This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
Fear Is A Liar – Rev. Mark Anthony Lord
DESCRIPTION
Fear Is a Liar. Fear is an Illusion. Fear is a Doorway Home to God. Fear has many disguises—but two of its sharpest tools are shame and loneliness. These are not just feelings; they are strategies of separation. A Course in Miracles teaches that fear is not real because it was not created by God. In this talk, we’ll expose shame and loneliness as the illusions they are and reclaim the truth that can never be threatened: You remain forever held in the peace of God. No feeling, no story, no fear has the power to undo your holiness. Come home to the love that has never left you.
SUMMARY
The message focuses on overcoming feelings of shame and loneliness through spiritual practices and connecting with others. The key points are:
– Fear and negative emotions like shame and loneliness are not real, but rather illusions that we can overcome by accepting the truth of our divine nature as beings of light and love.
– Sharing our truth and vulnerabilities with others, through practices like affirmative prayer, can help us release shame and loneliness and reconnect with our true selves.
– Forgiveness and expanding our understanding of God/the divine can also help us transcend limiting beliefs and patterns.
– Ultimately, by freeing ourselves from fear and reconnecting to our light, we not only heal ourselves but contribute to the healing of the whole world.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Mark Anthony Lord:
That was so good. That’s from Dear Evan Hansen. If you don’t know that show and Greg, you were working man. Hi everybody. I am Mark. And it’s my honor to be here and to be with you and thank you Cityside, for the opportunity to serve you. Lemme get my timer going. I want to look at that reading for a moment. I want to break that down for us because it’s super easy to bypass. Like what? And just keep going. It’s from a course of miracles and much of a course of miracles is written in I ambi pentameter. So you’ve really got to learn how to get the rhythm of it and then once you get the rhythm of it, it gets you and there’s just so much gold inside that. So can we pull that up, Dom, for a moment? So lemme just break this down if I may, because it really is the foundation upon why we’re here this month.
The fact that God is loved does not require belief, but it does require acceptance. Boom, right there, right? God is love. This is not a belief, this is a reality. It’s not waiting for you to question it, question it all you want. It’s real. What it’s waiting for is your acceptance of this. It is indeed possible for you to deny facts, although it is impossible for you to change ’em. If you hold your hands over your eyes, you will not see because you’re interfering with the laws of seeing you. See, this is what this world is. We’re looking at the world through our hands, through our illusions, through our perceptions of life. We’re going, this is what it is, this is what it is. This is what’s true, this is what’s true. But the writing on your hands are the lies of fear. That’s what exists on your hands.
And you can fight for its reality all you want, but in back of it is the life of God. So if you deny love, you will not know it because your cooperation is the law of its being. If you deny love, you will not know it. So you’re denying love all day long. Let’s just accept that. But you don’t know that that is what’s happening because you’re so busy seeing what you believe to be true. You can’t change laws you didn’t make, and the laws of happiness were created for you, not by you. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. The laws of happiness are created for you, not by you. Get over it. Be happy. I don’t know any attempt to deny what is must be fearful. Here’s our point. And if the attempt is strong, it will induce panic. Which means if the attempt to prove fear is strong, it’s going to activate your emotional body.
And when your emotional body is activated, what happens? It feels real. It feels alive and it is alive in you. In that experience, in that moment. Where was I? Any induced panic, willing against reality, willing against love, willing against your happiness. Though it’s impossible. It can be made into a very persistent goal, even though you don’t even want it. Y’all are crazy. Is that all right? But consider the result of the strange decision. You’re devoting your mind to what you don’t want. Underline, bold. We devote our minds throughout the day to what we don’t want, which simply means we think about what we don’t want. We think about what we don’t want. When we think about what we don’t want, it activates our energy, our feeling nature, and it becomes real and it grabs us and we collapse our identity with it. And then you are screaming. This is real. You’re screaming. This is real.
You are devoting your mind to what you do not want. How real can this devotion be? If you do not want it? It was never created weird. If it were never created, then it’s nothing. So can you really devote yourself to nothing? That piece right there is just, it’s impossible to comprehend. And yet it’s everything. If you don’t want it, it was never created. The course of miracles uses two words to kind of show the difference between what is created by God and what is made by fear. And it uses those two words intentionally. So when it’s saying it’s not created, it means it doesn’t flow from the God self, the God self that you are cannot produce fear. Now you can make it up. You make up fantasies all day long. You make up stuff that’s not of your true spiritual life force. Your life force creates your Bs.
Mind makes. That’s what happens. And so it’s saying if you don’t want it, which you don’t want the fear, it was never created, you never really, really caused it to be ultimately real. So God, in his devotion to you, God in her devotion to you, created you devoted to everything and gave you what you are devoted to. That’s another tongue twister. So basically God’s devoted to you, God had a divine idea. It’s you. And in God’s devotion, which is really a form of expression, God gave all that God is to you, not the fear, not the darkness, not death, life, love, power, creativity God gave. That’s the devotion. And in God’s full devotion, God gave you everything, which means you have the ability to create out of a quantum field. Listen, breathe. You have the ability to create anything. Love worlds upon worlds. What are you making? We got to pause. I mean you guys, you’re at two important of a passage.
This collective, you are at an important passage where you have the ability to know and stand the truth in the world of fear. You’re right there. You’re just at the tipping points. So that’s why you’re here. That’s why this conversation, that’s why you’re waking up. So at this tipping point, you got to start to choose. You got to pay attention to what is happening. I have been given everything. So what am I doing with that attention, with that devotion? Attention and devotion are, you could use those synonymously, is that the word synonymously? Where you place your attention, but to make it, to give it a little more juice. What are you devoted to? You’ve got everything, anything unlimited. What are you watching? What are you consuming? Who are you hanging out with? What are you saying? Oh, it’s hard, isn’t it? So the patterns of fear, the patterns of belonging are low vibration in this world.
But man, they kind of feed us a little bit. So we got to acknowledge that. But we got to choose, where am I placing my devotion? You cannot make the unreal because the absence of reality is fearful and fear cannot be created. There’s that word again. Fear can’t be created because what is created is of God. Fear can be made up, fear can be imagined, and it can become your experience. So I’m not telling you, don’t look at your world and go, I’m not feeling afraid. Don’t play that game. Say I’m feeling afraid, but is this ultimately who I am? Is there another possibility here? This becomes the question, as long as you believe that fear is possible, you will not create. That’s like the mic drop. And this is what’s so important. As long as you believe fear is possible, which we do, whenever you are consumed by fear, you’re making up your past, you’re repeating your past.
Fear causes repeat. Fear causes us to live in our patterns of not enoughness. This is what my mom told me. This is what life is supposed to be, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of that is creative. Creative is now. Creative is of your spirit. Creative is new. Creative is not dependent upon what fear thinks or anything of your past. It’s not dependent on that. So when I’m in fear, I’m making stuff up and I’d replace that word stuff, right? When I’m in my alignment with my divine power, I’m creating, you were born to create the good, the beautiful and the holy. That’s that’s what you’re made for, created for. So now you have choice. Now you have the ability to look and see, not judge, not blame, not feel bad, just look and see. Ooh, what’s that? Oh, I’m making some stuff up here. I’m making up fear.
Alright, I’m the cause of this. I can’t even stop it. It got me. I bought the ticket. I can’t even get off the ride until the ride ends now that’s okay. Acknowledge that. I love a song. What was it that you guys sang about? Love Yourself as a baby or something like that. That one that you guys did love myself the way, yeah, yeah. Love that, love that. Be with that. But don’t stay there. Acknowledge it. And this is where the real shifting happened for me, when in the midst of whatever it was, I said, this is not my truth. I mean in the midst of the tsunami and it felt like it feels like a tsunami sometimes it feels really overwhelming. This is not true. This is not true. Ride through me. Do what you’re going to do. This is the past. We start to be able to speak these words and I promise you they’re game changers.
And what I love about this focus this month, I love this. I love that your leadership chose this because it’s taking this world of fear and it’s saying how can we use it? And that really is the game. The game is, again, I’m super course of miracles as you know now, so I can’t stop speaking from it. But it says love will locate you wherever you are and wherever you are, it’ll flip it over and use it to bring you home. So whatever upset you’re in, whatever story you’ve made up about yourself, love goes, okay, well we’ll start there. And it flips it over and it starts to unravel you back. So the ones that we’re looking at today, real doozies, shame and loneliness.
I know shame, I know shame. Born in it, born into a shame filled family, born into parents who danced in it and didn’t even know, created in an identity structure that multiplied it. Now the thing about shame, by the way, according to Hawkins, David Hawkins, power versus force, if you know this guy, he calibrates emotions and energies. Shame is the lowest calibration. It’s basically a zero to a thousand calibration system. Anything below 200 is self-destructive. Humanity just moved above 200 over the past couple decades. So before this, you kind of can’t blame humanity. And a lot of people are still vibrating below 200. So this is where we say God forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re not even in a life-giving vibration yet. They’re still in the patterns. The lowest calibration is shame. It is in the like, I want to die. It is at 20 is the lowest calibration that they find.
The thing about shame is I think of it like a mist or a fog that you can’t see. So you’re sort of swimming in it and you don’t know it. So it’s hard to name it and it’s elusive. So if you try to point to it, it goes that way. It’s like that weird thing that you can’t catch. So you’ve got to learn what is this thing? I’ve had a lot of people over the years say to me, I don’t feel shame and I don’t disbelieve them. I’m sort of like, wow, lucky you. I got enough for eight.
So I guess they’re all free because of me. I’ll take credit for that. But I do think it’s, if we’re open, we can discover what it looks and feels like in our world because reality is humanity is immersed in one of the low vibrations is this thing called shame. But for me personally, it was so hard because it causes you to keep secrets. It causes you to hide. Because it says I am the flawed one. It says, oh no, not if you knew me, you wouldn’t like me, you would hate me, you would annihilate me. It’s very narcissistic, it’s very self-absorbed. It disconnects us and when we’re disconnected, we are trapped in a world of own making and it gets darker and darker and darker. The way out of this, the simple way out, which is so hard to do, is to begin sharing, to begin connecting, to talk about, you don’t need to name it shame.
That’s the good news. If you want to just become free and rise up in your vibration to higher and higher love, you start sharing your secrets. It’s one of the coolest things about the 12 step program. It says, we’re only as sick as our secrets. That’s true, that’s true. And the great thing about that spiritual path is that built into it right in the center four through nine is a system of how to become free by connecting with others, by doing inventories through your prayers of asking to be relieved of these. There’s a way that it causes you to actually look at what are the characteristics of this fearful, painful vibration in my life. Because we must know the demon by its name. We must know it by how it acts out within us so we can catch it. I remember I entered program at 24 years old and like many, if you’re in program, you can relate to this. I swear to God. I went there to my first or second meeting, I was like, whew, I’m just going to get this fixed and get out of here. That was my plan. Six weeks, maybe six weeks.
What was my point? Oh. So I start going there and you’re being invited to tell your truth. You guys, I hadn’t told my truth my whole life. And that’s not exaggerating. Growing up as a little gay boy where every day before my feet hit the ground, I had to pretend to be somebody else. Not a day did I have a day off, not even when I was by myself till you get a day off. Because what the heck does it mean to be yourself if being yourself is wrong? So this is an entire childhood. That’s my dramatic version of it. If we’re here to win the award on that, I’ll take it. But you have your version of it. And if you had some days where you could be you, that’s great. I didn’t. So now here I am in a room that says, in order to stay alive, you got to start telling your truth.
Shame slams that door shut. Shame says, no way am I letting you in here. I don’t even know what’s in here. I can’t put two words. I’m trying to explain to you how deep this liar that our life force is. But you keep coming back, you keep coming to places like this and you start to hear people being vulnerable and they start to mirror you. And suddenly across the table someone says something that you go, oh, that’s me. So to think everything, I didn’t have words for other people were speaking them. And maybe I didn’t hear it the first time, maybe I didn’t hear it the 20th time. But eventually something would open up. I’d go, oh, that’s me too. Not me. Ultimately me. It’s the doorway to me. It’s taking ownership of what has captured me. And this thing called shame, which if I may have me by the balls, I had to break free.
I had to find my freedom. I went to treatment at 25, 24, 25. I get lost in my years there. It was a 30 day program. And I may have told this before here. I tell it all the time, halfway through I was leaving my counselor’s office and she stopped me and she said, mark two things. She said, you need to get a new God and you need to learn how to forgive or you will die. And I feel the emotion of that because it pierced my soul. I was killing myself. I was already on a death spiral like this. But those words, I know they came from love because only love can pierce your soul like that. And it went in and it turned something. And here I am, over 30 years later, that’s been my whole adult life. My whole adult life has been getting a new God, getting a new God, expanded, expanded, expanded.
There’s more. There’s more. There’s more. And to live a life of forgiveness, that is you must walk through the doorway where you must forgive everyone for everything. You can’t do that if you’re still entertaining broken identities of who you think you are, you’re shameful, you’re lonely. These are the things that trap us, disconnect us and make it impossible temporarily. Temporarily to do what you’re really here to do, which is to become free from the illusion of fear. That’s what you’re here for. That’s what you’re here for. Any other game is it? This is a great news. Any other game becomes boring. Getting the car, getting the house, doing this, doing that. You can want those things. I still, but when you get lifted to the greater game, when you really realize, oh my gosh, I’m here to wake up from this dream of fear. This is what I’m here to do and this is how we do it. We come to community, we tell our truth, we stop hiding. We watch others share their secrets. And that gives us a little courage. You’ve got to keep putting yourself into the rooms, be it here, be it program, be it therapy, whatever you do, you got to keep putting yourselves here. And I want to ask you to do it more, to do it way more. Lemme see if I’ve got more time to ask you.
Oh I do. You’ve got to commit to giving more of your life to this whatever this is. Science of mind doesn’t have that confessional sort of thing. Oh, by the way, that was fun too. I was Catholic and if you went to confession, y’all, if you’re not Catholic, you’re like nine and you’re sitting there and they’ve got these scary dark booth, you’ve probably seen ’em in a movie. And the door opens, you go into this little box, it’s like an old phone booth and there’s someone on the other side with this creepy screen. And I mean it’s the priest, but it’s still, it’s creepy. And you have to go in there and confess your sins. Now the heart of this is good. It kind of lines up, right? Tell your truth, relieve yourself, be seen so that you can be lifted. But you’re nine and you don’t quite get it and you’re scared you’re going to get in trouble. And so you go in there and you say, I remember making stuff up to be in the confession. I lied in the confession.
I had to do something. I wasn’t going to tell my truth. I wasn’t going to have words for the terror. So I just chose weird stuff. And then they sent us and we had to do so many Hail Marys and so many our fathers, and it was over again. I don’t want to throw them completely under the bus. There’s real purpose at the center of that ritual. But for me, and I guarantee you my classmates, we didn’t get it. We didn’t get it. Science of mind doesn’t have confession. Science of mind doesn’t have an actual inventory process in the middle of it process like the 12 steps do. But science of mind has affirmative prayer. Science of mind has a brilliant scientific artistic way of praying that accesses you to the highest vibration of God. Reality capital R. And from there uses the power of the word to create a present moment, to create a present moment, new idea.
It’s an actual formula and it is amazing. And the more you got, how long have I been doing that formula? Over 25 years. And it goes deeper and deeper and deeper. And the reason I referenced this is because it’s a way for you to begin telling your truth. You can go sit with a practitioner and just between me and you can tell ’em you shot somebody. They can’t do anything but pray for you. Well, I dunno about that one. Hold that one back until I find out. I want to double check that. But you can tell ’em how bad you’re feeling. You can confess. You can relieve yourself of what you’re holding against yourself. And someone who has spent the time to train their mind and their vibration to know the truth about you sits in that vibration. And when they do, they help you lift up to remember who you are.
Isn’t that phenomenal? It’s an amazing thing. So if you’re one of those people, if I may do a commercial, if you’re one of those people who goes, oh yeah, that’s prayer, I’m not going to go there. Don’t. Don’t make this organization fill the room with five more practitioners because this is what works here. The talks are great, the community is great, the music is beautiful. You are one-on-one opportunity to let a simple thing be relieved is everything. It’s everything. And it starts to carve the marble away. That’s around the David Carve the marble and the fear around you where the God self resides, the gunk and everything that’s keeping you from it is the shame. This belief in loneliness. And I know the loneliness too. I’m dating us. There’s some people in the room who know this. If you remember the I love Lucy shows, if you’re too young, shut up.
But there’s this one silly episode where Lucy does this whole thing. She’s the friends of the friendless. It’s this whole thing. She has no friends. And so this whole thing about her being friends of the friendless, I would use that term. I’m friends of the friendless. I have no connection. This is a hard one, but it’s easier than shame. And I want to give you your easy way out. I mean super easy way out. When you are feeling lonely, text someone, a positive thought. Send a good vibration to somebody. Cause connection. Shoot an email. Hey, I’m thinking about you. I hope you’re doing well. Activate the connection from you. That is your best move. And again, it doesn’t matter how fake it feels. It’s not about how you feel about it. It’s the action you take. You’ll relieve it a little bit. Do it once.
Do it three times. Do it five times. Do it. Take the moment to appreciate someone else. Now this is quantum physics workable because there is nobody else out there at the highest truth. There’s one here. So you’re always talking to yourself and everyone literally is a reflection of you. You don’t need to understand that. But it is absolutely true. Everyone is a mirror and a reflection of you. So it is true as you give, you receive. So the lie of loneliness makes us contract and shrink and sit there and sing my poor me song. But the way to shift that is to reverse it and to say, I don’t want to be stuck in this feeling. Let me do something. Now you got to kind of move past the victim part of it because in the center of it, it’s just like nobody wants me and I’m going to prove it.
Right? Right? Isn’t that kind of what we do? There’s nobody here for me and I’m going to prove it. Well, you could go in your room and you could prove that you could fight for that. Or you could say, I think I believe there’s nobody here for me, but what else could I prove? What else is possible? Remember, you live in a quantum field of infinite possibility and everything’s possible for you. We must reposition ourselves there over and over and over and over because from there you can cause what you want. You can create what you desire and you can really, really become free from all of these fearful, fearful ideas, shame, loneliness, whatever they are, they really do become the doorways. That’s the beautiful part. They really are the doorways for me today. When it comes up and when I feel it, it’s now an opportunity to say what is really true.
It used to be a wall that said, this is all that’s true and you’re screwed. But through spiritual practice, through dedication, through everything a doorway was made. And now you find the door and you walk through it. And here’s the thing I want to end on before I pray. The reason you must do this again, back to this, we are all one. When you carve a doorway through a wall of fear and you learn how to through that doorway, you do it for everybody and not kidding, it becomes the gift you give. It ripples out into the consciousness. It is a vibration of love that makes it easier for everybody else to find the door. So if you screaming about how horrible the world is, if you’re riding all the dramas of what’s happening out there and they’re happening out there, I hear, I don’t pay attention.
I’m one of those weird spiritual people who really feels like, if I can’t do something about today, what can I do? Oh, live my own life and take care of that. And that will contribute. It’s true. You really can’t change large global experiences that are happening right now unless you have that much power. And if you do by God, go. But don’t forget that forgiving your neighbor, don’t forget that carving a doorway through fear and walking through it is powerful in healing the world. I’m not kidding. That is what heals the world. So let’s do a prayer. I used up my 30 minutes on my talk. Sorry about that everybody. You’re going to be a little late going home. Take a breath. Nice deep breath. That was a lot of flow. Breathe in, open your hands, open your hands. If you’re a practitioner or minister and you feel available to stand, please do so to hold this consciousness. You guys, open your eyes and look around. There’s a few practitioners here, ministers in the room. These are the ones that pray for you. These are the ones that you can cast your burdens upon. Take a breath… Keep breathing deep.
Music playing … I am light. I am light…
Breathe. Breathe. Deep breaths, belly breaths. Wake up.
Feel that. Feel that I am the light of God. I’m the light of the world. I am that healing light that can remove the darkness of fear. That is what I am. That is what we are. That is what cityside spiritual community is. It’s a light awakening within the darkness. Denying the darkness, dispelling the darkness. This is what you can do and what you’re here to do. I’m the light of the world. And because we are that light, we see the word shame in our mind. We see it literally spell down S-H-A-M-E. See it in your mind and say to it in your mind, you are not real. You are not of God. You do not own me any longer. Deny its power over you. Deny its reality. And imagine from your heart streaming right at it. The energy of love and forgiveness blows it up. Just watch the word disappear and see, imagine on the other side of that world light, a city of light, a world of light, a mind filled with light, infinite light. You are not any of the stories. You’re not the shame, you’re not the loneliness, you’re not the fear. You are everything that has always been here and back of it. You are the light.
Breathe. See this light. See it right now. Keep breathing.
Alright you guys, we got to activate this energy. Stand up if you can. Stand up. Stand up. Breathe. Breathe. I am light. I am light. I am light. I am light. I am light. I am light. I am light. I am light. I am light. Feel it expand through your body in life. And as I am light, I’m light. Reach your arms up. I’m white. I’m white. I’m I’m white. Stretch it, expand it. I am that light.
Take a breath. One more time. Take a breath. Take a breath. Just feel this. Thank you.