Xlibris

I´ve learned a lot about fear since that nearly overwhelming experience in 1993. Fear is like a disease. It infects words like Love, Life, Reality, Truth and God, then tramples, twists, distorts and beats these words beyond recognition. The true beauty of these words is lost.

Fear turns out to be teacher if you want it to. What it teaches depends entirely upon you, the fearee. Fear points you in any direction you allow it to point. Out of ignorance, I pointed myself in the wrong direction and went there. Upon reaching the dead end, the choices I had became obvious. I chose to live.

With that decision, I delivered a mortal blow to fear. That´s when fear became my teacher rather than a scoundrel that lay waste to my life. The more I listened to fear, the more I learned. The more I learned, the more gifts fear dumped in my lap. That´s what happens when you take off the mask and say, "Goodbye fear; hello love!" So the catalyst for the pursuit of my Self, or Truth, turned out to be emotional pain. And I certainly don´t claim any uniqueness to the quality or degree of my pain, because when it´s dark, it´s dark, no matter the cloud formations. The good news is, there´s light, not at the end of the tunnel, but behind the mask of fear. We can call it a tunnel if we want, but what we´re really dealing with is, what I call, the "mask of love."

Fear turned out to be a mask for something I feared even more. Love. Now that was really scary. Heaven forbid I open myself to you. Why? Because if you knew about me what I knew about me, you´d run away. Hell, I was running, so why not you too? Then we could run away from me together! That´s one of the terrible things about fear when it has shame as its foundation. The shame tells you how bad you are. But fear comes to rescue with the mask, allowing you to hide. But behind this mask are the very answers we seek, the solution for every problem we think we have, the biggest one being the ability to love. To love not only others, but most importantly, ourselves. I learned I had to take the mask off to get to those answers. And I couldn´t do that as long as I was afraid to take it off. Fear can get you coming and going.

So Target Joy is the story about my flight to the Face of Truth, or Love, or God if you will. I don´t fly to my destination in a straight line. Ha. I wish. No, I ride an emotional rocket that flies about as straight as a moth. Fortunately the moth eventually reaches the light of its destination, however many twists and turns and doubts are involved.

I had no map to guide me on this journey. I only had my target, joy, along with a determination to reach it and a willingness to do what it took to get there. I had no warnings concerning the gut-wrenching dives I took toward self-destruction or the ecstatic breakthroughs that followed. In short, I didn´t follow any printed how-to manual written for people in my predicament.

I tell this story, as I experienced it, through the window of a metaphor. I make no attempt to convince you of the truth of the message. I don´t believe this message can be preached into acceptance or sold through argument and debate. It´s a message that must be discovered, or realized.

The beliefs I now hold are so contrary to what I believed before this journey that only personal experience could have convinced me of their truth. I pray the reader can hear the music I hear today, no matter how they might come upon it. It´s the music that counts.

Target Joy is not a religious book or written to promote any religion or religious idea. It´s a story about my experience; religious ideas just happen to be involved. Some will consider this story anti-religious even though I´m not anti-religion. I´m not pro-religion either. I´m pro-Truth. If there turns out to be a conflict between Truth and a religion or religious idea, and all too often there is, Truth won´t make the necessary adjustments. It can´t, not without ceasing to be what It is. If there be a conflict, I hope the religion adjusts to Truth so it can fulfill its purpose of leading people to the Truth, not away from It, or be a substitute for It.

To discuss God and Truth isn´t, necessarily, a religious discussion. Spirit, and the spiritual realms or dimensions stand beyond and independent of any religion because spirit existed before organized religion was created by the human being. In light of my experience, the highest form of religion is the experience and expression of spirit . This requires no particular belief system to be attained. I found it necessary to suspend my beliefs in order to have the experience.

My experience did not come from an intellectual exercise or involve mental gymnastics. It came to me on Its own when I was ready. It´s a state where belief is unnecessary, because you know. Belief is then seen as a substitute for knowing; a form of mental putty we use to fill voids in our understanding.

I can´t think of a single belief I had prior to my experience that went unchallenged at some point during my journey. Did I resist these challenges? Ha! I oftentimes resisted to the point of embarrassment. But Truth does win in the end.

I did not tune this message and its music to harmonize with the beliefs of this world-religious, political or otherwise. They can´t be synchronized. Fear will never synchronize with love. Given the barbarous treatment and judgments humans still lay upon one another entering the 21st century, it seems time to put down the instruments of war with which we played the game of life. The sword of judgment is always used first. War is its natural outcome. Judgment always rises from fear.

Fear is the root cause for every inhumane act ever committed by anyone, at any time, under any flag, or in the name of any god. An almost universal belief causes us to be fearful, and fear always separates, splinters and divides. Have our past solutions worked? What does behavior on this planet reveal? Maybe we´ve used Band-Aids on a compound fracture.

If history were a phonograph record, would we hear the cause for history´s sour notes? Would we hear the skipping of the record? Would we recognize it´s stuck, stuck in a groove of divisive beliefs that keeps repeating its chronicle of fear? Do we not want to spin a sweeter tune? Can´t we go into the studio of our hearts and listen to the melody recorded for us by the Master Musician? We have to say goodbye fear, hello love, and if humanity is unwilling to dance to that music, it´s only because it values fear more than love.

We will continue to manifest conflict on our planet until we resolve the conflict in our collective hearts - a conflict between fear and love. We´ve assumed too much about ourselves and were mistaken in trusting those assumptions, and the war-torn history of the human being is a testament of just how misguided we were to follow the path of fear. Until we know the Truth instead of making it up, then assuming we know what Truth is, our walk down fear´s lane will continue. Switching paths is a matter of choice based on a reordering of values.

We can do this. I know this is so because I did. That means everyone can. I used to avoid fear like the plague. At best I gave it yellow-bellied side-glances. And I was stuck, stuck in the muck of human limitations. I became a walking miracle, a package of fear, shame and depression with two legs.

I share the problem and the solution, as I see them, in this novel. Fear is an interesting adversary. In order to say goodbye fear, hello love, you have to beat fear at its own game. And here´s the first and all-important fact concerning fear: it doesn´t exist. But to realize the truth of that statement, I had to face fear head-on. Fear was anything but non-existent at this time in my life. It turns out that fear has only a seeming existence, an existence based solely upon our belief in it. And if you want to try and convince yourself of the reality of fear, just resist it.

Fear thrives on resistance. Once born in our minds, fear is maintained through our resistance to it, through our refusing to embrace it. Instead, we run or hide from it, thinking it´ll go away.

I had to get in fear´s face and stay there, no longer avoiding what it hid from view. I then learned what fear is and is not. I learned fear cannot stand to be stared at for long because it has to reveal itself for what it really is: a mask. And a phantom mask at that. Unmask fear and you reach your target: love, or joy. Then the awesome, unnamable beauty of who you really are stands there with open arms, ready to embrace you in an eternal hug.

When I unmasked fear during my journey I wanted to turn my head from what I saw. Death seemed all-appealing to me at that time. I wanted my lights to go out and stay out, forever. That was before I broke through fear´s illusion.

But today I can say that the best in human imagination cannot fathom the awesome beauty awaiting us once we decide to open ourselves to the Truth of who we really are - and to the Truth of our relationship with each other. When we say goodbye to fear, we say goodbye to separation. When we say hello to love, we embrace our oneness of spirit.

You should know I was raised a Catholic but am no longer a practitioner. There is something beyond religion that religion can never own or monopolize; and that´s the experience I´ve referred to.

But I did learn in my religion that I had to ask when I wanted to receive; I had to knock if I wanted a door opened. I learned a lot about asking and knocking on this journey. For one, it works! But I also learned how to ask and how to knock. Asking in a whimper or knocking sheepishly on the door didn´t bring the same results as when I shouted and pounded. I had to let the gatekeeper-to-knowledge know I would not leave until he answered my questions. And I questioned him for decades, including weekends and holidays - even in my sleep.

One proviso he came back with was: I had to put aside every preconceived idea if I wanted to hear the answers I sought. That was not as easy as it sounds. Try it.

A second stipulation he laid on me was my development of a sense of humor about my situation. And I am happy to report there is such a thing as cosmic humor. I eventually learned to not only laugh, but to laugh in ways and at things I never thought possible.

Truth has too great a sense of humor for me to share this story in a completely serious tone, but despite the humor employed, I couldn´t be more sincere regarding the message.

I know I don´t have to tell this story; I could simply live my life dancing to my own music. But then I think about someone who´s wearing the shoes I wore years ago, and what I would tell them if I had a chance; what I would say to ease their pain, to help them find light at the end of that seemingly endless dark tunnel. What would I do if I had the chance and the time? I would tell this story. So, whoever you are, wherever you may be, it is for you I share the story of Target Joy.