By Cathy Eck

Facing Our Fears 

There’s a popular book called, “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.”  I’ve never read it, but I’ve heard plenty of people quote it.  The title says it all.

The underlying premise of “doing it anyway” is that our fears (or any emotions) have no purpose except to annoy the hell out of us. We need to get rid of them; and if we want to achieve anything in life, we need to will our fears into submission.  Personally, I think that’s an arrogant assumption.  We were all born with emotions; they obviously have a purpose.

So what should we do with fear or any other emotion?  How were we designed?

Initiate’s View of Facing Our Fears

The initiates saw facing our fears in a very different way.  When you understand their point of view, life gets much easier. Initiates didn’t differentiate between emotions.

Try this experiment.  Think of a situation that scared you, and feel the emotion in your body.  Now think of something that made you angry, and feel the emotion in your body.  Now think of something that excited you, and you’ll find the same emotion in your body. You might feel the emotions in a different place or with different intensity, but the feeling of all emotions is virtually the same.

The label that we place on our emotions is an intellectual decision based on the circumstances.  Our emotions don’t have labels.  So taking off the label is the first step to using our emotions correctly.  Emotions aren’t fear, anger, grief, or shame.  They are a signal that our mind needs correcting.

As you know from my other articles, emotions were considered a signal to the initiate that they were thinking wrongly (falsely).  The mind was seen as a container of thought. While we’re all connected as one at the level of the truth (True Self), our false selves were designed to be individual and separate. This was so we could all create uniquely.  Each of us could have different ideas and beliefs and experience different lives.  But as you know, people started to control what others believed.  Humans started to fear and believe authority and accept other people’s beliefs as their own.  We also accepted the belief, “If it’s true for them, it’s true for me.”  Consequently, people became connected (or one) at the false self level.  Big mistake!!!

Emotions were simply a sign from our True Self to let go of the belief that was causing the emotion.  So, from the initiates’ perspective, keeping a belief, ignoring or facing our fears, and doing it anyway was a prescription for suicide.  The initiates understood that beliefs are the cause of our life experience.  The effect is the emotional warning that such cause (belief) is leading us down the wrong path; and if we ignore that emotional warning signal, we may not like the outcome.

To complicate things more, we often think that our emotions are caused by others.  Often they are, but it’s because we believe what they’re saying.  So our emotions are still caused by us.  But retraining our mind takes effort because we were trained to believe others and obey them, especially authority figures.

What Do We Do With Emotions?

This sounds incredibly strange at first.  Only your True Self can understand it.  Facing our fears makes sense to our false self; it equates letting go with dying or disappearing.

It took me a long time to figure this out because my own false mind kept replaying its faulty tapes.  But I realized it didn’t hurt to try.  And when I tried it, I liked it.

Our emotions tell us when a causal thought is false.  Most of what normal people think is false.  They’d be emotional all the time so they reverse their internal system creating psychological reversal, causing them to appear unemotional.  They are mentally wired to win in the illusion, not live authentically.

If you let a causal thought go, the related emotions disappear. Imagine that you’re talking with someone who makes you very angry. The anger is caused by the fact that you believe what they said; they were simply spouting off their beliefs.  If another person tells a complete lie, you won’t get emotional unless you believe their lie.  Our bodies are designed to be magnificent lie detectors. People in power messed with our signaling systems so they could lie, and we wouldn’t know it.  Other times we’re feeling emotion as an effect of what we thought or judged about the other person.  Most people think that the emotion confirms that their judgment of the other is correct.  It’s actually proof that their judgment is false. It doesn’t matter what the person has said or done in the past, our minds are wired to help us let go of judgments and see the True Self in everyone.

Thoughts Matter

Most people are other directed.  To heal our minds, we must become inner directed.  The ancient Greeks said, “Know Thyself.”  They meant know your thinking — your mind.  Jesus said, “It’s not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth.” He wasn’t talking about food choices or vomit.  He was talking about words.  Our words come from our mind, our thoughts, our beliefs.  Using our emotions as our guide frees our minds from beliefs and purifies our words.

Our beliefs create our reality.  When we listen to our emotions and let our beliefs go, our minds becomes free and our bodies become calm.  We have returned to the mental state from which we were born. The initiates called this being reborn of a virgin.  We begin life again, but this time we know how to stay free.

People also believe that life is a struggle, but that’s wrong too. If we do the right struggle by becoming mentally free, we don’t have to do the physical struggle.  Read more here.