God of Fear/God of Love

Originally published on this site Jan 4, 2008

Part I:  An excerpt from Richard Moss’ book “The Mandala of Being” (New World Library):

“Fear is the principle 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 of 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 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.”