The Lexicon
Shadow and obstacles
Fear
Fear is the first shadow the traditions name, the contraction that mistakes the present for a threat and pulls the self back from its own good. In New Thought it is read as the inner block to demonstration: the consciousness that, doubting supply, locks the door it longs to open. The Course in Miracles draws the sharpest line, teaching that there are finally only two emotions, love and fear, and that fear is simply love forgotten. On Hawkins's map of consciousness it sits low and heavy, the gravity that the higher states are made to dissolve.
Yet the map never treats fear as an enemy to be conquered by force. Tolle hears it as the voice of the ego defending an imagined future; the contemplatives meet it with presence, and the New Thought teachers with faith, knowing that the same energy bound in fear is released as power once its grip is seen through. To name fear, the traditions agree, is already to begin its undoing. It is transmuted not by fighting but by turning toward love, the only thing it cannot survive.
In their words
Fear is at the bottom of all poverty; fear of others, and distrust of self which is another form of fear, and the most deadly form of all.
On the mental plane we are a law unto ourselves. If we believe in a thing, and state our faith in it, it will be so. But if we doubt or fear, we ourselves thus prevent its realization.
Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.
The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.