Reacting from Fear, or Responding with Love?
There’s no shortage of horrifying events going on around us. This seems to be particularly true lately, with a brutal, needless war raging in Ukraine, and mass shootings happening with discouraging regularity.
As I see these things happening, one after another, at times I find myself feeling overwhelmed. I’ve started to notice an element that has to be present in order for me to feel overwhelmed. That element has to do with feelings of separation, and isolation.
The more distance I feel between myself and both the perpetrators and victims of violence, the more discouraged and hopeless I feel.
When I’m able to see myself, and the victims and perpetrators of horrifying actions as inextricably connected parts of a greater whole, the more compassion I’m able to have for victims, perpetrators, and myself.
What I’m really doing when I’m able to see and feel my connection to everything and everyone is reminding myself of the true nature of consciousness. The apparent divisions between us collapse and are replaced by a sense of oneness.
“I” and “they” exist only as thoughts generated by my ego’s need to feel safe.
“I” and “they” exist only as thoughts generated by my ego’s need to feel safe. Strangely enough, the illusion of separation created by these thoughts of “I” and “they” does just the opposite: it makes me feel isolated and hopeless.
When I’m able to see myself as an expression of sheer aliveness, everyone and everything else appears in the same light. The illusion of separation, or duality, disappears, and we’re all just “pieces of God.”(Don’t worry if you have problems with the word, “God.” To me, God is just another word for oneness.)
We’re all just pieces of God. We’re all responsible for one another.
We’re all just pieces of God. We’re all responsible for one another. We’re all, as Ram Dass said, just walking each other home.
This is the place I like to operate from because I know my thinking and vision will be clear, which will make the decisions I make and the actions I take more effective and helpful.
Do I operate from that place all the time? No! Just like you, there are plenty of times when I find myself reacting from fear, instead of responding with love. But having seen for myself what I’m capable of when I respond from love, reacting from fear no longer seems to have the power to automatically suck me into its orbit.
That makes all the difference because when I find myself reacting from fear, I know very quickly I’m going down the wrong path. What tells me that? It couldn’t be simpler!
When I experience the bad, physical feeling generated by fear, it gives me all the information I need. It tells me I’m taking the content of my thinking too seriously, because the bad feeling I experience is nothing more than the reflection of whatever I’m thinking at that moment.
That bad feeling has become my wake-up call because I know its source can’t be the distressing events happening around me. The source is my thinking, and how much of it I believe.
It’s impossible to describe how completely seeing allows me to escape the gravity of my thinking. Will I make the same mistake again? Yes! A million times! But it doesn’t worry me, because more and more often, I recognize the source of that bad feeling: my belief in my fearful thoughts, not the situation in the world
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