First, sign your name as you usually do, on the line below (or grab an extra piece of paper for this), and date it:
Signed, _____________________________
(Dated: _____________)
Look at your signature, and try to get in touch with your sense of whose name that is. What concept of that person are you holding as you sign the signature? Is it not a separate person? A person with a particular history? And a special station or place in the world? With special attributes?
Isn’t this self trying to make its way through a perilous world? Isn’t that why you sign your name to things? To protect yourself from something? Or to procure some needed thing for this endangered self? If, for instance, you sign a legal document, are you not often afraid of what it may bring into your life, even while you are hoping it will protect you in other ways? In short, isn’t the identity signified by your name filled with fear? What else would a separate self trying to make its way through a perilous world be filled with?
Keep going!
Therefore, sign your name again, and this time sign it simply as “Fear.”
Signed, _____________________________
(Dated: _____________)
Once you sign it, try to see this signature and the first one as the same. Look back and forth between the first and second signatures and try to let them blend into one. Try to realize that when you sign your name in everyday life, you are signing “Fear.” You are saying, “This self who is separate from The Source, vulnerable, and beset by the dangers of a perilous world.” Regardless of the specific words you write, the content of what you are writing is fear.
Now sign your name one more time. This time sign it as “Love.”
Signed, ____________________________
(Dated: ______________)
As you sign it, try to really mean it. Don’t think of it as a given name like “Joy,” which doesn’t mean much. Think of it as a statement that you really are love. Love is your nature. You are not a being who can love, who can love at times and hate at other times, whose love is partial, selective, and intermittent. You are love. Love is your nature. You are a segment of Love Itself. In your true nature, you are incapable of any anger, any hatred, even any neutrality. Being love, all you can do is love.
Realize that this is not an aspiration of what you want to be. This is who you are now, beneath all appearances. You are love, a segment of God’s Love, merely dreaming that you are a separate being filled with fear. You are love masquerading as something else.
Look at this final signature and try to identify with it. Think to yourself, “That’s me. That’s who I am.” Does that make you see yourself differently? What feelings does it evoke?
“Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists, herein lies the peace of God”
How often do I realize that I am afraid of love? We are afraid of love far more frequently than we realize. Use this thought as a suggested mental response whenever we notice our egos acting up: “I must be afraid of love again.” There is a sense in which we could say that the ego is the fear of love. It is a mental stance that rejects Love as our Source, that rejects Love as our Self, and that refuses to recognize Love in everyone and everything around us. When we look at it in this way, it begins to be more understandable that if we could simply realize this one thing-not to be afraid of love-the salvation of the world would be accomplished.
Fear of love is insane on the face of it. Of all the things we might be reasonably afraid of, love is not one of them. A famous old-time Christian evangelist, Charles Grandison Finney (famous in the 1800s), once wrote that “Love is the eternal will to all goodness.” To be afraid of that which eternally wills only our good is truly insane. So to accept today’s idea is “the decision not to be insane”
ArtScienceMind 