Love and Fear

What is Unconditional Love?

Published on by Jim

I do not want to talk about theory or philosophy here; I really want to talk from my personal experience of Unconditional Love.

It took me a lot of work, time just asking myself what I wanted, listening to that inner voice or guidance, before I realized I prefer the experience of loving what life is offering to not loving what life is offering.  AND, it took a lot of work to cut through all the beliefs I had that restricted or limited my opportunity to love.  I had so many beliefs that told me I cannot love this or I cannot love that.  With time and a willingness to look at these beliefs, I eventually saw through ALL of those beliefs that limit my love.

I LOVE to love.  Love is the richest experience I have ever found, or at least love is the word I use to describe the richest experience I have ever had.  Therefore, I had to ask myself, why would I create or allow any conditions to exist that would limit my experience of love?

With a willingness to examine my beliefs and doing so, I realized that there are no good reasons to limit my love.

So now, I can and often do Unconditionally Love ALL that life has to offer.

When I love unconditionally all that life has to offer then I am experiencing Unconditional Love.

It does not matter if another or even the whole world can love me unconditionally, if I do no love then I will not know love.  As someone else once said, the measure you give is the measure you shall receive.

Does this mean that I will always CHOOSE to love what life is offering? No!  Part of life is the experience of fear, hate or whatever emotion life is offering, and I want to have these experiences too.  With consciousness or awareness that I have a choice on what type of emotion I experience, I have the freedom to choose the experience of love or not, it is not conditional upon external situations.

I do not need a complicated philosophy or theology to allow me to love unconditionally.  I do not need any person or object to practice the art of love.  I choose to love unconditionally when love is the experience I want to have.

I also find that with this unconditional love in my heart I have less or no need to see others change, yet I am available to demonstrate that change is an option if you should want it.  Loving what life is offering makes me a softer, kinder person.

My Calling

Published on by Jim

My Calling is what I have to do and what I am not doing, or where I have to go…

Jesus is my model of sorts.  What he did that was so impressive was that he went and spoke his truth out there in the world.  He had the courage to be honest.  Moreover, this is not just the courage to write a book, make a video, or give lectures for people that want to hear what you have to say.

It is not WHAT you say but how it you say it or, better yet, WHERE it you say it.

It does take some courage to write things that will not be popular.  Yet, to go out into public places and speaking to the public, not people who came to hear me necessarily, but to those who do NOT want to hear me, like the conservative and religious people that Jesus did.  The conservative and religious people would judge him and criticism him and he would demonstrate his lack of fear of their judgment.  Jesus demonstrated that he had overcome that fear of the world’s judgment or the world’s ability to intimidate him with their words. He was not afraid of them when they would say that he was a sinner or that he was Satan.

Jesus was out there speaking his truth; he was demonstrating the courage to be honest.

Courage is the manifestation of love.

Jesus was demonstrating the love, that courage.  That is why they call Jesus God; they say that God is love since Jesus was demonstrating love in his courage to be honest in spite of the hostilities of those who were listening.  Jesus was not intimidated by all these doctrines and theologies that were out there.  Jesus had seen that the judgments and criticisms meant nothing if one aligned within himself.

Demonstrating that courage is what I have to do.  I have done some but I have not consistently spoken out.  That is where I have failed, consistently to speak out in public places.  That is my calling.  To go out and speak my truth to people who do not want to hear it, who will judge me and criticize me and reject me.  People who will take the greatest offense at what I have to say.

I am not necessarily to talk to just individuals, who cannot handle the heat of the confrontation directly, but to crowds of people in public places.

That is my job, to go do this.  Until I have done this I have not done what I have to do.

What is Love?

Published on by Jim

“Love stretches your heart and makes you big inside.” – Margaret Walker

My take on love comes from watching what is actually happening inside the body when we are experiencing the sensation known as love.  This is something that anyone can observe or directly experience if they just take the time to watch.  I come at this topic first from a detached, precise perspective, and second from an attached perspective as a human who wants to expand love.  To embrace the whole reality of love one embraces both the detached and attached perspective, giving both their due.

Love is a feeling we have inside of our body and is a reaction to thoughts.

Generally, we learn how to love from our parents or whoever nurtures or takes care of us when we are infants.  As this person comforts us, say by feeding us relieving our discomfort of hunger, we learn to associate the image or thought of this person with that comforting, and we develop a habit of relaxing around the thoughts of this person.  Relaxing is not just a physical thing, or just something we do with the muscles of the body, it is also something that we do with the nerves.

Therefore, love is a two-part process; the first is the thoughts and the second is the reaction of relaxing the nerves and the muscles around that thought.

In the beginning, our thoughts are associated with some material things like the person who nurtures or takes care of us, as we mature, our thoughts can be associated with anything, even a concept. As children our experience of love comes from thoughts of people or things that produce the good feelings

This practice or habit of relaxing is healthy in that it removes the ‘dis-ease’ we may be experiencing when we hold onto some thought or habitual tension in our body.  This is why spiritual teachings encourage us to love this or that so that we can develop a habit or skill of relaxing around our thoughts of various things that traditionally would have produces tension or ‘dis-ease’ within us.

We call these traditions ‘spiritual’ because they address what we are inspired or motivated to do; the word ‘spirit’ has the same root as the word ‘inspire’.  We are naturally motivated to seek the release of tension the same way that water is naturally motivated to flow downhill.

Therefore, when any tradition encourages us to practice love or any positive emotion, they are encouraging us to practice relaxing around our thoughts.

Some thoughts we have we have developed a habit of contracting around, and we call this fear.  A spiritual tradition might say that “love drives out fear,” for if we practice love (relaxing/expanding) around a fear producing thought we will eventually re-train ourselves to react by relaxing to that thought and thus relieve the tension, dis-ease or negativity we had experienced.

Learning to love is like learning to control our bowels and bladder; it takes practice at first but later becomes natural.

As I said above, the first part of learning to love is the thought, which is why there is no much emphasis on thinking about this process.  This can come in the form of a spiritual or religious tradition, which tries to get us to think in ways that allow us to relax around thoughts that traditionally produce contraction or fear.  Such a way of thinking might be to “love your enemies” since the idea of an enemy is of one who seeks to do us harm, we would naturally develop a habit of contraction or fear associated with ‘enemy.’  Since mostly the reality is we are just thinking about our enemies and not actually being injured by them, then we are being taught to love the thought of our enemies or to relax around the thought of those who have or might hurt us.

Once we get that love is healthy and what we want to experience it more, then we recognize that ANY thought we have we want to develop a habit of relaxing around.  We then will no longer need to discern between this or that type of thought, we just relax around all thoughts.  Hence, we will no longer need the philosophies or theologies and we can go back to being innocent “like the children to enter the kingdom of heaven.”  This enables what we call “unconditional love”, for we choose to love without conditions or criteria since we recognize that love is what we want to experience.

This is the objected behind the teachings to “love God,” where God is a concept that implies the creator of all that is.  We are practicing to love ALL that is, since it was created by this creator.  At an even higher level, we are encouraged to love the process of love, where “God is love” and we are taught to love God/love.  This moves us away from any mental activity that may be a limitation to our practice of relaxing and we practice loving the process itself.

Much of the ‘how to love’ teachings are about the science AND art of love.  The science deals with the understanding of how the human instrument works; how to relax both the nerves and muscles of the body.  The art deals with developing the sensitivity and the skill or habit of actually operating the human instrument.

I am currently writing a book that will detail my observation on both the science and the art of loving, particularly loving ourselves.  To keep informed on this book please subscribe to this blog.

 

Fear or Love of Ourselves

Published on by Jim

I wonder how many people realize they are afraid of themselves, they are afraid of how they will react to what people say to them or what life offers them.  I see this as one of the biggest problem we human have; fear of themselves.  The solution to this problem, of course, is to practice loving yourself, particularly when you are being most abusive to yourself.  And we are being abusive to ourselves when we take offense at someone or are being angry or pessimistic.  It takes consciousness and practice to change a behavior that is not really serving us, like the behavior of abusing ourselves.  However, the effort is worth it…YOU are worth it.

Loving ourselves is not easy, particularly if we have been taught to hate and abuse ourselves.  Most people have been taught that there is something wrong with them, that they are lacking something or that they are sinners or some other nonsense.  People tell us that because THEY want us to be something other than we are or THEY want to use us in some way.

As children we are gullible and believe what we are told, we believe we are flawed or lacking or sinners.  However, as adults, we can question the ideas, and if we do, we will find that they are nonsense, assuming of course that we truly question them.

So let us say that we have questioned those judgments of us and found that the criteria for them were faulty, based upon faulty assumptions.  So what do we do now to stop abusing ourselves and start loving ourselves?

How Do We Start Loving Ourselves?

Conceptually this is easy but the practice of this takes concentration, awareness and dedication, for all your life you have develop certain habits and those habits are deeply engrained, it will take some work to retrain yourself to healthier, more loving habits.

I like to use an arithmetic like scale to visualize the process.  On the left side of the scale are the negative numbers, in this case the negative experiences.  In the middle is zero or neutral experiences and on the right side are the positive numbers or positive experiences.  The further from center one goes the larger the absolute value of the number and the greater the intensity of the experience.

We all want positive life experiences and at least we are open to neutral experiences like peace and contentment.  So we naturally have a desire to move to the right on this scale, from the negative to the positive or from the more negative to the less negative or from neutral to the positive or from the less positive to the more positive.

So how do we go from the negative to the positive?  First off, we look at WHY something is experienced as negative and this will tell us a lot about how to go from negative to positive.

If we watch ourselves closely when we are experience some intensely negative experience, say fear, we will notice that we are uptight and/or contracted.  Our mind is very narrow-minded focused and contracted too.

And if we were to observe ourselves when we are feeling great we would notice that our body is relaxed and feels expanded; and our mind is expanded, embracing the big picture of life.

Therefore, from this we realize that to move from the negative/contracted state to the positive/expanded state is to change the focus of our mind and to make an effort to relax the body.

I will talk more about how to do this later, but here I want to say that in essence it take consciousness of when we are tense, uptight and narrow-mindedly focused usually on ourselves or our interests and see how this behavior is not pleasant but is actually abusive to ourselves.  The more we do this the more we will fear ourselves.

We can start making a choice now; start to move away from this habit and towards a more loving behavior toward ourselves.

The choice is ours and the power to choose comes with practice.

Closed-Mindedness

Published on by Jim

I recognize that, at times, I am closed-minded and I recognize that we all are closed-minded at times. It is natural for a person to resist change or new ideas or new ways of thinking.

Recognizing this but not wanting to close myself off to something new that might improve the quality of my life experience, I decided to look at closed mindedness and how to overcome that handicap.

So how do I ensure that I do not be closed-minded? I cannot.

What I can do it to make myself comfortable with listening to what others have to say, and I can develop a habit of not reacting while they are telling me what they think will benefit me. I can also encourage people to recognize that we all are closed-minded and I can ask them to keep trying even if I do not seem to be receptive at first.

One thing I never want to do is to take offense at anything anyone offers me, for that is a sure sign I am closed-minded.

How can I help others I see who are being themselves and closing themselves off to anything the universe is offering them? I am not sure that I can, except to do what I have just done and write about, hoping that others will recognize this trait within themselves. I also will make every effort to break through someone’s closed mindedness that I feel I can. My friends will recognize this as a loving effort to serve them. Those who are not part of my ‘tribe’ will probably take offense at this effort and there is a very good chance they will ‘un-friend’ me in one form or another.

When does being persistent become pestering someone? That is relative and only each one of us can define that for ourselves. I find that the more closed-minded a person is the more they will perceive ANY intrusion as pestering. Yet, I also find that the more open minded a person is they will be willing to at least listen fully to what you are offering and you will feel complete in your offering even if they do not find what you are offering as valuable to them at this time.

Why are some people more closed-minded than others are? I find that if a person has developed a habit of abusing themselves emotionally and blaming others for that abuse. So they will naturally be afraid of THEMSELVES and their own reactions to what others share with them, so they will not want to hear what others have to say, at least not if those others think outside of the narrow boxes in their mind.

Not all allowing others to share with us is about us. Sometimes people just need to share or even vent, so allowing them to do that with you is an act of compassion or love. In addition, of course, compassion and love are good for you.

Fear & Conservatism

Published on by Jim

Fear and authoritarianism are the two foundations of conservatism, but mostly just fear because authoritarianism is felt as necessary for those in fear.

It takes a lot of love and courage to look at and speak to the fears that are within us all. I have always done that by first confronting within myself the beliefs that are the foundation of these fears until I had overcome them and then confronting the beliefs in others that they have not examined themselves. I wonder if there is a better way to address this challenge.

Love Yourself First

Published on by Jim

“The measure you give is the measure you shall receive.” Jesus

If you love yourself then you are loved.If the whole world loves you but you do not love yourself then you will not know love.If the whole world hates you but you love yourself then you will know love.

It does not matter whether or not God loves you or Jesus loves you or anybody loves you, if YOU do not love yourself then you will not be loved.If you love yourself then you will have the experience of love.

Do we want to love ourselves all the time?No, not really.We might think we want to be loved all the time, we might think we want to be accepted unconditionally no matter what we do, but the reality is we do not, for we use the idea of none acceptance to motivate ourselves to do something.And if we do not ‘do something’ then we will not even take care of ourselves, our bodies and our world.So this loving yourself will sometimes be conditional and sometimes it will be unconditional.

In order for our love to be perfect it must embrace the all, accept all reality.That means we must accept, enjoy and even love conditional love, which is part of the all.There is a time to accept and a time to not accept.There is a time to love and a time to hate.Without both there cannot be embracing of the all.

My Fear of Commitment?

Published on by Jim
I have a Fear of Commitment. No doubt about that, I cannot follow through on just about anything. I have ideas galore but I do not follow though on any of them. Many a time I have what I thought was a good idea, even a great idea, but I have learned to sit with these ideas and watch them gestate to see what happens with them. To date not a one has really survived long enough to even be born, let alone grow to maturity. A couple of years ago I had the idea to write my story, and I did spend the whole summer working on that, but I do no have any desire to edit it and get it published. So I just published the unedited version on my website and let it go at that.

I could say this is a failure to focus my mind, to block out the distractions. Even writing this blog post could be considered a distraction. But then again creating a blog was one of my good ideas. I wanted to share my insight with others, or at least make it available to the world should anybody actually care what my insights are.

This, of course, makes me no different than a million other bloggers or people wanting to share or even vent.

So I am wondering, is it fear of commitment or is it a lack of ability to focus or what? Maybe I am just lazy. Maybe I am not motivated to continue with any of my ideas because I really do not hurt enough or care enough to get me off my lazy and cowardly butt.

I do feel I have a deep commitment in concept but not in form. I am committed to waking people up but I do not have a form I like for that process. I love to confront people. I have to admit that I really do enjoy pissing people off, upsetting them, upsetting their slumber, waking them up. But how to do this consistently is the problem I have.

My latest idea is to walk around town with a video camera and engage people while filming the confrontation. That, I think, might make for interesting video.

I am sure that some people who read that last paragraph would be appalled at the thought of what I proposed of doing, but those are the ones I would say are asleep. Those who are awake would love it.

Anyway, again, I have to watch and see if this idea really manifests or will I just chicken out or get distracted and nothing will come of it. Is it fear or laziness? I do not know.

Overcoming Fear

Published on by Jim

What motivates us? Is it a negative motivator like fear, pain, discomfort, doubt, or guilt? Or, is it a positive motivator like playfulness, joy, love, pleasure, or fun? If you are negatively motivated then you end up justifying and reinforcing negativity in your life. If you follow the positive motivators then you will manifest more positive things in your life.

Intelligence is the ability to FEEL the origins of our thoughts, desires and motivations. When we are conscious of our motivations we can be free of fear.

 What is Fear

If one watches themselves when they are fearful, particularly under extreme fear, for instance if somebody were to attack you, you would contract down to protect yourself (your limited self the body in this case.) It is the reaction of contraction, the tensing the nerves and the muscles, to the thought or belief of impending injury that is want we call fear. In fear we contracted our consciousness down to identifying with the human instrument, particularly the body.

So fear has two elements, the thought or belief and the reaction of contraction. To overcome fear (and develop love) we must work with both our thoughts and beliefs and our reactions or behaviors.

Let me give you an example of difference of perceptions or beliefs that change the quality of the experience. If you were told that the roller coaster you were about to take a ride on was going to break and that you will probably be hurt or killed, then the ride would be one of anxiety and fear and not something you would enjoy. If you believed the roller coaster to be safe then it may still be exciting but without the experience of anxiety or real fear. The fear would still be there but only at a body level (with what we call excitement) and not at a deeper or heart level. Ninety-nine percent of our fears are only imaginary and a product of our assumptions or beliefs.

Therefore, you can see how truth liberates us from our fears. By freeing ourselves from the ninety-nine percent of our fears we are being loving to ourselves and improving the quality of our lives. The fears just limit the quality of the life experience.

Fear is defined as a painful agitation of the mind caused by a perception of impending danger or evil; a state of alarm. Fear is a perception of danger causing a painful reaction in the mind.

Fear is generally a negative experience. If one where to watch carefully they would observe that there is a thought that enters the mind, an electromagnetic impulse traveling through the brain. Then the mind’s conditioning causes a reaction of tensing the nerves and muscles. There can not be pain (or negativity) with out tension or resistance. The tension or resistance is experienced as negative or painful.

Fear is the reaction of the mind to sensation or the phenomenon known as thoughts. Thoughts are only electromagnetic impulses traveling through the brain that are either internally stimulated or are stimulated by the senses. When we resist an impulse or thought we experience negativity. When we experience negativity associated with a particular thought patter we call that fear. if we do not resist the thought we do not experience negativity and hence no fear.

A habitual fear is a fear that is being experienced although there is no present physical danger. A dynamic fear is when is present with an apparent danger.

Fear and negativity comes from making something important, giving all your attention to it, and narrowing your awareness. Who is it that experiences negativity when there is fear: the one who is afraid or the one who is feared?

Fear is a product of the future; it cannot exist in the mind that is present. You must be thing of the future to experience fear. Fear’s misery comes when you are torn between the experience of the present and the imagination of the future.

Whatever you want the most you fear the most and therefore you say no to it. So whatever you find yourself saying no to is really what you want the most.

Fear of Fear

Fear is something we do not like to look at, particularly our own fears. If there is something we do not like or something that displeases us or we disagree with then we look away from it and avoid it for in our hearts we fear it. If we fear something it is because it causes pain or discomfort. It takes a lot of courage and self love to look at the things we fear, to work at it until we can appreciate, enjoy and love that thing. Loving something releases the fear of that something.

That which you love the most you fear the most.

Fear is our conditioned response of tension to a thought that enters the mind. We can overcome any fear with just practice of relaxing in the presents of the thought that creates the fearful reaction. See Stopping the Spin