I’m not sure what the garden variety of fear is, but I’m pretty sure that we all recognize it when we see it. So why do people continue to give in to it? Why do fear mongers have such a strong hold on our psyche? I mean, there are people out there every single day trying to instill fear in the hearts of men. If you don’t do x,y or z the whole world will come to an end, or you will be culpable for the death of innocent animals and insects, or the end of time as we know it is just around the corner, or Judgment Day is going to reckon with you soon and leave you behind to suffer, or you will die if you eat such and such . . . . blah, blah, blah. It’s high time that we all recognize a con job when we see it. If it causes fear, it should be questioned.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t think the danger of some things should not be respected. For instance, I will not walk down the middle of a four lane highway at night in black clothes. I do fear being run over, but it’s the kind of fear derived from intelligent and wise discretion of reality, which I respect. I think that’s were the cosmic reality recognition responses play a role in guiding our thoughts toward reality.
Spiritual thinking is a good safeguard against fear. I think spiritualized thinking bypasses human emotions and makes contact with divine emotions. Not that human emotions are bad, or that they should be avoided, not at all. I’m saying that there is always a higher way of thinking and even emotions can be purified by spirit. Fear is an emotion and it eventually has to be transmuted into awe and then into trust and finally into love. It’s a process.
Feelings occur due to stimulation of various neurochemical receptors throughout the material body and are translated by the material brain into actions we call emotions. Emotions can be spiritualized because the rational mind is capable of observing them and changing their meaning by contact with spirit. The spiritualized mind can assign new meanings and values to those feelings and then express them as divine emotions, better known as fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance. There are spiritual feelings too; they occur due to stimulation of the soul to the presence of Deity, another topic though.
Even the angels and other deities have emotions, but they are divine emotions. Spiritualized thinking involves the use of the “mind of Christ”, elevating human thought to divine levels via the spirit gravity circuit of the Son wherein spiritual values are assigned to our thoughts and resultant actions. This involves both evolutionary human wisdom (learning by experience) and the revelatory function of divine inspiration ( personal relationship with God) both of which are enhanced by prayer, the inroad to spiritual insight.
Human feelings cannot, in and of themselves, impart spiritual values to human thought. If one lives entirely at the level of human feelings, one is living at an subspiritual level. A progressing individual masters his/her feelings and emotions and tries to understand them. This knowledge eventually becomes wisdom to which truth values can be assigned and thus harmonized and spiritualized with reality. This is the process of becoming more divine and becoming more divine is becoming more God-like. Divinity is defined as the unifying and coordinating quality of Deity. Even our emotions can become divine; they can unify our experience by coordinating with Deity. And fear has no place there. Fear must be transmuted within the relationship with Deity in order to take on divine qualities.
