Marcus Aurelius had this to say in regards to fear:
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Marcus Aurelius
Living in fear separates you from arriving or doing anything productive. Your constantly thinking about what’s going to go wrong or right! Living in fear creates such a lapse in judgment because of the awareness of what one views as being constantly harmful. We tend to think about preparing ourselves for the worst. When preparing ourselves for the worst we spend so much time doing so, we create the “bad” event and say, “see I told you..I’m glad I prepared myself for this.” Without realizing it we plan a disaster. I’m not saying one should not cover their windows if it has been said that one should do so, in preparation for a major storm or hurricane. But what I am saying is that one should use the energy they have toward fear to do something much more productive with their lives. The amount of time we spend afraid of doing something or afraid that something is going to harm us, is the same amount of time we can use to pray and to send pure energy into this world.
I once meet a woman who told me her father was going to die. She said my father is on his death bed and I want to begin preparing for his death. She later received a call from her native county saying her father was getting better. She began to think about individuals back in her country and thought about all the preparations she would need to make to accommodate the people who are flying in for the funeral. Though her father has not passed and is getting better she thought, I’d better be safe than sorry. As she continued to plan, in the midst of her planning she received a phone call that her father passed, prior to her getting to her native country to see him. She thought to herself I’m so grateful I planned for his death. Though the woman was hurt she kept reaffirming to herself that what she did was right. We later talked and she realized that the time she spent planning while being in another country she could have spent with her father. She could have spent those last weeks with him, as he was feeling better.
Instead of planning on saying goodbye she could have actually said goodbye. The fear of losing her father caused her to think irrationally. The fact that she planning out her father’s funeral was not something to blame herself over, the purpose of hearing her father was on his death bed, was to help her to consider what is important. What was important the time of her preparations was the awareness that she needed not to worry or become afraid of not having enough provision for the people coming to her father’s funeral. If she was at all cognizant of the importance of remaining connected to what her intuition had been telling her, she would have been better off.
This experience taught her that she needed to be aware of the present moment, while allowing the fear and worry that she felt to dissipate and return to the nothingness it once was. If she had done so she would have realized that after her father’s death she could have then began to plan his funeral with her other siblings and shared that experience with them.
The concept of fear has the power to make you feel insane. Insanity is simply the mind that see’s itself outside of the context of love. This Love is Christ; this Christ is the True Self.
Within love,
Herlay Maitre
