 We continue today with Chapter 2, Fear and Conflict. Being afraid seems to be involuntary, something beyond your own control, yet I have said already that only constructive acts should be involuntary. My control can take over everything that does not matter, while my guidance can direct everything that does, if you so choose. Fear cannot be controlled by me, but it can be self-controlled. Fear prevents me from giving you my control. The presence of fear shows that you have raised body thoughts to the level of mind. This removes them from my control and makes you feel personally responsible for them. This is an obvious confusion of levels. I do not foster level confusion, but you must choose to correct it. You would not excuse insane behavior on your part by saying you could not help it. Why should you condone insane thinking? There is a confusion here that you would do well to look at clearly. You may believe that you are responsible for what you do, but not for what you think. The truth is that you are responsible for what you think because it is only at this level that you can exercise choice. What you do comes from what you think. You cannot separate yourself from the truth by giving autonomy to behavior. This is controlled by me automatically as soon as you place what you think under my guidance. Whenever you are afraid, it is a sure sign that you have allowed your mind to miscreate and have not allowed me to guide it. It is pointless to believe that controlling the outcome of mis-thought can result in healing. When you are fearful, you have chosen wrongly. That is why you feel responsible for it. You must change your mind and not your behavior. And this is a matter of willingness. You do not need guidance except at the mind level. Correction belongs only at the level where change is possible. Change does not mean anything at the symptom level where it cannot work. The correction of fear is your responsibility. When you ask for a release from fear, you are implying that it is not. You should ask instead for help in the conditions that have brought the fear about. These conditions always entail a willingness to be separate. At that level, you can help it. You are much too tolerant of mind wandering and are passively condoning your mind's miscreations. The particular result does not matter, but the fundamental error does. The correction is always the same. Before you choose to do anything, ask me if your choice is in accord with mind. If you are sure that it is, there will be no fear. Fear is always a sign of strain arising whenever what you want conflicts with what you do. This situation arises in two ways. First, you can choose to do conflicting things either simultaneously or successively. This produces conflicted behavior, which is intolerable to you because the part of the mind that wants to do something else is outraged. Second, you can behave as you think you should, but without entirely wanting to do so. This produces consistent behavior, but entails great strain. In both cases, the mind and the behavior are out of accord, resulting in a situation in which you are doing what you do not wholly want to do. This arouses a sense of coercion that usually produces rage, and the projection is likely to follow. Whenever there is fear, it is because you have not made up your mind. Your mind is therefore split, and your behavior inevitably becomes erratic. Correcting at the behavioral level can shift the error from the first to the second type, but will not obliterate the fear. It is possible to reach a state in which you bring your mind under my guidance without conscious effort, but this implies a willingness that you have not developed as yet. The Holy Spirit cannot ask more than you are willing to do. The strength to do comes from your undivided decision. There is no strain in doing God's will as soon as you recognize that it is also your own. The lesson here is quite simple, but particularly likely to be overlooked. I will therefore repeat it, urging you to listen. Only your mind can produce fear. It does so whenever it is conflicted in what it wants, producing inevitable strain because one thing in doing are discordant. This can be corrected only by accepting a unified goal. The first corrective step in undoing the error is to know first that the conflict is an expression of fear. Say to yourself that you must somehow have chosen not to love or the fear could not have arisen. Then the whole process of correction becomes nothing more than a series of pragmatic steps in the larger process of accepting the Atonement as the remedy. These steps may be summarized in this way. 1. Know first that this is fear. 2. Fear arises from lack of love. 3. The only remedy for lack of love is perfect love. 4. Perfect love is the Atonement. I have emphasized that the miracle or the expression of Atonement is always a sign of respect from the worthy to the worthy. The recognition of this worth is re-established by the Atonement. It is obvious then that when you are afraid, you have placed yourself in a position where you need Atonement. You have done something loveless, having chosen without love. This is precisely the situation for which the Atonement was offered. The need for the remedy inspired its establishment. As long as you recognize only the need for the remedy, you will remain fearful. However, as soon as you accept the remedy, you have abolished the fear. This is how true healing occurs. Everyone experiences fear, yet it would take very little right thinking to recognize why fear occurs. If you appreciate the real power of the mind, and no one remains fully aware of it all the time. However, if you hope to spare yourself from fear, there are some things you must realize and realize fully. The mind is very powerful and never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating. It is hard to recognize that the thought and belief combine into a power surge that can literally move mountains. It appears at first glance that to believe such power about yourself is arrogant, but that is not the real reason you do not believe it. You prefer to believe that your thoughts cannot exert real influence because you are actually afraid of them. This may allay awareness of the guilt, but at the cost of perceiving the mind is impotent. If you believe that what you think is ineffectual, you may cease to be afraid of it, but you are hardly likely to respect it. There are no idle thoughts. All thinking produces form at some level. And from the workbook, lesson number 13, a meaningless world engenders fear. Today's idea is really another form of the preceding one, except that it is more specific as to the emotion aroused. Actually, a meaningless world is impossible. Nothing without meaning exists. However, it does not follow that you will not think you perceive something that has no meaning. On the contrary, you will be particularly likely to think you do perceive it. Recognition of meaninglessness arouses intense anxiety in all the separated ones. He represents a situation in which God and the ego, quote, challenge each other as to whose meaning is to be written in the empty space that meaninglessness provides. The ego rushes infrantically to establish its own ideas there, fearful that the void may otherwise be used to demonstrate its own impotence and unreality. And on this alone, it is correct. It is essential, therefore, that you learn to recognize the meaningless and accept it without fear. If you are fearful, it is certain that you will endow the world with attributes that it does not possess and crowded with images that do not exist. To the ego, illusions are safety devices as they must also be to you who equate yourself with the ego. The exercises for today, which should be done about three or four times for not more than a minute or so at most each time, are to be practiced in a somewhat different way from the preceding ones. With eyes closed, repeat today's idea to yourself. Then open your eyes and look about you slowly saying, I am looking in a meaningless world. Repeat this statement to yourself as you look about. Then close your eyes and conclude with a meaningless world and gender's fear because I think I am in competition with God. You may find it difficult to avoid resistance in one form or another to this concluding statement. Whatever form such resistance may take, remind yourself that you are really afraid of such a thought because of the quote, vengeance of the quote, enemy. You are not expected to believe the statement at this point and will probably dismiss it as preposterous. Note carefully, however, any signs of overt or covert fear which it may arouse. This is our first attempt at stating an explicit cause and effect relationship of a kind which you are very inexperienced in recognizing. Do not dwell on the concluding statement and try not even to think of it except during the practice periods. That will suffice at present. A meaningless world and gender's fear. So today Jesus is turned cause and effect back around in a right-thinking manner. And instead of the false declaration that the world engenders fear in the mind, it's really focusing on the idea that the fear that is engendered is coming from the thoughts that are held to be real and dear in the mind. And so we have this first statement of cause and effect, cause being mind and world being effect. Cause being mind and emotion being effect. When he brings in the idea that a meaningless world engenders fear because I think I am in competition with God. And so we see from our reading in the text that the mind that is sleeping is actually afraid of thoughts. It's afraid of the power of the mind. It's afraid of the idea that belief and thought combine in a way that is like a power search that is the power to literally move mountains. It's afraid of the power of the mind because of the belief that it can miscreate, that it can use the power of the mind in a destructive way. And holding on to a meaningless belief system of the ego, holding on to meaningless thoughts, and holding on to the perception of a meaningless world, all are indicators of the idea that I think I am in competition with God. It's an amazing cause effect idea that Jesus says you may find it difficult to avoid resistance to this concluding statement. This is like the atomic bomb of metaphysics, the metaphysics of cause and effect that were covered over by an entire world of linear time to guard against the intense fear of this thought. And yet as we recall our reading about fear in the text, we are given an idea of how this fear seemed to arise and how the fear cannot be controlled by Jesus, but he can give us the conditions in which the fear seemed to arise. And having given us these conditions, he can help us to make another choice. And that choice is always at the mind level. It's not at the behavioral level. It's not at the symptom level. This choice is not going to come about trying to change the world or thinking something would be better if it were different in form. We must actually be willing to be healed and give over the belief in these so-called choices in form to Jesus. Say, please direct me at the mind level. I am willing to heal. And this also reminds me of our instructions about level confusion that we receive from the text reading today. That Jesus must wait as long as we raise body thoughts to the level of mind. What does that mean? As long as we believe that bodies are causative, that people cause things, that events and images cause things, then we are raising body thoughts to the level of mind and preventing ourselves from being guided by Jesus and having the atonement accepted in our mind. We cannot believe that these images, the effects of the ego are causative. If the ego is a puff of nothing, how can its images that it generated be causative? Think about this backwards causation as we were growing up as children. You make me mad. You hurt my feelings. You are the reason I am upset. It's all impossible. The world of images cannot make us feel anyway. And this has been demonstrated by the eastern yogis who meditate, train their mind, transcending all concepts, hot and cold, all apparent needs for protection of the body simply by sinking deep inward into the mind and coming into that stillness which is invulnerable, which transcends the belief in being cold, transcends the belief in the body being harmed. So we are told of this amazing idea in the text that mind is the only causative area and we are not to raise body thoughts to the level of mind. Because when we raise body thoughts to the level of mind or give them causation, then we think we are in competition with God. How is this so? God did not create bodies. God creates in spirit. God creates in eternal love. And if we give autonomy to bodies, we give causation to bodies, we make them something in our mind that is real. We have first said no to spirit, said no to the awareness that we are spirit. And then we think that something outside in the world of linear time and form, images, constructs is causative. So today we go beyond fear, all fear by recognizing that mind cannot create beyond itself. And if there is any attempt to believe the opposite of that, to believe the error, we must remind ourselves throughout the day a meaningless world engenders fear.