If the earth is veiled in darkness, have no fear.
Whatever is dark do not consider permanent.

 

3. The feeling of fear is unbreakably connected with the notion of Time: man feels fear from the moment he descends to the denser layers of the earthly dimension and the cosmic time-less acquires the shape of earthly linear time for him.

Then, on the one hand, man lives in linear time, sees the row of candles and realises the notion of time according to his emotional condition (when he is happy time runs fast, when he is unhappy – throughout the ordeal – time goes by slowly, the darkness seems permanent) or according to the stage of his earthly course as well (when he is young, when the days of his future stand before him / like a row of little lighted candles - / golden, warm, and vibrant little candles, time seems plentiful, and when the biggest part of the earthly life has gone, when his time is past and fading, time seems short): 

The days gone by remain behind us, a pitiful line of burnt-out candles; (…) how quickly the dark line grows longer how quickly the burnt-out candles multiply. ………………….. And even so the time when he was young seems like yesterday. How brief a span, how brief a span.

On the other hand, the soul of incarnated man lives in the only reality, which is the timeless in space-time, a feeling he also retains during his whole lifetime.

Half past twelve. How the time has passed. Half past twelve. How the years have passed.

Often, man's inability to coalesce Time, which is endless, with the rhythmical pace he must follow during his incarnation, makes him feel he has wasted the time of the earthly contract, for instance like the old man, who

… broods on the way that Intellect had duped him: and how he'd always trusted – how foolish! – the liar that used to say; "Tomorrow. You have lots of time."

The human mind does not conceive time in its correct dimensions and distorts it by projecting attempered dimensions in a limited time-space instant. The more consciousness grows, man can expand the perception of time-space, and then he can oversee what the earthly man is not capable of understanding, because the mind, like the senses, functions within certain natural limits, beyond which, for it, there is only void.

As long as man counts exclusively on the Intellect, he is condemned to live in Fear – material time –, separated from his self, sometimes living in yesterday and at others in tomorrow.

How long will my mind remain in this decay

Man lives united with (his) Self when he lives in the present - besides, men know the actual events. The moment is the absence of a specific timetable and must be experienced self-sufficiently. Fear is wiped out only when man becomes conscious of the fact that the quintessence of life, the concentration of his whole existence is the Now and learns to live every moment as if it were eternity.

Fear is the law of Matter, its inner existence, the power that preserves it. Basic characteristics of matter are contraction, cooling and immobilization. In the spiritual plane, in the consciousness, these characteristics are manifested as Fear, meaning the feeling, which contracts, immobilizes and freezes man’s every action:

Our efforts are those of the ill-fortuned, our efforts are like those of the Trojans. We achieve a little; we somewhat gain confidence; and we begin to have courage and high hopes. But something always comes up and stops us. (…) But when the great crisis comes, our boldness and our resolution vanish. Upset is our soul, paralyzed and we scramble all around the walls seeking to save ourselves by fleeing.

The trap of fear carries us away from the truth of our spiritual existence and pushes us deeper into the delusion of earthly-material life. Our efforts are those of the ill-fortuned, because, usually, in fear and with suspicion, we fight to change the tides of fortune, we try to look out for the future dangers.

Unrest and fear for the future colour the present with colours that do not exist in it and distort it. He, who wears himself out planning the future, is used to transferring the essence of happiness to the future, so that even if it materializes the way he envisages it, when it becomes the present, he will postpone his happiness to a next future. Some other time, anew, he pins himself to "ideal" situations - according to his own judgment - which do not exist in his life now, and in that way the present slips and passes without him bestowing the proper value it is worthy of.

In this life there is no future – destiny has sudden twists and turns – so, whoever wears himself out planning the future, toils in vain. We accumulate possessions – the wealth, the exceptional, the superfluous wealth – with greed, because insecurity completely possesses us, making the soul atrophy and the Temple of God remain empty.

When Mithridates, glorious and mighty / lord of great cities, / possessor of powerful armies and fleets, / on his way to Sinopi for new conquests he asked to learn from an oracle how much more future wealth / he will acquire, how many more powers, the oracle answered:

But the king ought to be content, in my opinion, with what he has. Any more would expose him to dangers. Remember to tell him that, officer: In god's name, let him be content with so much that he has. Destiny has sudden twists and turns.

He, who is in constant contact with the primary Source, has no need to stock-pile or to look out for the future. He knows within himself that immediate Providence will present before him, whatever he needs, whenever he needs it. Besides, each one of us has exactly what he needs in order to successfully complete the specific task we have undertaken on Earth, so that we neither need to be concerned about having more, nor become anxious about having less.

To make my arduous life secure I, in the Bank of the Future very few exchanges will make.

4. The work of the gods, or in other words, of our higher Self, consists of guiding us in our course towards His own image, immortality. Since we were created in the image of Logos*, we are destined, in this life, to manifest and experience the qualities of our souls: the imperishable and the timeless. Goddess Demeter and goddess Thetis initiate good work, to make Achilles and Dimofon immortal. 

(*Logos is the ancient and modern Greek word for "the Word" mentioned in the New Testament.)

The work of gods is interrupted by us, the hasty and inexperienced creatures of the moment. In the palaces of Eleusis and Fthia Demeter and Thetis initiate good work amidst high flames and thick smoke.

Fear, however, makes us intervene and interrupt that work of gods. As hasty and inexperienced creatures of the moment, we easily lose touch with our self and we act self-destructively. And whilst the mortal side of our self has by itself pursued immortality, all of a sudden it becomes scared and interrupts the procedure. This is how earthly man always functions …

… But always Metanira rushes from the halls of the king, disheveled and terrified, and always Peleus is fearful and intervenes.

Sometimes in life certain emotions are so strong, that they manage to enforce their vibration and make our whole existence attune to them. "My son, Dimofon, the stranger lets you perish in fire and me go deep in sorrow!" Metanira burst out. Then, we rush disheveled and terrified, with a troubled mind and terrified eyes and we interrupt our course towards the Union. Demeter answered her: "You people are unwise. You foresee neither the future good nor evil. And you, out of your irrationality, suffered incurable harm. Immortal, who would remain eternally young, I would have made your beloved son and I would have provided him with everlasting worship. Now, there is no other way for him to avoid death."

In that way, the example of Thetis and her Unfaithfulness represents many people, who interrupt the holy procedure out of Fear and afterwards they ask themselves why the divine prophecy has not been fulfilled.

At the nuptial banquet of Thetis and Peleus Apollo rose from the sumptuous marriage table, and named the newly-weds fortunate for the offspring to come from their union. He said; No sickness shall ever touch him and he shall have a long life.- Having said that, Thetis greatly rejoiced, because the words of Apollo who knew of prophecies seemed like a guarantee for her child. […] But one day old men arrived with news, and they spoke of  the slaying of Achilles at Troy. And Thetis tore off her purple garments, […] And in her grief she recalled the past; and asked what the wise Apollo was doing, where was the poet wandering, who speaks so divinely at feasts, where was the prophet roaming when they were slaying her son in the prime of his youth. And the old men answered her that Apollo himself had gone down to Troy, and with the Trojans he had slain Achilles.

The soul is that element of our Self where the time-less and the non-space reside, hence it is expected that through the soul's inner processing, man is able to investigate these planes and receive the guidance he needs each time. Man is such a unity of elements, which enables him to move in all planes, and being such a creature, each time he must use the equivalent element, which "unites" him with some plane of the Universe. In that way the soul, not the logic or the senses, is the one that functions as a channel so that man "finds" himself in the dimension of the time-less and the non-space, where he will get in touch with the equivalent dimension of His Self. In other words, this is said by believers: "prayer connects us with God".

And our soul is free to deliver messages to us. What happened to Thetis happens unfortunately to people who very often silence their soul and while, in that way, they make themselves invalid, they consider they have become "autonomous" and "masters of themselves". The worst thing is that while they themselves choose to rely exclusively upon the material side of their existence, they build their life on it and from then on they blame God because, they say, He betrayed them! And they do not realise that God is the Truth and the Truth can be none other than the Truth and nothing different. That also is the meaning of faith: to attribute to God all that belongs to Him.

All that god Apollo had prophesied for Achilles was the truth, because the Universe anticipates our return to Paradise. Goddess Thetis, however, who undertook to make her son Achilles immortal, interrupted her own work, by submitting to the fear of her mortal husband Peleus. Watching his son sinking in the water, the father was fearful and intervened, believing, all the more so, that he "saved him". Besides, the same happened with Metanira: while in the first place she herself had asked Demeter to make her son Dimofon immortal, she interrupted the process, out of fear, when she suddenly saw the goddess holding her child over the fire.

Peleus and Metanira tried to avoid the certain danger that frightfully threatened them, but they ended up with the opposite result: interrupting the good work the gods had initiated. In reality, the danger not only was not certain, but was non-existent; because what they saw was not what really existed. They were misled and acted in hot blood out of their partial perception of the meaning of the circumstance, in other words, out of lack of trust in the divine Plan.

Fear is not a good counsellor; on the contrary, it charges us with an accumulation of mistakes, which finally lead more certainly to the result which we wish to avoid.

With the progress of experiences man learns to apply a difficult but liberating inner discipline: when he is under the influence of a specific emotion, he does not try to enforce it logically, but he simply lets it exist without connecting it with rational thoughts. This isolates the emotion and keeps it within the dimensions it really has. If we fall into connecting the emotion with rational reasoning, then we consolidate it on the one hand, and on the other we maintain the wrong association of ideas, which distort reality. By learning to discipline the mind, we shall be able to suspend every action and decision and connect with our Self, each time the path is not clear.

5. Whoever has learned to tune in to the highest-divine frequency, realizes that there comes a time when the illusion scatters – even the most convincing one – in which fear has misled him innumerable times and passes by, somehow or other, following determinism. Evil is defined as the absence of positive properties and does not have a self-existent thisness nor entity. The quality of Good always prevails and is never threatened by Evil, which is usually none other than the negative manifestation of the positive quality: just like the black colour which is actually the absence of every quality of light – while the white is the highest quality as the synthesis of all the manifestations of light.

So, Fear is an emotion, which ought to be effaced from our hearts. Fear is a situation acquired by man and is exactly what is called the Fall in the Old Scripture, since it is based only on the creation of impressions and not on real causes. Inferior creatures – the serpent in the myth – create illusions, plunge people in mental and imaginary illusions, which in their turn lead to feelings of fear. Then man experiences a vibrational, energy "fall", which he inevitably "pays for" with pains and grief – since it constitutes a loss of certain positive-divine qualities of ours, and every loss is painful. God supplies him with Faith, the Serpent deceives him with fear.

Elementals are on the look out to demolish anything beautiful one builds with love and faith, because they envy the blessing of the divine Seal, which they are not in a position to acquire. The feeling of fear they managed to create in the son of the Sun, the "bright" Phaeton, when he, in his desire to meet the Light, tried to drive his father's chariot, resulted in him being killed.

Like Light in matter, like transparent gold is precious amber. – When a hideous and maniacal force, envying Phaeton, hurled him from the top of heavens.

Trust in the Plan of God shields us with higher and higher energies and protects us from our self, who is the only one that can harm us. The knowledge and awareness of the Course of God's Universe are the shields of the mind. Faith is the unique antidote against the poison of the snake.

Do not fear the Lestrygonians and the Cyclopes, and the angry Poseidon, you will never find such things on your way, if your thought remains high, if a fine emotion touches your spirit and your body. You will never encounter the Lestrygonians and the Cyclopes, and the fierce Poseidon, if you do not carry them within your soul, if your soul does not set them up in front of you.

The ground of fear is conducive to the development of the feeling of impatience as well. We rush the journey, as a result of our wrong perception of Time and react with premature measures. What appears to be is not always what actually exists. And this is an extra reason for not rushing to conclusions because whatever seems to converge may be very far away, while whatever seems to diverge may be very close.

Perhaps the time hasn't come yet. Let's not hurry; haste is a dangerous thing. Premature measures lead to repentance.

When we become conscious of the multi-faceted nature of time, we will become sure that living and experiencing has a one-track course only externally, on the surface. The motion of time in the direction that we perceive, is partial, that is why the results of a judgment according to this dimension must also be limited.  Consequently, we must be able to wait, not with the usual meaning of the word, but the more substantial one: the future in reality is the expanded present, and therefore time does not move in one direction but with the pattern in which a wave expands in water, i.e. in all directions circularly around one starting point, which is the present.

The sequence of the facts may at first seem accidental, but in reality it is about one movement progressively according to the flow of the expansion of the time "wave", i.e. from the centre to the outside. This movement of the conscience makes it all the more capable of understanding that, which a little while before it regarded as inexplicable, because of the limited vision due to the circumstances.

The movement of time is regulated uniformly towards life, in limited space and our course seems to be leading only in the direction of the future. Consciousness, though, is not subject to limitations, like the sea that does not have a direction. The return to the past, just like the transfer to the future, is a shift simply to the periphery of the wave, temporary, nevertheless, and with a limited conscience, since the centre always remains "active" and immovable.

The hours fly like instants, like rushing horses across a flat plain, (…)

Every time man retreats from fear, he connects in a one-sided way, i.e. only with what he is scared of, and this one-sided connection deprives him of a sensational reality. On the contrary, when he connects with the centre of his existence, which experiences moments of an eternal present, he lets time quickly fly ahead, condenses the future and is automatically relieved of any painful connection.

6. Fear keeps us transfixed to the past. We carry the displeasing thoughts and images of the past to the present, we hold the echo of our negative experiences alive, instead of simply holding the extract of every experience as an outcome of knowledge within ourselves. The truth, however, is that our life, goes ahead each moment, new and untouched by the past, unless we wish to colour it with its shadow.  

Because the past is the only period of our life that we know, it seems natural and obvious to occupy ourselves with it, returning mainly to its negative moments. The constant intellectual preoccupation with the past may push towards its repetition, and this happens because the Universe is a huge photocopier: the human mind is the one that moves the evolution of things, and the predetermined is none other than the sequence on the way one chooses. Hence, as long as we continue to reproduce horrifying memories and images from abominable times within ourselves, we charge our aura negatively, creating the prerequisites for a repetition of them. 

Whenever, therefore, we are taken over by bothersome thoughts / of our wayward life, we must replace them immediately with some other thought or activity and postpone their conscious processing, only for when and if we feel we have returned to the balanced state of inner harmony and tranquility.

And I went out onto the balcony in a melancholic mood -  I went out to change thoughts by seeing at least a little of the beloved city, a little of what was going on in the street and in the shops.

The past could teach us, because mistakes are always repeated and cyclical, yet we face a situation each time as if it were for the first time. Not only does "History repeats itself", but also in our personal life, we constantly trace recurring circles, we continually confront the same problems until we find the absolute light we seek.    

This will be done now, and then that; and later on, in a year or two (as I reckon), such will be the actions, such will be the ways. (…) - And then he will do this, the other will do that; and in time the others will do their own.  And we shall start all over again.

When we observe that a problem follows us in our life, reappearing in many sectors, this certainly does not mean that someone wishes to make us suffer, or that the Universe functions with feelings of sadism. On the contrary indeed: not solving it when it first appeared, showed that we were not able and ready yet, so, the "circumstances", the external sheath of the problem, are modified, in order to retry under new conditions which may facilitate us more. At the same time, the repeated appearance of the same problem under different patterns makes us capable of recognizing it, even if it is elaborately disguised and enables us to become familiar with it. Familiarization is always the first step that fear, which "freezes" every reaction of the human being, be distanced.

Evolution is an especially slow procedure; that is why, even for the man who is conscious of his course and the necessity of repetitions, it is inevitable that he will sometimes feel tired:

I attend to my work and love it. But the slow pace of the composing discourages me today.

And while we often feel that we move around the concentric circles which, after all, we ourselves design, most of the time we do not see that the solution we seek is already in front of us and, in fact, has been put into practice many times and under more difficult circumstances. We are a bit reminiscent of the man who was cured of a vision impairment and every now and then its recollection makes him "unable to see". Of course, such a psychological phenomenon is not rare or curious; time is simply needed in order for the soul to be convinced that it has already found a way out. By repeating the exercise it assures itself that it knows the solution. Studying for school exams is also based on this very simple natural law, according to earthly analogy; we solve and resolve the same mathematical exercise until the certainty that we have understood is instilled within ourselves, and we can automatically pull out the solution's mechanism, not only for the same exercise but for a category of similar ones. The solution is found the first time; the continuation is simply a process of learning by repetition.

A great deal of time is needed in order to understand at a deeper level and put into practice, that which in the beginning seems obvious or simple; many exercises are needed for Love to be conquered.

It is suffice to imagine a man who is bound by his instincts – so basically he functions through the second centre – and suddenly life puts him in a port new for his eyes it brings him before an experience of real love; then one of his higher energy centres starts to radiate. Of course, the stimulation of a centre by some specific experience is not enough to speak of a conscious activation of this centre. This kind of activation needs to be repeated many times in order for man to be able to finalize the conscious functioning, with his self-earned right to be a citizen of the city of ideas, something which often requires many life cycles with the equivalent experiences.

When the consciousness is awakened and man acquires consciousness of his fate, he fervently desires to walk with the Light and the ascension of the very high stairway of Poetry. While, indeed, he becomes conscious of the many things he has to do outside, he tries to go beyond the limits of the earthly instant. He forgets that time does not exist and what we, people, call "sooner" or "later" has no substantial meaning, that time is eternity and the way is always the union with God. He forgets, as well, how long this way is and that he must not expect from his self to embrace this knowledge so soon and painlessly. In that way, instead of wishing for the road to be long, it is possible to fall into the pitfall of impatience and discouragement, situations which delay him even more and steal his joy.

The disciple confesses to his Master: 

To Theocritus one day the young poet Eumenes was complaining; "I've been writing for two years now and I have done only one idyll. It is my only complete work. Alas, it's high, I see it, very high the stairway of Poetry; and from the first step, the one where here I stand, poor me, I shall never ascend."

Man's life begins under particular specifications, which he can however, modify, according to his will and his developmental level. This modification does not usually refute the stages which man must go through in the particular incarnation, but he can condense them as much as possible and go on to new phases, which had not been foreseen for him from the beginning. This, nevertheless, involves the following dangers: the immoderate ambition, which is being fed and enforced the more man experiences his "successes", and the insufficient "experiencing" of the lessons.

Both of them can destroy any immature personality, no matter how pure and guileless the first intentions were. In order to be gained, knowledge demands tireless experience of repetitions, the number of which is wiser to be decided by the Masters and not the disciples, the coaches and not the athletes, universal Providence and not the man.

Each time our impatience – or, to put it another way, our sincere desire – urges us to want to go on deeper into the path of Initiation, let us consider that long strides do not necessarily mean that someone will reach the target sooner; on the contrary, rushed steps lead more surely to loss. Only he who finds the way little by little, / manages to reach the last line, having completely understood the deeper meaning of "more haste, less speed".

As long as evolution progresses, man escapes from any kind of attachments on a material level, something he cannot do when and for however long he is at lower levels. This sense of trust in immediate Providence can become conscious only when man has entered the path, and this constitutes a determinant feature of this phase. Consequently, as long as he materializes this trust by executing, even the most painful exercises, without complaining, despite the many hardships he finds on the way, he consolidates his course and his choice on the path of divine Initiation.