FEAR Chapter from the book, The Prophecy
copyright © 2005, All rights reserved.

Illusory Fear
Fear is insidious. Fear is debilitating. Fear is crippling. Why would we want to go another moment with fear in our lives?

You can immediately say you have no fear --- that fear is for the faint of heart! But ask yourself: have you ever been angry? Have you ever been jealous? Have you ever experienced hate? If, so, then you have experienced the fear of which I write. If you are angry, you are feeling inadequate or rejected. Have you fallen in love only to find the recipient of your love rejects you? Did they quickly find a new partner? Did this situation make you feel angry or jealous or resentful? Did you become so angry, jealous and resentful that you felt hate? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you have experienced psychological or illusory fear.

As a child were you ever made to feel that you would never measure up, that you would never reach the level that your parents desired for you? Let’s say you had a younger brother who you felt always did everything right. Either you were made, or you made yourself feel inferior to him. You felt inadequate. Now if you take that feeling into adulthood, you will find that you return to that same emotion time and time again --- you feel inadequate.

I am not proposing that you blame someone else for how you “turned out.” I am not even proposing that you blame yourself. I am suggesting that you take responsibility for how you feel from today forward. Many self-help theories have taught to confront, to blame, and to regress to previous life situations in order to try to put experiences to rest, or to forget, or to heal. I am not indicating any of these strategies. I am not suggesting them for this reason: Why go back to thinking of or acting out experiences that caused pain, that inflicted feelings of fear? Why would you need to regress in order to go forward?

Fear is defined as the fear of inadequacy and/or the fear of rejection. These two emotions are the cause of how you can distort your thinking and affect every minute of your day. If you are experiencing the emotions of fear of inadequacy or fear of rejection then you are experiencing illusory fear.

Accept That You Experience Illusory Fear
I write of fear as an emotion—psychological fear—fear that only exists in your mind, in your imagination, in your survival patterns. It is illusory. I am writing about an unreal fear that easily could control how you think.

If you want to experience love and joy, if you wish to experience expansion of your life energy, you first must become aware of, and accept, that illusory fear might be standing in your way. In the beginning, as you learn about fear and accept that it exists in your life, you must be aware of your thoughts that include this fear. You cannot correct the way you respond and react to life’s situations without first being aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it. The next time you are in a situation where you feel anger, for example, ask yourself if you are actually feeling rejected or inadequate. It does not matter if it is you making yourself feel that way, or if you think another person is at fault. The point is to decide if you are feeling fear at that moment.

A simple-to-remember fear indicator is peace of mind. If you are not experiencing peace of mind, then you are probably experiencing fear.

It’s Easy to Negate the Information
There is an easy trap for many people to fall into when they first explore the thought of fear in their minds. They may immediately think, “I don’t have fear, but I know so and so who does.” Or they say to themselves, “I don’t have fear. Who, me have fear, don’t be ridiculous!” Or there is the situation with many many men who immediately deny having fear. As young boys, males are taught that to be afraid is to be a sissy, to act like a girl. Boys are put down. Boys are told to not cry. Boys are told to not be afraid. They are taught to deny the existence of fear as a possibility. Boys are taught if they have fear (or are afraid) that they are inadequate. Therefore they find themselves restricted from having thoughts of fear. Nevertheless this thought, that fear is not to be experienced, is drummed into the male. When they then at some point are exposed to the understanding of the psychological fears of inadequacy or rejection, they immediately deny that they experience fear. For many men to accept the concept of fear in their mind and the effects of fear in their lives, they will have to let go of misconceptions about fear.

Distortions Lead to Fear

Where did this illusory fear come from? How did it begin?
In the evolution of mankind what eventually happened, after man was created, was that man began to distort his mind and therefore distort the intent of living. Man created illusory fear. In this way he could have power over other men. Man created illusory fear in order to extract from others what he desired. Man did this because of greed. Man then found he had created envy. From envy came plunder and murder. And so the story of mankind in relation to fear is written:

Once there was a man who lived a life of contentment. He had enough of everything. He had himself to rely upon, he had a partner to love, and he had children who assisted with the work of hunting and providing for the family needs. He had enough food, he had enough shelter and he had enough companionship. Then one day he met another man who seemed to have more. He had a bigger shelter, he had a desirable partner and he had many children. The first man then became dissatisfied, not because of what he had had before, but because of what he thought he now wanted. All of this was only his perception. His perception changed and he no longer felt adequate. He began to want more and more. He then became greedy. He based all of his thoughts upon wanting and wanting, desiring and desiring, getting and getting. He based all of his thoughts upon greed. When he thought he did not have enough, then he thought others were rejecting him, because of not having enough. All of this was an illusion. All of this was created by his mind. All of this distorted his mind, which once had known contentment.

The man still had enough of everything. But because of the distortions that were allowed to enter his mind, he became dissatisfied. With his dissatisfaction came the entering of fear into his mind.

Fear evolved into becoming a prevalent distortion in the minds of people. This explains how fear has evolved into becoming common place to our way of thinking, to our way of accepting, to our way of living. This explains why fear is an illusion.

Self-Correction

What can you do to free yourself of fear?
If you have fear, simply say to yourself “Release my fear.” This is the first step in self-correction.

Now, you may be so angry, or hateful or jealous that you cannot stop yourself. If so, then you must repeat to yourself “Release my fear.” This will take practice, and in many cases lots of practice in order to get the attention of your mind. I remember when I first heard Gladys say, “Release the fear.” I thought “What good will that do?” By saying in your mind this simple statement, you are asking fear that has been a part of you for years to be released from your mind power. You are retraining. Who is hearing your request? Whom are you asking? Your mind is hearing the request. You are saying it to yourself, to your mind power and life energy that are part of the Source, the Universal Mind Power, God. You are saying it to yourself and to whatever higher power you accept in your personal belief system.

As you begin to practice this easy technique, you will find at first that you may need to say it over and over. When I first met Gladys, I was a very angry woman. I felt I had suffered great humiliation from the situations that caused my divorce. I was VERY angry. I had a mind full of angry thoughts. At that point in my life I spent a lot of time working from my car, as I would drive from one business location to another. I found that in my car I could shout if I wanted (windows rolled up, of course), “Release my fear!” I often thought it was not working. Sometimes I thought I was crazy. I had deep-seated fear. I was a hard nut to crack! I had practiced it for many years. I had held so much inside that I was a volcano erupting with anger as I was driving along shouting to myself. I would have to shout, “Release my fear” in order to get the attention of my mind, in order to stop my mind chatter of distorted and fearful thoughts.

We allow ourselves to become overwhelmed with our day to day living. We allow ourselves to become immersed in our distorted way of thinking. As I describe myself with deep-seated fear, I had arrived at that point in my life because I had tried to change myself in so many ways to accommodate my marriage partner that I had lost my own identity. I had lost myself. Therefore as I was extricating myself from that marriage, my anger erupted. I was able to pull myself out of the emotional distress by releasing my fear. By doing that for myself, I began to insert belief and trust in self. It wasn’t an easy task. It took a concerted effort to work to overcome how deeply my fear was embedded in my thinking.

Fear Of

There is another aspect of fear that is relevant. We can experience fear and the distortions in our thoughts that then occur. We also can experience fear of and have the same distortions. Fear of is as damaging as experiencing fear itself. Both are illusory. Both affect our thinking and our thoughts. Fear of is never the same as having fear. Fear of is what occurs when we create illusions about the future. We have a thought and we immediately insert fear of rejection or fear of inadequacy. We are not experiencing either one as yet. We are only creating the illusion of fear of something happening in our future. When we have fear, the rejection and/or the inadequacy are part of our experience. Fear of is a result of the effects of fear and concerns our future.

An example may help clarify this very fine distinction. A friend of mine is fearful when she has to speak before a group of people. Her mouth becomes so dry she cannot speak. She knows she is inadequate because she cannot speak. She knows the group will reject her because she cannot speak. In her work she is required to occasionally make presentations. Weeks before the scheduled presentation she becomes fearful. She is experiencing fear of because she is pulling through memories of previous times when she did not feel adequate. It is not the actual fear in the moment, because the event is several weeks away. Nevertheless she has experienced tremendous stress in anticipation of (or fear of) speaking. By repeatedly asking for peace of mind as she anticipates the event and asking that her fear be released as the time of the presentation is imminent she has been able to overcome this stress in her life. If you asked her she would tell you that experiencing fear of is very real.

Let me explain more fully. We have a thought and in that thought we experience fear. We distort the thought with the fear. We negate the thought because of the fear. Because we have had previous experiences of rejection or inadequacy we pull through the memory of those experiences. That memory contains fear. Now let’s say we have a thought and in that thought we don’t experience fear. We experience fear of. We experience fear of the future, fear of being inadequate or fear of being rejected in the future. We haven’t had the experience yet, but we are negating the experience because of fear of. When we experience fear of, all we can do is demand peace of mind. We do not need to release our fear, because we do not have fear. We only have fear of.

Because the distinction between having illusory fear or illusory fear of is a fine line we may not be able to distinguish between the two when we experience either. We do need to know that they both exist. Fear is in the present and fear of is normally about something in the future, based upon our fears of the past. In order to cover both types of fear we need to release our fear and ask for peace of mind.

Emotions and Feelings

We have self-destructive psychological or illusory fear. This is not the beneficial type of fear that is innate to us—which is the fear of survival when physically threatened. This is harmful psychological fear. As I have said previously, fear is defined as the illusory fears of rejection and of inadequacy. Fear is an emotion. We have additional emotions of anger, hate and jealousy which are destructive forces. We also have feelings. Love and joy are feelings. We have additional feelings, such as resentment, guilt, acceptance or rejection, adequacy or inadequacy, grief, pain, and loneliness. Obviously some of these feelings contain fear and some of them do not. We can have all of these feelings; it’s the fear that destroys the value of the feelings. The result is we have an active mind power experiencing emotions and feelings.

Love and Joy

We should not need an explanation of the feelings of love and joy. We should all know and understand how they feel. We should all have had the experience of love and joy. Nevertheless, very few of us have experienced the love and joy of which I write. Our quest is to figure out how we can experience love and joy continually in our daily lives. I am referring to love as an energy force that is our innermost being. I am referring to love as the energy force that allows us to accept and honor ourselves, and then others. I am referring to love as something we all desire: to love and be loved, to give and receive unconditional love. After we are able to experience love as our core energy, we will then be able to experience joy: joy in living. Joy comes from being loved and giving love; joy comes from being fulfilled in life. Joy comes from knowing. Joy comes from experiencing fulfillment within ourselves and with others. Joy comes from our experiences of love. Joy is a celebration of love. It is hoped that experiencing love and joy will be the end result of your understanding and working with this philosophy.

Anger, Jealousy and Hate

When you respond and react with the emotions of anger, jealousy, or hate, there is fear in your mind power. When you have fear in your mind and subsequently feel these emotions you create distortions in your thinking. The intensity of these emotions expands as you go from one emotion to the next, adding one on top of another. You can then create further distortions. You are experiencing your reality and that reality is distorted because of your imaginary fears.

When you have all of these negative emotions in your mind about a certain situation, you then create pain. You create pain for yourself and for recipients of your emotions. You may then be experiencing pain, grief and anguish. You have created a vicious cycle in your mind power and your mind is consumed by fear --- fear of inadequacy and fear of rejection.

We have all been there; we can all relate to these thoughts and these emotions. We must remove fear from our mind if we want to experience happiness. We need to seek to understand how to remove fear from our mind.

Coping, Compromising, and Defending

As you experience the intensity of this distorted way of thinking you set up a complex system of coping and compromising and defending. You have probably experienced coping with a situation instead of correcting it. Have you coped with another person, or with a situation that repeatedly occurred? Have you compromised in order to maintain the shelter of a relationship? Have you defended your actions, rather than look at the cause of your actions? Do you become defensive if your actions are ever questioned? Do you become defensive when you and a loved one try to talk about how you may need to change your relationship?

You may find yourself in repeated situations of coping and compromising and defending. This is a vicious cycle. How can you experience freedom if you are constantly in a position of coping or compromising? How can you experience freedom if you are constantly defending your actions to yourself and everyone else? This is not freedom. This is a prison.

Control Versus Freedom

You have probably heard of mind control techniques. These self-help philosophies have been taught for years. Why would you want to control your wondrous mind? Why not give it freedom? Do you realize what freedom means? It means you remove the restraints that have held you back for so long. It means freedom from fear --- freedom to think without fear. If you are able to free yourself from your pain of the past, you will not bring it into today. If you are able to free your mind, you will start to experience peace of mind. And that’s what it’s all about! Imagine yourself going through life actually enjoying living. Imagine enjoying first yourself and then others. Why not forget the imagining and just do it? Utopia you say. Read on.

You see, when you become bogged down or become conditioned into constantly worrying and fretting or constantly analyzing, you have the same thought over and over and over. Why spend the time grinding the thought into tiny pieces? Why not leave it as a whole thought and just let it go? Why not stop the worry and simply say, “I need the answer.” When you get to this point of worry or fretfulness, simply stop yourself and say, “I don’t understand.” And then truly stop the worry, the grinding. It will take conscious effort to stop the thoughts, but make that conscious effort and repeat as often as necessary, “I do not understand.” What is worry but an illusion? And if you want to create an illusion why not create a happy one? By stopping the thought or correcting the thought of worry by saying “I don’t understand,” you are consciously working your mind correctly. You are stopping the worry. You are saying, “I don’t understand. I need the answer.”

Why not make it that simple? If you let something go, by simply admitting to yourself “I don’t understand,” the thought will come back to you later. And perhaps the second time the answer will be crystal clear. Or the thought will come back to you later (which may only be a few seconds) and you still do not have the answer, so you stop yourself from analyzing by saying again “I don’t understand.” You may have to do this over and over while retraining your mind. Remember you have had bad habits for many years and you’re trying to break them.

Self-help Tools

You now have three important tools:
 

• One is releasing your fear. • The second is admitting you do not understand as a way to solve a problem. • The third is accepting you need an answer.

When you use these tools, you are letting your mind know that you want the freedom from fear and/or the freedom to understand and find the solution to a situation without fear in your thoughts.

If you do not stop yourself from worrying you continue in a spiral downwards. You continue to worry, to be angry with yourself and others, to be unhappy. As you spiral downwards in coping or compromising with a situation, you are in your survival pattern. You cope and you compromise in order to make someone else happy, and in doing so make yourself completely dissatisfied. This cycle must be broken.

A Way to Survive

The very young child creates a survival pattern, which is the child’s method of surviving with illusory fears. People usually do not wait until adulthood to create a pattern. A survival pattern is the mechanism you create to survive with the fears of rejection and/or inadequacy: to survive in a bad environment at birth, survive abuse, survive shame, survive put-downs, survive a drug addicted parent, survive a school situation, survive a relationship, or later survive a work situation. Then life becomes only survival, not living. Childhood sets the stage for your future successes and disappointments. If children are given love and acceptance, they have the feeling they are okay. They are acceptable to themselves and to others. A healthy self-esteem is created. Children who are loved and accepted will not need to create a survival pattern. Therefore they will not have the baggage of a survival pattern to carry into adulthood, unless in their life experiences they start to experience fear. A survival pattern can be created at any time, whenever fear create the need to survive with its distortions.

Many people were not given the advantage of love and acceptance as children. Many now have to find a way to get out of their survival patterns. Surviving is not what life is about.

If you have the desire to rise above surviving with fears, then you have to know how to do this. You have to be taught because you were not given this knowledge in school or in living. Many of you have read New Age or self-help books. You may have a favorite author you follow. You may have tapes to which you listen. Many times these authors and speakers give the reader motivation, a good feeling. Then several hours or several days later the inspiration is gone and you are again trapped in your real-life situation. You forgot the motivation. All you received from those speakers or the book was motivation. You did not find out how to correct your problem(s). The key element that was missing was the how to. The how to correct is comprised of the tools to make your life better. They are the tools to free your mind so that you can then correct the situations in which you find yourself.

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