Our motivating emotions: love and fear

I share with all this morning a passage from the book "Conversations with God" by Neale Donald Walsch. This book has been a tremendous reading and leads to direct experience of God, if that is what one is looking for. Below is an exerpt I was reading this morning as God communicates:

All human actions are motivated at their deepest level by one of two emotions—fear or love. In truth there are only two emotions—only two words in the language of the soul. These are the opposite ends of the great polarity which I created when I produced the universe, and your world, as you know it today.

These are the two points—the Alpha and the Omega—which allow the system you call “relativity” to be. Without these two points, without these two ideas about things, no other idea could exist.

Every human thought, and every human action, is based in either love or fear. There is no other human motivation, and all other ideas are but derivatives of these two, They are simply different versions—different twists on the same theme (15-16).

Think on this deeply and you will see that it is true. This is what I have called the Sponsoring Thought. It is either a thought of love or fear. This is the thought behind the thought behind the thought. It is the first thought. It is prime force. It is the raw energy that drives the engine of human experience.

And here is how human behavior produces repeat experience after repeat experience: it is why humans love, then destroy, then love again: always there is the swing from one emotion to the other. Love sponsors fear sponsors love sponsors fear…

…And the reason is found in the first lie—the lie which you hold as the truth about God—that God cannot be trusted; that God’s love cannot be depended upon; that God’s acceptance of you is conditional; that the ultimate outcome is thus in doubt. For if you cannot depend on God’s love to always be there, on whose love can you depend? If God retreats and withdraws when you do not perform properly, will not mere mortals also?

…And so it is that in the moment you pledge your highest love, you greet your greatest fear. For the first thing you worry about after saying “I love you” is always whether you’ll hear it back. And if you hear it back, then you begin immediately to worry that the love you have just found, you will lose. And so all action becomes a reaction—defense against loss—even as you seek to defend yourself against the loss of God.

Yet if you knew Who You Are—that you are the most magnificent, the most remarkable, the most splendid being God has ever created—you would never fear. For who could reject such wondrous magnificence? Not even God could find fault in such a being.

But you do not know Who You Are, and you think you are a great deal less. And where did you get the idea of how much less than magnificent you are? From the only people whose word you would take on everything. From your mother and your father.

These are the people who love you the most. Why would they lie to you? Yet have they not told you that you are too much of this, and not enough of that? Have they not reminded you that you to be seen and not heard? Have they not scolded you in some of moments of your greatest exuberance? And, did they not encourage you to set aside some of your wildest imagining?
These are the messages you’ve received, and though they do not meet the criteria, and are thus not messages from God, they might as well have been, for they have come from the gods of your universe surely enough.

It was your parents who taught you that love is conditional—you have felt their conditions many times—and that is the experience you take into your own love relationships.

It is also the experience you bring to Me.

From this experience you draw conclusions about Me. Within this framework you speak your truth. “God is a loving God,” you say, “but if you break His commandments, He will punish you with eternal banishment and everlasting damnation.”

For have you not experienced the banishment of your own parents? Do you not know the pain of their damnation? How, then could you imagine it to be any different with Me?
You have forgotten what it was like to be loved without condition. You do not remember the experience of the love of God. And so you try to imagine what God’s love must be like, based on what you see of love in the world.

You have projected the role of “parent” onto God, and have thus come up with a God Who judges and rewards or punishes, based on how good He feels about what you’ve been up to. But this is a simplistic view of God, based on your mythology. It has nothing to do with Who I Am (17-18).

Having thus created an entire thought system about God based on human experience rather than spiritual truths, you then create an entire reality around love. It is a fear-based reality, rooted in the idea of a fearful vengeful God. Its Sponsoring Thought is wrong, but to deny that thought would be to disrupt your whole theology. And thought would be to disrupt your whole theology. And though the new theology which would replace it would truly be your salvation, you cannot accept it, because the idea of a God Who is not to be feared, Who will not judge, and Who has no cause to punish is simply too magnificent to be embraced within even your grandest notion of Who and What God is.

This fear-based love reality dominates your experience of love; indeed, actually creates it. For not only do you see yourself receiving love which is conditional, you also watch yourself giving it in the same way. And even while you withhold aned retreat and set your conditions, a part of you knows this is not what love really is. Still, you seem powerless to change the way you dispense it. You’ve learned the hard way, you tell yourself, and you’ll be damned if you’re going to leave yourself vulnerable again. Yet the truth is, you’ll be damned if you don’t (18).

Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms.
Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals.

Fear wraps our bodies in clothing, love allows us to stand naked. Fear clings to and clutches all that we have, love gives all that we have away. Fear holds close, love holds deare. Fear grasps, love lets go. Fear rankles, love soothes. Fear attacks, love amends.

Every human thought, word, or deed is based in one emotion or the other. You have no choice about this, because there is nothing else from which to choose. But you have free choice about which of these to select (19).

There are no “shoulds” or "shouldn’ts” in God’s world. Do what you want to do. Do what reflects you, what re-presents you as a grander version of your Self. If you want to feel bad, feel bad (38).

But judge not, and neither condemn, for you know not why a thing occurs, nor to what end.

And remember you this: that which you condemn will condemn you, and that which you judge, you will one day become.

Seek rather to change those things—or support others who are changing those things—which no longer reflect your highest sense of Who You Are.

Yet, bless all—for all is the creation of God, through life living and that is the highest creation (38).