Love What Arises from Our Depths

“By loving everything that arises within you, you eliminate fear of yourself.  By eliminating fear of yourself, you eliminate fear of your experience.  By removing it [fear] from your innermost self, nothing and no one can make it arise again.”  COL bk.2, 19:II

Many of us studied “positive thinking” for many years.  But one thing that bothers me now is that we reject our negativism, and this takes effort.  This quotation would have us embrace anything and everything that arises in our consciousness.  We won’t have to judge ourselves so harshly for a stray thought that is not positive enough.  We will simply love it away.

If we love everything that arises in us, we won’t be afraid of our mind anymore.  Many of us have thought of our mind, especially our egoic mind, as the enemy.  And that may be true.  But rejection does not work, because what we resist becomes stronger.  We need simply to turn aside from thoughts that we don’t want.  Entertain something else, in the present moment.

If we are in a low mood, our thoughts will be negative.  At such times Richard Carlson counsels us simply to relax and invite a graceful response.  He says that if we don’t relax, we will be afraid of our own thoughts.  And this is exactly what today’s quotation warns against.

There is no reason to be afraid of what arises from the depths of our mind to be healed.  This rising from the depths is how we are prepared for Awakening, enlightenment, Christ-consciousness.  We must see, with God’s help, that the subconscious is cleansed from the bottom up.  This idea, from The Way of Mastery, makes perfect sense to those of us who have followed Freud.

Be gentle with ourselves today.  Let fear fall away in the only way possible, by embracing love.