This quote of a western disciple of the great Indian saint, Neem Karoli Baba, relays a simple and beautiful message which has repeatedly handed down to humanity through the ages - learn to love, and let go of fear; release fear, and let love in. And although it has most often been rejected by society or at least the existing societal power structures, it is a life-changing message capable of transforming this entire planet into the heavenly paradise filled with peace and joy that we all on some level dream of.
It is an unfortunate truth that the power structures of the world have and still do stand in the way of global healing and a society built upon peace and love rather than fear and division.
“Fear is the path to the dark side,” Master Yoda said in Star Wars, and it is indeed a great truth. For many centuries, the institutions and power structures of the world - mainly governments and organized religions - have used fear as the primary tool of control over masses to keep humanity as a whole enslaved in great darkness - ignorance, which is the cause of all the perpetual violence and suffering seen around us and experienced down through the ages.
Even now, with the ‘dark ages’ centuries behind us, this darkness and suffering is still a present reality almost everywhere we turn, impossible not to miss it - perpetual war, rampant violence, slavery, greed, famine, tyranny and oppression, dishonesty, and injustice in so many forms. And if you turn on your TV or listen to the politicians and religious leaders, it isn’t difficult to see why humanity hasn’t yet pulled itself out of this cycle of darkness. Most of us still live our lives gripped by fear, as the mainstream media spends 24 hours a day pushing fear on its audience in an attempt to keep humanity ignorant and divided; politics is a tool of division based entirely upon fear, and fear is still the foundation of most organized religions.
Whether it is fear of death, fear of rejection among peers, fear of losing a loved one, fear of losing possessions or financial security, fear of a foreign ‘enemy’ attacking your country, fear of a ‘pandemic’ or illness of any kind, fear of divine punishment when you die, or any other number of common fears that haunt humanity, the result is the same.
“A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.” - Michel de Montaigne
When people live in a state of perpetual fear, they are subjecting themselves to unnecessary mental suffering which eventually projects itself out into the world, from which all of the various forms of physical suffering we accept as a ‘normal’ part of reality emanate.
”Fear is the greatest of all foes. It is a devil residing within. Fearlessness is the first rung on the ladder of freedom.” - Swami Rama, Living With The Himalayan Masters
Fear disempowers all those under its sway; a mind ruled by fear is an enslaved mind, and similarly a society ruled by fear is a society of slaves.
“He who has overcome his fears will truly be free,” the Greek philosopher Aristotle taught. And not only free from the control of tyrannical rulers and corrupt power structures of the world, but free from ignorance, free from suffering, and free from physical disease.
Stress is a leading cause of disease as science has now begun to demonstrate, particularly chronic illnesses including diabetes and heart disease, with fear and anxiety being major stressors and emotions felt during times of stress. Fear triggers the body’s ‘fight or flight’ response, inducing the brain to send signals to the endocrine system which then floods the body with hormones that are only helpful in extreme emergency situations, but detrimental over long periods of time as they severely depress our immune system.
As Andrew Goliszek (Ph.D.) explains in an article entitled How Stress Affects the Immune System:
Some experts claim that stress is responsible for as much as 90% of all illnesses and diseases, including cancer and heart disease. The way it does this is by triggering chemical reactions and flooding the body with cortisol that, among other things, decreases inflammation, decreases white blood cells and NK cells (special cells that kill cancer), increases tumor development and growth, and increases the rate of infection and tissue damage.
Louise Hay, a New Age teacher and therapist who, after being diagnosed as terminally ill with cancer, healed herself completely with the power of her mind and change in diet, says that fear is one of four major causes of illness and other problems in our life.
”I find that resentment, criticism, guilt and fear cause more problems than anything else. These four things cause the major problems in our bodies and in our lives.”
And just as fear and other negative energies makes us sick, on the flip side the energy of love heals. As Dr. Dean Ornish, a researcher of the effects of stress on heart disease, has said:
Love and intimacy are at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well, what causes sadness and what brings happiness, what makes us suffer and what leads to healing. ... I am not aware of any other factor in medicine - not diet, not smoking, not exercised, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery - that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness, and premature death from all causes.
Disease starts in the mind, and so disease can also be healed by the mind, if we choose to accept and allow the flow of the totality of love through us. But only if we are willing to release fear.
“When we are in a state of panic, it is very difficult to focus our minds on the healing work. We have to take time out to dissolve our fears first.” - Louis Hay, You Can Heal Your Life
At the same time, “fear attracts the object of fear”, and thus: “It is true that what one fears has the tendency to come until one is able to look it in the face and overcome,” as the highly acclaimed author on Yoga, Sri Aurobindo has written. This is the foundation of the universal ‘law of attraction’, that like energy attracts like energy. This truth can even be found in the Bible, where Job proclaims: “For the thing I greatly feared has come upon me, and what I was afraid of is come unto me.” In this light, it is absolutely insane to live in perpetual states of fear as the majority of people do; for the longer we do so, the closer we are to bringing the very thing(s) we fear into our reality.
Fear is quite literally the source of all of our problems, and yet most of us still cling to it as if it were our closest friend! What insanity... We all die (our bodies), and yet most of us (at least at the subconscious level) live our entire lives in fear of death, while the few who transcend this fear die all the same; for it is the nature of this physical world that everything which is born will eventually die. And yet the one who lived his entire life without fear of death truly experienced life to the fullest, while the one who lived in fear can hardly be said to have lived at all, having gone through life paralyzed, living as one among the walking dead, asleep to the reality of his true inner potential and immense power of a life lived without fear.
“Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.” - Dorothy Thompson
And the greatest irony of all is that fear isn’t actually even real, so humanity has for centuries been fooled and enslaved by an illusion! There are only two fundamental energies in the world, love and fear, and of those two, “only love is real,” as A Course in Miracles and many ancient spiritual traditions teach.
As Dale Carnegie has said, “Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.”
On the other hand, love exists everywhere, for God is love and the source of all existence, and therefore everything in existence in its fundamental essence is in reality made of love. Love is literally the energy which creates and sustains all life, our true identity is love - divine and eternal energy which cannot be destroyed - while fear dies with the mind and body which entertained and fed it.
“Love dissolves fear. You cannot be afraid when you are feeling love. Since everything is energy, and love encompasses all energies, all is love.” - from the ‘Master Spirits’, Messages From the Masters, by Brian Weiss
Love is the true identity of all life, but humanity has for the most part forgotten who and what we are. We have become unconscious, fallen asleep and believed that the fear-based dream of separation was real. We have done this by identifying ourselves with our ego - which is nothing more than a fear-based mental program ensuring our survival as a species - and have thus become identified with all of our fears and insecurities and attachments and guilt, forgetting our true identity as love, which is eternal.
And once we are identified with that which is temporary and thus unreal, our identities feel threatened by our very essence (soul/spirit) which is love, and by anyone or anything that teaches only love.
For, as Martin Luther King Jr. taught (quoting the Bible): “Perfect love casts out all fear.” Anyone whose identity is based in fear, therefore, feels threatened by such perfect love, for divine love threatens to destroy this false identity by dissolving their fears. But because the person is identified with this false sense of personal ego-self, they feel that divine love threatens their very existence. In reality, it only threatens the existence of all of their fears, doubts, anxieties, and guilts which they mistake as a part of their very own identity, by making that which causes their own suffering a part of their personality. And this is the underlying reason why, despite all of us at our core longing to find and experience true love, most people actually fear and ultimately reject the pure universal love that has the potential to quickly eradicate all human suffering by casting out all fear and thus dissolving all the darkness and suffering seen and experienced around the world.
Every energy has a vibration, and the two fundamental energies on earth are love and fear. The higher the vibration of the energy or feeling/emotion, the more love is fueling it, while the lower the vibration of an energy, the less love is fueling it. Fear is the total absence of love. Love brings peace and joy, the highest divine vibratory energies. Fear is the source of all the low, ‘negative’ energies such as guilt and anger and hate, which are really all just the result of the absence of love, the darkness which results whenever light is not shining.
We all long to find ‘true love’, and most spend a good chunk of their lives chasing love or the illusion of love in one way or another; but then when it comes knocking on our door, most of us won’t let it in because it threatens to dissolve all of our fears and with it our false ego-identity.
We all want to experience love, but most are unwilling to give love to others, at least to anyone outside their immediate family and circle of friends. This is insanity, and it is why the world around us seems to be so insane, because the ego system - upon which all the institutions of the world are based - is insane.
At our core, every one of us is the same: We all want to love and be loved, and yet we ration and limit both the love we give and the love we receive. We all want to find happiness and avoid suffering, and yet most of us contribute to suffering in one way or another, and often in many ways.
We are all one; the human race is but one large family, connected at our core by the energy of divine love, but we continue to allow fear to keep us divided, because we continue to believe the biggest lie the ego tells us - that we are separate from each other, from all life, and even from our Creator/Source, God.
“The most egregious error of the ego is a belief system that says that who I am is separate from God, that God is something outside of me. We have not been raised to understand and believe that at our basic core - what Lao Tzu called our original nature - is love. And all we have to do is to be that and live that. And it’s a great piece of truth, that in order to get to the place called self-actualization, is that we have to stop evaluating who we are on the basis of those ego-identifiers, and instead begin to see ourselves as divine love, as pieces of God.” - Dr. Wayne Dyer
The solution to all of our problems - both individually and collectively - is so very simple, and it is what we all at the very depth and core of our being long for, and spend our life seeking after - unconditional love and the end of all suffering. And yet most of us fear such love, because we are still living in fear.
Fear is essentially the result of love forgetting it is love; it is only a ‘real’ energy during this stage of forgetfulness until true love has been remembered, at which point it vanishes; just as a dream instantly vanishes the moment a person awakens from the sleep in which the dream arose. Just as darkness vanishes the moment a light shines upon it, so fear vanishes wherever divine love is realized and accepted.
This is awakening; awakening from a life built upon the illusion of fear and separation to the reality of love and oneness. And it does seem that the world is currently experiencing a great awakening. Every day more and more people are waking up from their ignorance, shaking off their fear and embracing love and compassion. All the darkness we currently see around us, which these days often seems to be rapidly spreading, is but the fear-based power structures of the world making their last desperate attempts to keep the waking masses in their fear-induced sleep. Their obvious desperation to perpetuate the state of fear within the people is a clear sign that they are losing control, that the fear is dissipating, and love is spreading.
They feed off our fear. As humanity continues to wake up and cast off the fear, the matrix system which has long been in place feeding off humanity will be starved to death until it too, along with all the fear that once gave it life, is no more.
“Teach only love, for that is what you are.” - A Course in Miracles
“The whole secret of existence is to have no fear.” - Swami Vivekananda