Fearful Thoughts

SAT., MAR. 23, 1985, 5:59 AM
FARM, STUDY

As you woke from your dream, an experience full of unpleasantness, your mind turned to fearful thoughts, and you are having a difficult time eliminating them. Let Me, then, comment on such thoughts and let Us see if they have any value.

There are some experiences and things here in the earth that should be rightly feared. The earth is not the Garden of Eden… it is not a realm of peace and tranquility. The earth is basically the way I wish it to be, a unique realm for spiritual growth. Fear of some aspects of life is unique to each person, for while the capacity to fear is part of each individual, the “threshold” of fear varies… and fears come from experiences or from learning.

The environment in which you live is one in which there is little to fear. (Good preparation!) Your thoughts yesterday afternoon were as far from fearful as they could be. Then, later, you experienced a film of much that was fearful, and as you entered into the situations portrayed you could imagine fear, but you were not actually fearing. It was a vicarious experience, and so the fears were not genuine, because you have not encountered such happenings in your actual life.

The dream was yours, and so it was more of an actual experience. The situation that brought the most fear was not fearful in itself, but it was like experiences you have often, so your thoughts were “what if…?”, and you created thoughts of experiences that were fearful. Your mind can do that, and, of course, it has value in urging you to be careful rather than foolhardy.

Like many emotions, however, fear has value, but it also can be life disrupting. A person can fear too much or too long… can magnify fears and distort perceptions of the world till they produce fear. Such a person can live a miserable life, for one dominated by fear is one difficult to live.

Some fear Me, as Almighty God. (Few fear Me as the Holy Spirit, because if I am perceived at all I am seen as benign… or helpful… not fearful.) Some focus on My capacity to punish, and when you feel as though you should be punished, there is natural fear of the punisher. Some religions have large amounts of fear as the basis for belief and behavior. This is an interesting use of fear. While it is not a universal way, I must admit that it works with some… and they do come to Me and lead exemplary lives, out of fear of Me or of alternatives to Me.

The Garden story has Me using fear to get the non-behavior that I wanted, but the serpent reduced the fear and substituted a desirable result, and so, as the story is told, they disobeyed, and real earth life began.

One of the supreme fears, of course, is of death. This is fear of the unknown… or of that imagined or taught. Death, for some, means the end of all existence, and there is fear of such a fate. Some others foresee an after-life but expect punishment for a life lived apart from Me. You know that this is a foolish fear… but it is legitimate for those who see Me as one who loves to punish.