving response: Love did not create that poverty, and so it is not real.
This exercise might not make sense to you at first. Throughout the text, the Course acknowledges that you may not fully understand the concepts it introduces at first, but to continue forward nonetheless.
The Course states,"The exercises are very simple. They do not require a great deal of time, and it does not matter where you do them. They need no preparation." Therefore, all you need is an open mind and the willingness to be guided.
Hang tight and know that each simple shift in perception creates miraculous change.
> Shifting from Fear to Love
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