Here we go. What does fear do? Fear does something.  Joel says something about this. But first of all, he says ‘fear not’ because that’s one of the phrases in the Bible. I will read what Joel says about that too.  He starts like this.

In conscious union with God the mind rests, the human mind is no longer concerned with the problems of today or tomorrow because the souls union with God, the conscious realization of God, reveals God as the fulfillment of every need even before the need is apparent. Concern, fear, and doubt vanish in the midst of fulfillment. The true meaning of the word ‘fear not’ is revealed in conscious union with God. The mind of God functions as our mind as our experience and this is our life then the human mind rests and performs his proper function as an avenue of awareness.

The Art of Meditation, Joel S. Goldsmith

See, that is not so easy to read, just like that. Now I know what fear is and so ‘fear not’ means I am in a  direct experience of communication.  See, that is not so easy to grasp. If you look at what Joel says here it is like this. Make this world real, you make this world real by your fear. Everything that turns your heart rate up like fear, anxiety, being in shock, has always to do with the response to something that you think is going on in this world. Then you know that you are alive, because if you see yourself for just a moment as an animal consciousness, so to speak. It is like fight-flight, there is an impulse, there is a response to it and then that puts you into action. By running away or attacking. That would be the basic structure of your adrenaline-ruled-mechanism that is happening in your blood for instance.

Fear is always connected to something that is a response to something you see or think it has always to do with something that might occur, you know, it’s never in the moment, it is never completely present in the moment. No, it is something you fear that might happen, so it has basically, short tracked to that, nothing to do with any occurrence, it has to do with your ideas about it. Whether it is going to happen or not, does not matter, you can still be afraid of it and you can wake up at night: it can disturb your rest. That is what does: it is a disturbance because of something that you think or perceive or want to perceive. How interesting!

To ‘fear not’, is a big message, it is quite a chunk. Even though it is a simple instruction: fear not. There is nothing to be afraid of. In the assumption of that there is nothing to be afraid of is a vision included, seeing the world aright!  You will have to see the world as it is, to see the world through Christ vision in order not to be afraid of it. Because if you, with your human mind, walk around and see this world there’s every reason to be completely afraid! Simply how you perceive the world. It is like a thread, that can happen anytime, floods, fires, viruses, you name it, the whole all shebang.  When you walk around with your conceptual mind, in your human frame of reference, there will always be a possibility or a temptation to fear something that might happen to you. Here it is completely different, Joel says, when mind is in communication, it is completely quiet, is completely still. That is what we bring in into this class, that is what we are offering to one another in this class. The mind at rest. The mind at rest functions. If not at rest, it is in anxiety, it is attacking and it is defending itself to all kinds of seeming threads. That is the simple statement about that.

Here we are, the mind is at rest, we have a possibility of communication. Communication is what we call meditation or contemplation, it is basically turning within and making a connection with your within-ness, with your Kingdom.  You might want to breathe a little, and relax…