OVERVIEW
Most of the time we all experience love as an outcome, as the result of something happening or not happening. This is a love at the understanding of our human selves, however, there is a love of our spiritual selves that the human understanding yearns for. This is the unconditional, forgiving, kind, accepting, patient love that we read about in stories, movies or other peoples experiences, BUT it is here and now in your very life, it only needs your willing attention to look for it, to practice this love. The challenge is most of the world is mad! Instead of loving love, we have a love of fear and a fear of love. Let’s explore loving love.
TRANSCRIPTION
I’m excited. I’m always excited to talk, but I’m really excited about today’s talk because love is the thing for me. And this month we are actually for the next three months, we’re focusing on the book Of course in Miracles. If you’re familiar with that. It’s dense, it’s thick, it’s an interesting teaching. So there are always books about books, right? People write about things. And so we’re actually exploring the Heart of A Course in Miracles by Michael Mierda that, uh, was read this morning. My talk title today is The Love of Fear and The Fear of Love. Take that in for a minute. I’m gonna repeat it two more times. The love of fear and the fear of love. The love of fear, and the fear of love. Hold on, I gotta set my timer cause I said I was gonna only be 25 minutes today. Um, I’m trying to stick to it. I just get so excited, y’all, okay? Most of the time we are all, uh, we experience love as an outcome.
Think about that for a minute. Love as an outcome, as the result of something happening or something not happening, right? We know that love is present. When someone says I love you. That’s an outcome. Their outcome of their saying something to us. This is a love at the understanding of our human selves. However, there is a love of our spiritual selves that the human understanding yearns for. And when I use the word spirit, I’m not talking about religion. I’m not talking about religiosity. I’m not talking about dogma. I’m talking about that sixth sense within you that knows something a little bit more than what’s tangible.
This is the unconditional love that is forgiving, that is kind, that is patient. It’s a love that we hear about in some stories that we read about in books that we see in movies. Sometimes other people seem to be experiencing it, but we are not. Or maybe we’ve had a fleeting moment of love to our understanding in our lives and the love that we’re talking about, this spiritual love. It is here and now in your very life. I don’t care what’s going on. I care about you and what’s going on, but I don’t care what’s going on. The love that we’re talking about in a Course in Miracles and the love that we’re talking about today is in your very life. It only needs your willing attention to look at it and most importantly, to practice it. The challenge is most of the world is absolutely mad and you are a part of the world. So guess what? You’re mad. You’re absolutely insane. Why? Because we have a love of fear and a fear of love most of the time. So let’s get to exploring Loving love. Yes.
I’m gonna come back to the reading and, and, and read it one more time because these words are, are powerful. We’ll come around to it towards the end again once we have made this connection to spirit. So there has been all this talk about the importance of connecting to our spirit, connecting to our sixth senses, connecting to our understanding of something greater than the thing that you hold in your hand. Once we have made this connection to spirit, we are then more prepared, not perfect, but prepared to practice unconditional love in our day-to-day lives. We cannot attain the consciousness of unconditional love just by studying or analyzing the concept or by preaching it to others. I’m sure you know people that preach it a lot. You’ve probably found yourself in a preaching position what you should do. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, right? Instead, we must actually live it by practicing it.
We must be diligent in recognizing each time we are either choosing not to love. So if we’re not loving, we’re judging or we are loving with conditions, we put boundaries and rules and regulations on what love is and what love isn’t. Once we have this awareness, we are free to choose to do otherwise by loving unconditionally. Sounds like a great concept. Let’s break it down a little bit more. Two weeks ago, Reverend Amy introduced all of this and kicked off the conversation of a Course in Miracles by bringing forward the principle of oneness. This is one of the fundamental principles of science, of mine, of religious science, of unity, of divine science, of any of the mystical traditions and of the course in miracles, oneness as the ground of all being. There is no true separation. Only the separation that we and our humanness have created is this, not when we are experiencing suffering, when we feel separate or not a part of something, but we also feed our egos and give ourselves a false sense of oneness and belonging by excluding and othering.
Wow. We do a number on ourselves in our humanity, don’t we? But regardless of what we do in our humanity, the truth of our spirit is oneness. And that is what uh, Amy was getting us to. Reverend Rodrick followed up last week and spoke on forgiveness and its power that as we forget our oneness and engage in behaviors, decisions and say things that harm someone else or we find ourself on the receiving end of someone else forgetting their spiritual truth, the path back to oneness is what for forgiveness. Forgiving ourselves and forgiving others. Not just once, not just a few times but every day. And I would say all day. So this brings us to the present to today. Lessons on love and fear. Fear can only do one thing, that’s it. One thing, and it creates more fear. That’s all it can do to dissipate, to break up to quiet fear.
We need love. The only way that I think fear can serve us in this conversation is in the place of evil. We talk so much about evil and evil forces and evil people and them and those people over there doing that thing and making the world a worser place. When we talk about evil in this way, there’s no out because it is a force that cannot be changed. We need to exclude them, we need to push them away. We need to other ultimately, I’ll own this for myself. I don’t believe that there is an evil force that exists. I believe evil doing and evil choices arise out of fear. That’s it. So if you ever find yourself saying something or someone is evil, fear can actually serve you in creating a little bit of space instead of saying that person is evil. What if you were to say that person is fearful? Ugh. It gives a little bit of room for some compassion and empathy in there.
The gift of doing that is that fear. I think all of us agree is something that we can transmute into something, but we need to bring something to it. Love, love ideally only does one thing. It creates more love. However, <laugh> in our world, we have a love of fear. It’s an interesting wiring of neurology, but we are familiar with fear. I don’t truly like being in that state and I don’t think any of us like being in a state of fear. However, it is becoming normal and I know that we all like normal. Why can’t things just be normal? Gosh, we fight for normal like crazy. So we default. If we love fear, then we default to fear even though we don’t want it. It’s normal for us now. And we all have experienced so much hurt, so much pain, so much uh, broken trust in suffering at various levels that we have come to this place of being suspect of love.
So we have a fear of love. We don’t trust it when it presents itself. We rarely trust it. And this gets reinforced over and over and over again by the things that we consume. Some of the music we, we, we listen to the movies, we watch the TV series, the books, all of them are filled with stories of heartbreak, deceit, corruption, abuse and excessive violence. Just think of the last few things that you’ve watched. They promoted fear even though it was intriguing and entertaining and interesting in a weird plot twist, you are reaffirming within you this normal sea of fear. Our news rarely, rarely shares stories of love and upliftment. And when it is shared, it is an exclusive or seemingly an exceptional story. Now, I don’t hate the news, I don’t hate our entertainment. I just hope that you can see the correlation between what we feed ourselves mentally and emotionally on a daily basis as individuals and as a society.
That it is promoting loving fear and fearing love. Are you tracking me so far? Give me a thumbs up out there. In the virtual world, we got thumbs up in the room. A Course in Miracles has so many powerful teachings. Um, but one of the main tenets, one of the main principles of a course in miracles is that love is all that there is. And period stop. Love is the foundation of who we are. And if this is the foundation of things, then stories of love shouldn’t be portrayed as an exception. They should be the norm. So how do we flip this? How do we, how do we flip the script of loving fear and fearing love first? First, let’s just all admit that we are all scared. Let’s own that. I’m scared. You in the room are scared you out in the virtual world, you are scared Most of the day we are dancing around our fears.
We are either trying to numb them away, lie to ourselves that we’re not scared or we’re blaming someone or something else for the feeling that we are experiencing, right? I wouldn’t be scared if they didn’t do that. I wouldn’t be scared if the government didn’t do that. I wouldn’t be scared if my neighbor didn’t do that. Now don’t get me wrong. If someone runs into a room waving a gun around, be scared. Do something to protect yourself. But how often do we sit in a room by ourselves and worry about in a time when we may be in a situation where someone runs into a room with a gun, we’re all by ourselves, we work ourselves into a total tizzy. Let’s, let’s step away from the gun thing. I know that can be a little intense. How often do we walk around fearful, scared of what someone may think or say about us because we did this or we didn’t do it?
I would say that is every single day of your life. And if you say No, I don’t do that, I’m gonna call bs. Check yourself and really listen to some of that background dialogue. We freak ourselves out all by ourselves. We scare ourselves all day long and then bam, oh, all of a sudden some love comes in the door. Some we get some good news. Someone calls us up and says, Hey, how you doing? Just checking in. Oh, I love you. But oftentimes this is where we end up. Well that’s okay, but it’s probably true. Good to be true and I’m just gonna stand over here and wait for the other shoe to drop cuz that’s what life does.
Right? Back into fear, love was just there, literally knocking on the door and we go, yeah, I don’t trust that. This is the unconscious state of loving fear and the fear of love that we are talking about today. And this is the human condition. We don’t want that to happen. I don’t want it to happen, but that’s the normal state of things. It is familiar. So when we get pulled out, even the love, the good feeling now becomes scary. And we’re just in a fear loop. <laugh>. We can’t get out from under it. So we scoot back over to our internal state of worry, doubt, mistrust, skepticism because it’s familiar and we’re used to it. The good news is that you are actually courageous.
Take that in for a minute. You have been courageous your entire life more than you probably have admitted it. Or as Walt Whitman wrote in the Song of the Open Road, I am larger, better than I thought. I do not know I held so much goodness. I am larger, better than I thought. I did not know I held so much goodness. When was the last time that was the tone of your mental chatter? I didn’t know I held so much goodness. Can we live a life steeped in love? Yes, absolutely. And I think we already do, always have and always will. However, the truth dwells in our spirit. What we need to do is remind our human selves of our spiritual truth every day as often as we can. We need to integrate our spirit and our humanity. This I believe, is the way to heal the madness that’s spoken of in the book of loving fear and fearing love.
We may experience fear, hurt, anger and suffering. This is something that is not going to necessarily stop. But in the midst of that, if we can remember our spiritual truth, that we are love, the hurt, the anger, the frustration, the fear, it won’t last so long and it won’t sting so bad. The world, our humanity, our ego fights every second though to be right and make the world wrong. To prove that there is evil and that there is wrongness and this will probably never stop. Unfortunately, it is a part of the human experience, but it is not the totality of who you, I and any of us are today. Right now. I challenge you to make a commitment to yourself, to your community, to your family, to your friends, and anything that you may come into communion with in the rest of your life that you actively love from this moment forward make a commitment I actively love from this moment forward.
In the book it reads, love is not only a verb describing what we do, it is a noun describing who we are. And that’s what we’ve been talking about. We’ve talked about the noun and this is what most of the spiritual mystical wisdom traditions invite us to. Remember our beingness, who we are, period. What we came into this life as. What we have been and what we will be is love. We are love period. However we must charge ourselves with exercising the verb of love, building a disciplined practice of loving, doing love every day. Just like brushing your teeth. Not because you even want to all the time, but you know it’s good for you and it sustains your wellbeing. Lord knows sometimes I’m just like, oh my God, I’m brushing my teeth again. Like it seems like this effortful thing. But you do it because you know it sustains your wellbeing.
We don’t, you know, we don’t, we don’t look out our, uh, the window of our home or turn on the TV or open up our phone and go, okay, let me see if the world’s brushing their teeth today. Cuz if they’re not, I’m not gonna do it either, right? That would be ridiculous to base that practice upon what we see in the news. But we do that with love. We go, okay, all right, tomorrow, Monday morning, all right, Monday I see you. Let me see what’s going on. Am I bringing love out into the world? Is it bringing it to me? Nope. All right then I’m gonna keep it back here. I’m gonna put it in the closet and I’m gonna put up all kinds of barriers and shields. You know what I’m talking about. All right, I do it too. I’m not pointing my finger at anyone, I’m pointing all the finger this way, but I am you and you are me.
We are one. Remember, we all do the same thing. Disrupt this habit. And as you, as you brush your teeth every morning and as you brush your teeth every evening knowing that it’s good for you, love every morning, love every evening, and all the spaces in between that you can because you know it’s good for you. And here’s the thing, it’s not just good for you. It’s actually a, a, a benefit to the world. It creates a better life. Remember earlier I said love ideally only creates one thing and that’s more love. If we are creating love, it will do one thing, create more love. The Beatles had it right. All we need is what? That’s it. Let’s come back to the reading. Once you have made this connection to spirit, we are then more prepared to practice unconditional love in our day-to-day lives. We cannot attain the consciousness of unconditional love just by studying or analyzing the concept or by preaching it to others.
Instead, we must actually live it by practicing it. We must be diligent in recognizing each time we are either choosing not to love being in a space of judgment or we are loving with conditions. Once we have this awareness, we are free to choose to do otherwise and love unconditionally. I guarantee people there is no destination where you can cruise. There’s no cruise control with the true love that we want to experience in life. We have to be attentive every single moment because the default is something else. The default is loving fear and fearing love.
You don’t need to become a different person. This is one of the biggest setups for failure that we do. One of the biggest mind F’s bleep that we do in the spiritual path is we think we need to become something else. So once we get here, then we can experience love, then we can know spirit fully, then, then, then, then. And it’s always this distant thing. The only thing that is being asked of you by love is to pay attention to it. Today notice all the signs and symptoms that your body, that your mind, that your heart and that your nervous system offers you as indicators that your fearing cuz we actively fear that’s fearing. You get all sorts of symptoms and red flags and and and flares shot up all the time. Those aren’t bad, they’re not bad. They’re opportunities, they’re gifts to do what choose to love.
Once there is awareness, the skill of discernment has the opportunity to be strengthened by asking yourself the following questions. Okay? So when you experience fearing, when you experience, uh, a flush of red coming across your face because you’re so angry, you could scream when you experience so much anger that all you want to do is just throw things or someone up against a wall. Those are opportunities to ask yourself, is the voice inside my head a voice of love or fear right now? And if it is a voice of love, then we need to practice trusting it.
We need to practice. Now I’m saying if the voice inside your head says throw the person up against the wall, we’re talking about discernment here. So I’m not saying trust. Oh yeah, it’s a good idea for me to throw someone up against the wall. Violence to me is not an option ever. What I’m talking about is when you find yourself in a space of fear, uncertainty, worry in doubt. Stop yourself for a minute and check in with what is the thought going through my mind? Is it a thought that is loving or is it a thought that is fearing? Chances are it’s a thought that is fearful. If it is fearful, then we can go on to the next question and ask, well what is it that love is asking me to be or do right now? This is one of the things that comes out of the actual course in miracles. There’s a quote in here. Uh, it says, where did it go?
Oh, I don’t think I put it in. Anyway. It’s one of the, it’s one of the sections of the course and miracles that I have always taken forward with me. That fear is nothing more than a call for love. That’s it. So if we are experiencing fearing in our lives, then we need to ask the question, what is love calling for right now? More than likely, more than likely, I don’t want to be too prescriptive about this, but the first thing it’s calling for is acceptance and forgiveness. Most of the fear that we have is that we don’t like what’s out there.
We’re at 24 minutes. So I’m gonna wrap this up. I’m really, really gonna be intentional. This might be a part two. Keep in mind that just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean that love isn’t present love and like are not synonymous. They’re actually very two separate things. Love is still present even when you don’t like something. So we need to learn to accept. And it’s in that acceptance that we can move into that space of discernment and ask ourselves, what is love calling me to be? I see some scrunched up foreheads. This is not an easy quick, oh yeah, I got it. And then you step out into your day. This is going to be a practice for the rest of your lives.
Let’s do a little practice to wrap up here. Take a deep breath in if it feels comfortable, close your eyes and remember the spiritual idea of oneness. We are one, we are connected. But somewhere in your life you have forgotten this truth and you’ve judged yourself, you’ve judged others. It’s probably active somewhere in your life right now. Remember that judging is the activation of separation. Denying our inherent oneness. When we feel separate, we hurt. What is the way back to oneness? Forgive back to the inherent, true spiritual selves of love. So this is not a practice and finding right or wrong, this is a practice in willing to forgive yourself. Are you willing in this moment, just for the next few seconds, to forgive yourself and whomever it is that you’re holding hostage in a cage? In your mind, are you willing to forgive them, to free yourself, not to do anything for them, but to free yourself?
The reading says, once we have made this connection to spirit, we are in the active practice of connecting to spirit right now. So forgive yourself, forgive life. And if it feels good, bring a hand to your heart and connect to love. The spiritual love that knows no boundaries. Welcome it to land in your human experience right now and to the best of your ability. Welcome it to rest. As we move into prayer, there is a power and presence that has always been whole in and of itself. But we forget. We forget. We forget on a daily basis. But right here and right now, we can remember through the power of this practice and this word of recognizing the inherent spiritual truth of our lives. That we are love, that we are one with all that is. And all that is is one with us. There is no separation.
And for all the times that we’ve forgotten, for all the times that others have forgotten, let us forgive in this moment. And unify, unify our spiritual self with the human self. And it is from this place of oneness that I speak a word for all of us. May we experience love, true love, our spiritual love in our human experience today and this moment forward in ways that we have never known before. And we are willing to actively take responsibility to love, to be the place that love is realized, bringing it out into the world. We are the reflection of love. And the more and more we do that we will see it in everyone and everything that we come into contact with. Oh, how grateful I am to know that this is the actual truth. This is the truth. That love is all that there is. It is who I am. It is who you are. It is who we are. It is who we ever shall be in our work, in our body, in our affairs, in our relationships. There’s no place that love is not. It is all ever present. So let it be ever present in this day and in this week.
And so it is. And so it shall be peace and blessings to you all.