“IYLI” Chapter THREE: Transcending Fear and Desire
Fear and desire are maybe the most common representations of forces in our life that most people on the planet have regular run-ins with. These two forces are also possible motivators for those who find themselves in consciousness levels below these, as the fear of death might spurn someone forward and out of agony. With desire as well as fear we come across the first negative levels of consciousness which can motivate someone to move. Even if the movement is flawed and based on a lie, it still can create movement.
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CHAPTER THREE:
Transcending the Forces of Fear and Desire
It was time to choose Life…
If you haven’t been able to tell yet, throughout this book the main way that a spiritual aspirant or just a common civilian transcends the forces of fear and the attachment to their ego is through surrender. Surrender is always the first step in reaching heights of truth that are not just understood but become part of one’s knowingness. Surrender is the key to unlocking one “ah-ha” moment after another “ah-ha” moment, which as we talked about earlier, serves to recontextualize your life every time a higher truth comes in and replaces an old paradigm of understanding.
The first section of the book is dedicated to surrender, as well as the information needed to contextualize the first three steps in the 12-step program. This current section is dedicated to providing a continual context for “ah-ha” moments to arise naturally within you, based solely on the truths you’re being exposed to in real-time.
Once we understand the need for surrender and the way it works in our life, and once we take the first three steps in earnest, we will have built a foundation of knowingness about surrender that will fuel the rest of the work to be done here, as well as the rest of the work to be done when one chooses to live a spiritual life. The last two sections of this book with regards to the 12-steps are rooted in forgiveness and gratitude.
Surrender, forgiveness, and lastly gratitude, are the three mechanisms we have as localities of consciousness to transcend this world and find God always present. We’ll get more into this as we move along, but for now I have to tell you the way to God is straight and narrow, always upwards, and paved with surrender, forgiveness and gratitude.
Now, let’s get back to fear and desire and the direct topic at hand, which is understanding these forces, so it becomes easier to let go of our attachment to the beliefs we have they represent reality and not illusion.
Fear and desire are maybe the most common representations of forces in our life that most people on the planet have regular run-ins with. These two forces are also possible motivators for those who find themselves in consciousness levels below these, as the fear of death might spurn someone forward and out of agony. With desire as well as fear we come across the first negative levels of consciousness which can motivate someone to move. Even if the movement is flawed and based on a lie, it still can create movement.
Many people believe both fear and desire to be quality aspects of life, worthwhile emotional states to move from, and overall, two levels of consciousness which feel as if they are 100% part of what it means to be a human. However, those who would believe this are not currently living in these attracter fields as their total reality, and many only have these forces arise within their life from time to time to serve as reminders that they feel cut off from who they want to be most, or what it is they think will create the most happiness in their life.
Fear and desire are no-joke scenarios to find oneself inhabiting as reality. These are also two aspects of consciousness that bring about incredible destruction for the person who resonates here currently, and not just for themselves or even for the whole world around them, but certainly for their inner circle of friends and their chosen work atmospheres.
With fear as the basis for the ego’s outward expression, the world looks to be a place worth being scared of, and a place that is best left to be fixed. When someone comes from a place of fear, they have little ability to empathize with another or trust someone else’s intentions. This is the case because they have little ability to trust themselves, so how can they trust another? If I am all fear, it is also a likelihood and probability that I lie, cheat and steal in my regular daily activities. It doesn’t mean that I tell huge lies, steal large quantities of goods, or cheat on the person whom I’m romantically involved with, but I do lie about my intentions, steal the trust of others, and cheat on myself by allowing other negative forces to become chosen within my regular day-to-day activities.
Desire is a funny little beast of a reality as one’s consciousness, because it creates an immense amount of juice for the personal ego, and because of the amount of juice and the self-fulfilling way the ego has the ability to prove itself correct time and time again, desire may be a place better than apathy, but it’s a place far from joy.
Desire can lift someone out of grief and shame by refocusing the aim on getting something out in the world to replace how one feels inside. Desire can be a catalyst for seeing the ego more clearly as well, for with desire, one always wants more and continually finds anger close by as the fuel needed for continually not getting what they want.
There have been seasons in my life where I was riddled with fear and constantly overcome with desire. As I look back on my drinking career, there were weeks, if not months, where I regularly stayed stuck in these lesser ways to live. I would fear that the way I was feeling and acting would always be the case, and I would vacillate between being angry with God because of it and desiring something and anything to make it better. As I reflect back on times of fear and desire as being present realities, these two forces are also major players in taking someone from drinking because they enjoy it, to drinking more when they don’t.
As someone falls deeper and deeper into being a slave to their ego and the world, they look for anything within the world to make them feel better. As anyone who is/was an alcoholic will tell you, a day lived without a buzz was a day where hell seemed present around every corner. Meaning, if I wasn’t drinking, I wasn’t escaping my current predicament of misery based in fear and desire. Drinking for many is a pastime which creates an alternate way of experiencing life and the world around them. But for the alcoholic, drinking becomes the only way to experience life because without it they have to come face to face with exactly what it is they’re drinking to escape from.
Fear and desire break up relationships, companies, partnerships, bonds, families, and eventually the singular person’s entire way of life out in the world who embodies such forces as current levels of consciousness. Out of fear and desire come poor decision making and the propensity to cheat on a partner or lie about their addictions to themselves and the world around them. In these two lower states it’s easy to take something or to lie about something if either serves yourself to feel more superior or better than another in the moment. Fear and desire create realities where the person who is either, or who has bouts with either, believes the world is out to get them because how they approach the world is from a desperate place of wantingness as opposed to a place of acceptance.
If someone is truly embodying fear or allowing it to stay around for the foreseeable future, their view of God is as punitive in nature and as if God takes delight in punishing God’s creation. Likewise, the way they approach life is as though frightened of it and without love present within their day-to-day experience. The emotional state most common when engulphed with fear is anxiety for the future and decisions to withdrawal from the world in the present. Fear, as a level of consciousness, is the beginning of one fully working all the angles to be alone with misery, whereas desire is mostly being alone but wanting others to make you feel better at the same time. Desire and fear are both places where hell is experienced as a reality. If either of these consciousness levels are where you find yourself currently, or remember resonating with such attracter patterns, you know I’m speaking from firsthand experience.
If someone finds that desire is where they currently reside, they most likely choose to deny the existence of a creator and would consider themselves an atheist without the title needed, and when they look around at their life it feels as though disappointment is all it’s worth and they have amounted to nothing, even though they might be quite financially sound or successful as the world would see it. Desire is characterized through an emotional state as craving, and through cravingness the appetite for satisfaction can never be satiated. Desire is lived out through total enslavement to the ego and all of its lower perversions. Desire is also a place that creates only more wanting – with more wanting comes only more wanting. The very act of desiring or wanting is the reward for wanting and desiring more. Desiring something or wanting something doesn’t cause that thing to become present, and if you acquire something in this state which you thought would make you happy, once acquiring it you realize you’re still not happy and you begin your search for something else to get and have. No amount of money, or homes, or romantic partners, or nights out, or good times had will fill the God-sized hole you have in your heart when calibrating at either fear or desire, or anywhere around or within these levels as well.
New age styled, pseudo gurus, love to mentate about how desire and fear are quality emotional sets worth employing for getting what it is you want. And in the same breath, they’ll say the way they got something was by wanting it or desiring it as well, or by using fear to propel them into a reality where something was manifested for them because of it. This is all nonsense. If you have a current spiritual teacher who uses fear or desire as a means to acquire happiness or places you in situations where fear and desire are the underlying mechanisms for spiritual advancement, look closely at how they’re benefiting from this false teaching and you’ll see the crux is not based on truth but based on manipulation. It is true, what we hold in mind tends to manifest, but just because we hold something in mind does not mean it materializes for us and comes in a way that brings happiness along with it, and it surely doesn’t materialize because we want or desire it.
As was stated previously, both fear and desire seem commonplace for most people alive today, as well as those in the past, but speaking from firsthand experience with these two states of actual levels of prolonged consciousness, these two levels are actually middle levels of hell. At my lowest point of despair, I calibrated between both levels of fear and desire, and it was from this point that my bottom was propelled forth into heaven, as it was at this point that God delivered me from these two body-snatchers of humanity and recused me into to a place that I only look back on now. These two levels of consciousness, while being in them subjectively, were my first glimpses into actual hell as something that felt like eternity. When you reach these levels or have them periodically present themselves into awareness when not calibrating as such totally, it feels as if love is nowhere in sight, and because of love being nowhere around you in a way you can see or feel, this is where one can catch a glimpse of what eternity is. The same is true for states of great love, for in both the up and the down, eternity is found in an instant of either. Fear and desire are only useful for the person who needs to move from further down the scale towards further up the scale. No one has to go through all the levels of consciousness in a linear succession, and there is no benefit to doing that in this lifetime. So, if you find yourself in misery from feeling no sunlight on your face during these times, just know, in an instant of deep surrender, God will rescue you from yourself if you truthfully ask for help. God is never not God.
I do not recommend anyone choosing to visit these realms or spend much time in their presence, but if you do find yourself there and surrounded by what feels like an eternity without sunlight on the soul, do as I did and scream out for help. Don’t stay another minute a slave to these forces of the lower mind, and take faith in knowing that I, too, was once there but delivered from such a low point, not by my actions but by the choice to surrender over my lack of power for transcending such conditions.
TRUTHS
(The Katha Upanishad) God allowed man to look outward, but in seeing the outer, the inner is ignored. Those who see the eternal, turn their gaze within.
(The Tao Te Ching) When the wise man hears of the Way, he tries hard to follow it. When the average person hears of the Way, he tries to keep it, but eventually loses it. When those who are ignorant hear of the Way, they just laugh. If people didn’t laugh at it, it wouldn’t be the Way.
(The Gospel of Thomas) If you think the Kingdom of God is above you, then the birds will find it first. If you think it is in the ocean, then fish will discover it before you do. Look… the Kingdom of God is within you and all around you.
(The Buddha) The Way is not in the sky; the Way is in the heart.
CONTEMPLATING ON TRUTH
To this day, if someone asks me to do homework or to study for any type of quiz or exam, unless there was previously a lecture about it or I read it somewhere and it relates, or I listen to a podcast regarding the subject, I won’t perform well come test day, because studying was never a natural endeavor for me, nor was it something I could force myself to do. My mode of learning throughout formal education, from elementary school through college, was achieved mainly by listening to the teacher or lecturer, thinking in the moment about what was being said and how it relates to my life, then internalizing whatever knowledge I could walk away with, while simultaneously leaving the rest behind me as I moved onto the next part of my day. Looking back, I’m one of the lucky ones, for without knowing it consciously, I’m inclined since birth to look within for my own answers when the time is right, based upon what the world says, but not adopted because the world says it. Every time someone speaks or I sit alone and read, I have a direct and internal knowingness and truth barometer regarding the words in question, and that concoction always points inward towards the source of all information known and unknown. Inward is where I find meaning for the world outside of myself, and inward, deep down under the noise and confusion of past programming, is where I found God resides - - perfectly still and peaceful, always present and never demanding.
Unknown to me since I was a child, I was being prepared for this life in my own unique way, in order to have my own experience of the world around me, just like everyone else on this earth, but only in a unique manner fitting my purpose for inhabiting this particular body in this particular lifetime. Until adulthood, I thought this way of preparation, a non-studying style of learning was laziness on my part, but today I see it as quite the opposite, and as a gift. My perception of reality is formed through internalizing stimuli and equating what is heard and seen into discernment about the incoming data, and then going deep into those inclinations to investigate what’s true or false about them. A worthwhile truth found from this exercise came when I realized I’m not just in this world, but this world is in me and it’s defined from the inside out. One does not find answers from without that trump what’s only answered from within, for out there is but a mirror projecting what’s currently found within.
Today, as opposed to times past, I understand the power of choice, and while yesterday I was ignorant to it, today I’m grateful for it. For the most part, we all fluctuate from one polar extreme to the other, from ignorance to wisdom, from sorrow to joy, or from hell to heaven, while experiencing every intermediate aspect of life between and throughout the transition times. Laughing at another out of comparison's sake is an indicator that one is living in a state of ignorance, with ignorance being the first step towards growth. Yesterday, I laughed at others’ expense, but today I laugh at myself more than ever, and today I find myself giggling on a regular basis at how beautiful and perfect the Way truly is. Being able to laugh at yourself for comparison's sake is not only an indicator that one is moving towards the Way, but it’s part of the intermediate steps taken towards experiencing a new and better subjective reality in your day-to-day life and moment-to-moment existence. Today, I choose to laugh at the Way, and not because it seems foolish as a pursuit, but because of how ignorant I was to see It as anything other than the Ultimate Pursuit.
Throughout my life, I have been a participant in every aspect of life, from ignorance to wisdom, and from wisdom to the absolute average. In fact, we all have. But, in order to follow the Way, you have to be able to laugh at yesterday vs. today for comparison’s sake, for today versus yesterday is in fact the demarcation line between the wise and the ignorant. Today, is not a day that needs to be lost to the pursuits of the flesh, instead, today can be filled with wise decisions regarding surrendering over the flesh for the fresh perspective the Way presents. Today, as opposed to yesterday, is what we now have at our fingertips, for yesterday is gone, tomorrow is uncertain, but within the moment of now lies the present, waiting to be unwrapped. Happiness isn’t found in ignorance, only momentary glimpses of contentment through false feelings of superiority. If you truly desire happiness, if love is a word you’re not sure exists in your everyday life, then it’s time to lay aside the childish attempts at remaining saddled with your past. It’s now time to let go of past foolishness with regards to hiding from God, and today, the present gift from the creator, you have the opportunity to start laughing at yourself instead of at the world around you.
For most of this lifetime, I imagined I was outside of the Kingdom of God, while constantly looking for the secret back door that would allow me to slip in unnoticed by its true and worthy inhabitants. And thus, the kingdom of God remained a mystery to me for many years. At times, the Kingdom has been a worthwhile pursuit I looked for out in the world, and at other times it felt as far from my grasp as breathing under water without an oxygen tank. And by thinking that I am somehow separated from the Kingdom of Heaven, I created the boundary that kept me locked outside its gates. However, today I know that the Kingdom of God, the Way, the Path, the Eternal, and any other term one chooses to use for descriptive purposes, is not found above me or below me, it’s found within me, hiding in plain sight, but never forcing me to take notice.
By knowing God is found by first looking within, I now know that separation from my Creator is not possible, not even on my worst days, because despite my actions or assumptions, God remains steadfast in position and context. If heaven is found by looking within, it stands to reason that every time we choose to look somewhere else for our connection to God, or to someone else for our definition of God, we’re relying on something other than our own inner power to change the world around us. And for me, relying on others to “change my mind,” “cure my addictions,” or “break my negative habits,” is as futile as trying to breathe under water without an oxygen tank. The gift of surrender is the ultimate tool in realizing the possibility of bringing heaven into your life and into your everyday experience of life, and surrender is not found outside of one’s self. One does not surrender over life to God so that life will get easier. One surrenders life to God so that the Kingdom of God is able to be entered while moving through the experience of physicality and being a human. Just because we take this human form does not mean we’re separated from that which created us, because in fact, what we arise out of we are. There is no separation from what you are, but what you are, maybe you can’t see yet, so take the word of someone who’s been where you are and spent time in where you want to be, nothing outside yourself will be where you find the Kingdom of God.
The Way is peaceful once you realize it.
The Way is inspirational once you realize it.
The Way is motivating once you realize it.
The Way is beautiful once you realize it.
The Way is perfect once you realize it.
The Way is all-loving once you realize it.
The Way is mighty once you realize it.
The Way is powerful once you realize it.
The Way is everything once you realize it.
The Way is whatever you need it to be once you realize it.
Once I realized the Way was in my heart and not found anywhere else, I finally realized I was beautiful, perfect in reflection, all-loving, motivating, mighty, powerful, peaceful, everything, inspirational, and whatever I need to be in any perfect moment of now, even if I'm not aware of it currently. You see, it’s the potential to be all of these things that actualizes once one chooses to move towards the Way. The Way is not a magic pill one takes or a magical elixir for sale out in one of the world’s many apothecaries. No, the Way is found within for anyone searching for God, and neither your beliefs nor your actions will have an impact on whether the Way exists or not, as the Way is the context out of which the content of life arises, as well as the content arising.
The Way, the Truth, the Life. These are not about finding yourself as a separate part of the journey, they’re about following someone who’s been there before telling you that by following their example of looking within for truth, you now know the key ingredient for coming face-to-face with God along the Way.
The Way is narrow indeed but paved with gold once one realizes it. One can be lost at times on their way to Truth, but the Way is always available for any traveler looking for a home with a sturdy foundation. The Way is not found in the sky as the Buddha enlightened us about, it is in fact found by the traveler who chooses introspection and surrender over sailing through the atmosphere aimlessly and without clearance for landing. The Way is a choice. It is a subjective reality. It is truth and also a personal journey and shared experience. Choose to pursue the Way and you’ll soon find yourself carried away by the love it provides, and then you’ll know it is about finding yourself as part of the Way, as well as being the Way yourself for others to follow.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR STEP THREE
Find a quiet space away from the noise of other people and from the busyness of the world. If you find yourself making it to this step and you cannot escape what’s around you and you’re ready to take this step, don’t worry about where you are, just close your eyes for a moment or two and take a few deep breaths to begin. This step can be taken by speaking the words below internally or externally, but I would recommend doing both in succession and then writing them down after you’re finished reciting them.
What this step means, is that you are making a decision to surrender your life over to a power greater than yourself, for the purpose of having a life you’re not sure exists. This step is the definition of faith, and by taking this step you are making an act of faith to divinity and the world around you. This is an action step of surrender, and it is also the very step that if taken in earnest, will change your life for years to come in ways you cannot even fathom yet. Do not take this step without much self-reflection and without knowing that your life will change from the moment you take this step. The true spiritual life of surrender starts once this step is taken, because once your life is surrendered over to God, it might change drastically and be rearranged to fit a higher will for you as opposed to your will for you.
This step is the last of three in the surrender section of this book, with the previous two steps setting the context for this one here about to be taken. Many people are not aware that a spiritual life can be what the world calls a messy life, and that a truly spiritual life is not all rainbows and sunshine, because to be aware of a rainbow one first has to weather the storm. This step invites God into your life in a way that will recontextualize your very existence. This step is not to be taken lightly, for if you take it, your life will most assuredly look different moving forward, and at times feel totally out of control, but without giving up your will in exchange for a higher will for you, transcending fear and the personal ego will not be possible.
The life of Truth is straight and narrow, and few choose to traverse it to the end because it’s not an easy one by the world’s measure. However, a life fueled by pursuing Truth is the only adventure worth taking, for how will you know who God is and what you are while still remaining attached to the beliefs that come from something smaller than that which created it? The answer to that question is found within this step and what comes next after taking it.
Best of luck to all who have read these words and endeavor to persevere into the truth that Love has in store for you. Many blessings on a life worth living and journey worth sharing that is about to become evident to those who move past this step and into step four with an honest and open heart for truth.
STEP THREE
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I make the decision here and now, to turn my will and life over to Thee oh Lord. I choose love in the face of fear, your power instead of the forces of the ego, and I accept grace as a gift I don’t fully understand.
STEP THREE PRAYER
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I surrender over this life, my control over it, my desire to control it, the belief I’m in control of it, and my wantingness for life to go the way I want it to go and still reach truth in the end. Truth is surrendered over as I see it in exchange for Truth that can only be experienced, witnessed and observed from your lens.