Ham on Spiritual Liberty - Replace fear with love

[David G. Schlundt, Ph.D.]

January 19, 1997

Ham: Greetings, children, and my friends, I am Ham and I thank you all
for once again gathering this evening.  Tonight, our lesson is about
spiritual liberty.  Spiritual liberty is part of the experience of
growing up in the spiritual awareness that has been called the Kingdom
of Heaven.  Spiritual liberty refers to your ability to make free
decisions. Spiritual liberty is referring to the state of being when
your not subjected to your own patterns of behavior, your own
reactions. No longer are you chained to old reaction patterns to
situations. Suddenly you find yourself with the ability to change your
reactions, and this is freedom.

The freedom to live to your fullest potential involves first breaking
the bonds of the past.  Humans are held in slavery to their own
emotions and fears.  It is not life or circumstances or the weather
that gets you down and holds you there, it is your inability to change
your reaction patterns.  

Think for a moment of a habitual reaction pattern that harms you in
some way and think what it would be like to be free of the fear that
goes into generating this cycle.  Freedom from fear is truly spiritual
freedom because it is not so much the circumstances that keep you in
bondage, as your fear. It is fear that prevents you from taking the
action or the decision that is necessary to break the pattern.  Fear
immobilizes you and keeps you bound in a never ending chain of cause
and effect.  

Spiritual progress is made up largely of the tasks of overcoming
fears, one after another.  Once the fear is removed from the equation,
then you find yourself free to make decisions, different decisions,
and these different decisions will lead you away from fear.  


The only way to overcome fear is with love.  Love is the only thing
that replaces fear in the ascender's experience.  If you don't replace
fear with love, you will end up by simply replacing fear by fear.  You
may have experienced some of this already in your lives, but the only
way to move forward in the spirit is to allow your Father to take your
fears and replace those with love.  

Think for a moment, are you afraid of yourselves in some way?  Are you
afraid that you will do something wrong in your life, or that you
won't be able to do something you must do?  Think again, that the
Father's love surrounds you, and you are like a child.  What real harm
can you possibly do?  You see, you must learn to lighten up about
yourselves, and think of yourselves as a child playing in the world
and if you mess up, what difference can it possibly make? The Father
will not love you any less, the world will not fall in on you.  You
will have another chance to do whatever it is. You all take yourselves
too seriously, and so in a way you fear yourselves because you are
afraid of what you might do or not do. 

Have you ever watched a small child playing, and how very seriously
they take it and if their blocks fall over, they just act like it is
the end of the world?  But, you with the wisdom of years, look on this
and smile and comfort the child and tell them that it is not serious,
that it is alright, that no real harm was done.  This is how the
Father sees his children. He wants you to try, but he doesn't want you
to be crushed emotionally if your sand castles fall over.  

When you lived as long as I have, you can look back on creatures your
age and smile at their tremendous self-importance over their little
creations. You will look back on this time and smile at yourselves
about how serious it all was and about how important it all seemed.  

So, I want you to just relax, relax into the Father's arms. Take each
day, and each circumstance, one at a time, and consciously think about
removing the fear and relying on him instead.  Now there are some
people who cling to their fear, but you are not one. You are spiritual
ascender's and it is your desire to let go of your fear, where ever
you find it in your lives because when you live a life without fear,
then anything is possible.  

Are there any questions at this time?

Q: I agree with what you say for the most part, but I kind of find
what you say about our jobs and our lives patronizing. You sound like
you have never lived with a boss who will not give you a second
chance. There are a lot of people who live just one paycheck away from
living in a box.  I think some of our fears are justified because of
what we face each day. It doesn't seem to me like God is whispering in
your ear, do it this way and you won't get downsized.  You sound like
someone who has never been downsized.

Ham: Acknowledged. That is all.

Q: Could you be more specific about the process of replacing fear with
love, could you give us an example of how that might work in a
particular situation perhaps.

Ham: Yes. Love is the most potent force in the universe. There is
nothing that can defeat love. Fear can destroy and it can destroy the
physical, but love creates in the spiritual. It was the fear of men
that caused them to destroy the physical body of Jesus, but he met
their fear with love and the destruction of his body was the beginning
of his being as true sovereign creator of the Universe.  Their fear
did nothing, changed nothing, and likewise, your fears can do nothing
and change nothing. 

Q: I don't know, I was afraid when I had high blood pressure that I
might get a stroke so I started exercising. I kind of had to have that
fear of a bad consequence to motivate me.

Ham: Fear is not your standing motivation.

Q: No, not now.

Ham: Fear is never a sustaining motivation.

Q: I don't know, my fear of getting fat is a pretty sustaining
motivation. I don't think you have reckoned with my fear of fat.

Q: Just thinking about her remarks, since I have been meditating and
pretty tapped into God, the worse times in my life, the most difficult
times when fear should have been the most intense, I literally
experienced no fear. Is that the way it is supposed to be.

Ham: Yes

Q: There were times when I had to make contact because I knew there
were no options. Maybe that is the difference?

Q: A friend of mine, the other day, his wife's ex-husband came over to
his house drunk and corned him so he fought with him and beat him up
and took care of it that way. Since then, there has been a change in
the ex-husband's attitude, it seems to have solve the problem. There
is something troubling about all of this, and I wish you would comment
on it?  I don't think he could have talked this guy out of that, I
don't know. Do you understand my question, Ham?

Ham: The truth is different from what you are hearing, of course.  One
violent encounter doesn't solve complicated personal relationships. 
You of all people know this.

Q: I couldn't see that my friend had any choice in the matter?

Ham: There is always a choice.

Q: You are not saying that our blocks will not get knocked over, or
that our sand castles will not get washed away, or our cars will not
get repossessed, or that we will not lose our jobs or end up in jail.
You are trying to tell us that we don't have to feel afraid and in
feeling afraid stay locked into self-defeating behavior patterns?

Ham: Correct.

Q: It also helps to see that these bad things that happen may be bad
in the short-term but are not that bad when viewed from the long
perspective, from the perspective of our life time or even longer.

Ham: Correct.

Q: Can we take the example of losing your job and being afraid of the
consequence and use this to show us how we replace fear with love?

Ham: This is something that must be experience to be understood and it
is not  something that lends itself to examples like this because
inner transformation changes your entire outlook and allows you to see
opportunity in apparent failure.  So instead of being crushed and
imobilized by fear, one can thank the employer for allowing him a new
opportunity in the world. You see it is a different way of seeing the
world.

Q: So it is all about faith?

Ham: Yes.

Q: I believe you call that every could has a silver lining. I usually
do not like it when people think like that. "I'm so glad I broke my
ankle".

Q: I don't have fears so much, I am having a problem in a
relationship, and fear that if I do not hold on tightly I might lose
that person. I am getting the idea that if I turn the fear into love,
it might not push them away, and if they do maybe it was meant to be.
I have a fear of being alone in this world so I tend to hold too
tightly.

Ham: Thank you for this honest expression from the heart.  The fear of
being alone is very deep in all people, and it can compel you to
remain in unhealthy relationships and situations. 

Q: I'm just not sure if it is just unhealthy of if there is so much
fear on both sides that need to be replaced by life. There are
different fears, and they are destructive. 

Ham: Fear always tends to be destructive.  But you need to replace
your fears about you with love about you. Not so much just desperately
loving another, but loving yourself and accepting God's love for
yourself. Security with God's love will bring you security with all
other aspects of your life including a secure, loving relationship.

Q: I understand this, but maybe I am thinking about fear differently.
It seems kinds of healthy sometimes, we tell little children to stay
out of the street because we are afraid of them getting hit. I don't
walk down dark streets alone because I don't want to get mugged. Are
you saying to just do those things, let your kids run in the streets
or walk down dark alleys alone.  Maybe I am thinking of fear in a
different way?

Ham: You are trying to find justifications for fear, but this is not
the lesson.  In order to progress spiritually, in the spiritual sense,
disregarding the material for a moment, you must gradually let go of
your fears.

Q: I think I see what you are saying.

[The rest was personal questions]

*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*
David G. Schlundt, Ph.D.               (615)322-7800
Associate Professor of Psychology      (615)343-8449  Fax
Vanderbilt University               schlundg at ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu
301 Wilson Hall
Nashville, TN  37240
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Effort does not always produce joy, but there is no happiness without intelligent effort.
The Urantia Book
Paper-48 Section-7 Para-2        Page-556 Line-7 Para-2
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