“The only thing we have to fear is...fear itself” Dear Friends, I was born on election day November 8th, 1932, during the ‘Great Depression’, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was first elected 32nd President of the United States. Soon afterwards on March 4, 1933, FDR delivered his first inaugural address as a call to action for a national response to the country’s severe economic crisis. Perhaps most memorable line of Roosevelt’s speech was his opening assertion that “the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Long before my mid-life spiritual awakening, the idea that “the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself” intuitively intrigued me, and somehow seemed to express a deep truth. Now, as I approach an imminent 82nd birthday anniversary, I continue to believe that “the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself” expresses a deep spiritual truth; that our true identity is as common immortal and formless spirit – not as separate mortal physical bodies or their stories; that we live in a fearful age of mental malaise, in a fear-saturated society which materially impedes destined realization of human potential; that fear and loving-kindness cannot coexist; that as the Dalai Lama says: The more [we] are motivated by Love, the more fearless and free our actions will be. These ideas are expressed or implied in today’s posting of quotations and a brief poem about Fear at sillysutras/fear/ I offer you these writings with the aspiration that they may help enhance your identification with spirit, while diminishing psychological fear of bodily injury or death, thereby enabling you act – beyond ‘fight or fight’ instincts– ‘ever more fearlessly – as LOVE. And so may it be! Ron Rattner sillysutras/
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 03:46:35 +0000
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