God of Fear and
God of Love
by Dr. Richard Moss
Fear is the
principal force that divides our hearts. It will continue to do so unless we
increase the muscle of our attention and faith that lets us remain present for
more and more of reality. When we consciously meet our fear, our faith grows.
In the deepest solitude of ourselves, when fear has brought us to our knees and
there is nothing left to do but surrender to it, we discover what has all along
been supporting us.
Fear is a great
god, one that we can never defeat if we resist or react to it in any way.
Learning to grow faith is an incremental process. I know of no one who has
fully conquered fear. I certainly haven't. But I know that if, at the end of a
lifetime, our faith has grown a measure no bigger than just the space between
two hairs on our heads, we will have to a degree transformed the very fabric of
reality for ourselves and everyone else.
As this power to
resist fear grows within us, we begin to realize a greater god: the god of
love. I am using the term god here to refer to the dominant unconscious force
that influences us at a given stage in our lives. We could say that, at this
point in history, in the majority of us, the soul lives under the sway of fear.
Yet there is a growing minority whose souls obey the god of love, and the
primary evidence of this is that our lives are dominated by the yearning to
know who we really are. Love is not mere consolation for our otherwise troubled
lives. Nor is it the sentimental, but pleasurable, "mush" it has been reduced
to in popular culture. Love, as Walt Whitman wrote, is "the kelson of the
creation." The kelson is the keel, or backbone, of a sailing ship that unites
all the ribs to form the hull.
Love is the
backbone of reality: it is the unbroken connectedness of all things, everything
in relationship to everything else. Nothing is ever in exile from it; there is
nothing in life that does not belong here, in reality. Even fear.
When love is our
god, we have permission to be in relationship to everything, even the darkest
places of dread and terror. When love is our god, we can enter into conscious
relationship to any aspect of our experience and consciously suffer it until we
realize that the very fabric of reality is love. There is always that within
each of us that is greater than fear in all its forms.
The god of fear
offers hope but demands obedience: do this, obtain this, follow these rules and
you will be safe, you will be happy. But the price we pay for the illusion that
we can attain happiness and security this way is an eternal battle for
survival, one that always starts from a sense of insufficiency. The god of fear
was our first teacher of survival. No doubt, without fear we could not have
survived. But now our mindless obedience to this god threatens us with
disruption at every level of society and, perhaps, may even lead us to
extinction.
Our obsession with survival and security always ultimately leads us
back to fear and all its minions — power, control, righteousness, jealousy,
neediness, greed, blame, hate, and revenge. We live in endless hope for
imagined security, for freedom from an endless legion of external threats, but
in that very hope hides the root fear, that which we have not yet turned to
meet and hold. Hope can never break us out of the cycle of survival.
While fear thrives
on obedience, the god of love asks only for conscious relationship, and not to
an abstract idea of God, but to the immediacy of every moment. When fear is
overlord of a particular moment, filling our minds with endless worries and
demanding all kinds of actions in the service of a hoped-for outcome or reward,
love will hold and support our aware selves as we turn trembling to stand and
face fear itself, straight on, whatever its guise. In facing fear, we gradually
become free of the cycle of fear and hope and begin to fulfill the higher
purpose of our human existence: to reveal and express the fullness of our
beings.
But what of those
of us who derive our faith from belief in God or Jesus or any other symbol that
represents to us a reality greater than ourselves? Experiencing faith in this
way entails projecting our own self-transcending capacity onto a symbol of
salvation and then deriving feelings of inspiration and sustenance from those
symbols. But even though in our survival-oriented culture this passes for true
faith, it is really just borrowed faith: we borrow it from something external
to us, something we can think or imagine, without realizing that that which
resided in Jesus and all the great souls resides as well in ourselves. This
fundamental consciousness, which everyone has the potential to realize, is
clearly what Jesus was referring to when he said, "Before Abraham was, I Am"
(John 8:58).
Depending on
borrowed faith when we do not ultimately have faith in ourselves, we remain
prisoners of the god of fear, even as we worship the icons we have dedicated to
the god of love. We claim to know what God wants, but we remain ignorant of our
own essence. We continue to be rooted in a survival-based consciousness. There
is a deeper faith that comes from exercising the power of awareness to find our
own source, what existed prior to anything whatsoever that we have believed. If
we inquire deeply enough to realize that our conditional faith comes at the
price of giving away our own divinity, then we meet the true test of faith: we
finally face our egos' primal fear of being utterly and hopelessly
extinguished. When we face this fear, we ultimately come to realize the true
source of our beings.
The Problem with God
The problem with
God is that "God," as we think of God, is a creation of our own minds. If in a
given moment our god-idea helps us to enter more fully into the present and
into the wholeness of our being, then this god-idea is alive in that moment,
part of the vital transformative conversation between self and Self. But when
our god-ideas become more real to us than the awareness that allows us to
contemplate them, these ideas begin to imprison our souls.
It is always a
mistake to separate our own consciousness from our god-ideas. Jesus himself
said, "Whoever knows the All but fails to know himself lacks everything."
Whatever we believe about God, we are knowingly or unknowingly speaking about
ourselves, and frequently it is our survival personalities that influence what
we say. If we want a god to support us in battle or our nationhood or our
religious supremacy, we invent a god who legitimates our cause. If we want a
god who exonerates us and forgives us, we open our hearts to a god who does
that. If we want a god who is pro-life or pro-choice, we create this god in our
minds. And once we have created this god, we always construe evidence or
scripture to support our belief.
But it is not
really a question of what God does or doesn't want. For the religious person, God
excites the mind; for the mystic, God stops it. When we speak of God from a
spiritual perspective, we refer to that which, when we turn our attention
completely toward it, ends all thought and instead reflects us back to the
ineffable source of our consciousness, the true beginning of ourselves. God in
this sense is the ultimate mirror: whatever we see in it is God. We must
embrace every aspect of ourselves until, ultimately, we each know that I and
God are one.
This article was excerpted from the book:
 The
Mandala of Being: Discovering the Power of Awareness
by Richard Moss.
Reprinted with permission of New
World Library, Novato, CA. ©2007. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800-972-6657 ext. 52.
For More Info or to Order This Book (paperback) or Kindle Edition.
More books by this author.
About the Author
Dr. Richard Moss is an internationally respected spiritual teacher
and visionary thinker. He is the author of The
Mandala of Being: Discovering the Power of Awareness and other books
on conscious living and inner transformation. For thirty years he has guided
people of diverse backgrounds in the use of the power of awareness to realize
their intrinsic wholeness and reclaim the wisdom of their true self. His work
integrates spiritual practice, psychological self-inquiry, and body awareness.
You can visit him online at http://www.richardmoss.com.
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