Video Transcript
In endingfear.org last newsletter, N-L#6, I stated there was a battle over who is to determine your self-identity. Will you decide or will you abdicate that responsibility and allow others to define who and what you are?
Fear arises anytime you believe you lack the creative ability to handle a given situation.
When you fail to get either of these two questions right, you will be trapped within a fear-based thought system.
The first is, who or what you are? (How you define yourself.)
A non-fear-based thought system is only possible if you are willing to challenge society’s definition of who and what you are. That decision is really a choice between possible happiness and guaranteed fear. So what have you got to lose?
We have all agreed that you cannot be happy if you live in fear. Yet, it is also true that one cannot be happy if one is not free. The slave, who is given everything by their master, is still not happy because he or she is not in control of their own fate. We value our ability to freely determine our own self-identity. Therefore, if one is to be happy, which is everyone’s goal, your new thought system must not only eliminate fear but also protect individual freedom.
The Goal: You want to be happy.
The First Problem: You can’t be happy when you live in fear.
A Second Additional Problem: You can’t be happy when you are not free.
Conclusion #1: To be happy, you must eliminate fear.
Conclusion #2: To be happy, you must gain and maintain your freedom to control the source for your own inner peace and happiness.
Your fear-based thoughts are predicated upon the belief that you are either your body or that after your bodily death, you will be judged. Its minor premise is that you are not free and are a victim of outside forces beyond your control. Fate, not yourself, controls your destiny. These premises are assumptions, not provable facts. To escape any fear-based thought system, you must deal with the validity of these assumptions. You need a new plan that calls for a different mindset based upon correct assumptions.
Science tells us that what we experience is actually our perceptions, not actual reality. Perceptions are based on our beliefs. Our beliefs act as filters that color the events we choose to place our awareness upon that then become our personal experiences. Our physical senses are designed to confirm our pre-existing beliefs. As such, our senses are thought confirmation devices.
Physiologists have proven that the body’s physical reaction to both fear and excitement are the same. Thus, the real difference between fear and excitement is the judgment your mind chooses to place on the stimulus. Both reactions are designed to focus your attention on the matter at hand. It is your mind’s perception, not the stimulus, that triggers the emotion that you label as either fear or excitement.
This means that our definition of fear must be modified to address the mental aspects (your judgments) associated with the mind’s emotional creation that we label as FEAR.
Most fears arise from our assumed beliefs that we are either a finite body or that there is a judgmental god to be feared. Change both of those assumptions and the elimination of fear becomes a possibility. Exchange a judgmental god for a God of unconditional love and your chance for current and future happiness dramatically improves.
The second question that you need to correctly answer to avoid fear is. “What do I value and why?
If you have defined yourself as an earner that needs to get a pre-determined result in order to receive a reward or avoid punishment, you will be in a constant state of fear. Since earners perceive the source of happiness to be outside themselves, even when they earned their reward, they fear it might be taken away. Earners disempower themselves by mistakenly believing that something outside themselves has the power to make them happy.
Rather than some temporary external object to “make us happy,” what we actually desire is an inner peace that is internally sourced and controlled. External objects of happiness often prove to become the object of our future misery and suffering. The freedom to be the master of our inner peace is what we truly desire.
To help achieve that goal, adopt the attitude of a continuous learner. Be like Thomas Edison and realize that sometimes you must “fail” your way to success. A continuous learner values experiences for the learning lessons they provide. Experiences offer you the opportunity to demonstrate the principles you claim to use to guide your life in specific and often challenging circumstances. A learner values the feedback these experiences provide. This feedback is then utilized by the learner to make mid-course corrections so that they arrive at the proper destination.
To eliminate fear, you need a new plan to correct your past indoctrination into society’s fear-based thought system. This new plan must reverse the brainwashing about what you and your world are. When you correctly answer who you are, what you value changes. You become a learner, not an earner. The choice for happiness and inner peace now becomes possible. Fear no longer is your only option. You have begun the journey to fearless awakening.
This is Tom Wakechild, the best-selling author of the A Course in Miracles-Dummies Series and Ending Fear: The 7R Formula for Fearless Awakening asking you to create a great day for yourself and your world.
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Create a great day for yourself and your world.
Tom Wakechild
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