Gary Pollard
The second universal observation, as posited in the otherwise excellent research presented by Chase Hughes (The ancients decoded reality), is mostly spot-on! “Fear is an illusion, and love is the truth.” And, “Fear is the greatest lie ever told. Love is the only thing that’s real.” He cites the bible first, and it is in this citation where (as far as I can tell) his only error, from a Christian’s perspective, is.
He says, “The most quoted phrase in the entire bible is ‘be not afraid.’” Some variation of this command, according to the infallible internet, is indeed one of the most quoted in the entire bible. But then he says, “A quote from Jesus, ‘Perfect love casts out fear.’” Most of you have already spotted it! The error is a minor one, and he more than likely misspoke. I point it out only because it’s a well-known passage written by John, spoken by John (I Jn 4.18). If God’s love is fully matured in us, we can be without fear on the day when God judges the world. We will be without fear, because in this world we are like Jesus. No fear exists with love. None, because matured love throws fear away. This fear is of punishment! Anyone who is always afraid has not been made mature in their love.
So his overall point stands, if misattributed. In this case, though, that fear helps us know where our love is in the maturing process. If we’re still afraid (of death or of judgment), our love has not matured enough. So in the passage he cited, fear definitely means that something is wrong!
From a Christian perspective, one kind of fear is critical to maintain: of the power, presence, and holiness of God. Better words for this kind of fear may be sublime (delightful horror) and awe (admiration and fear, reducing feelings of self-entitlement). Our motivation to follow God transitions from fear to love as we mature. It’s impossible to see something large and powerful (like a tornado or hurricane or comet) and not feel at least a little something in the pit of your stomach. Those are tiny manifestations of his power — a healthy fear/awe of the power behind those phenomena is not a bad thing. It keeps our view of self properly calibrated. Some variation of “fear God” is found about 300 times in scripture, which is as much or more than “be not afraid”.
It is interesting that love is so powerful a discipline that every culture in antiquity praised it. Chase cites the following:
- Buddhism: “Hatred does not cease by hatred. By love alone is hatred healed.”
- Bhagavad Gita: “The path of devotion, love, leads to liberation. The path of ignorance, fear, leads to suffering.” Yoda apparently read the Bhagavad Gita.
- Tao Te Ching: “Courage comes from love. Paralysis comes from fear.”
- Dhammapada: “The mind is everything.” (This is explained further in his video)
- Sufi: “Your job is not to seek for love, but to find and remove the barriers you built against it.”
Finally, “Fear is an illusion that keeps us asleep. Love is the frequency or the thing that wakes us up. Fear shrinks the self, love expands the self. Fear breeds ego, and love dissolves it. Fear isolates you, and love reminds you [who] you actually are. Fear makes you chase approval, validation, money, control; it makes us compare ourself to everybody else. Fear makes us live like something is missing — love, in the ancient sense, isn’t romantic. It’s oneness, alignment, essentially the recognition that we’re made of the same stuff… That’s why fear feels bad, because it’s biologically incompatible with what you actually are. Every mistake you’ve ever made, every relationship that blew up, every regret you carry, every time you sabotage your own potential, that’s all fear. Every ancient teacher: you’re suffering because you believe a lie. The moment you drop fear, you don’t just…find love. You don’t find love, you return to it. It’s why you’re born with it.”
As you can see, his observations are mostly excellent! But if the observations imply universal compatibility between faiths, we have a problem. What videos like this do for us, though, is encourage us to return to a healthy interest in the esoteric aspects of scripture. Paul, John, Clement, and Origen (and many others) were no strangers to the esoteric. We have long abandoned its pursuit, perhaps because it was hijacked early on by Gnostics and other odd groups. Armed with only reaction, we’ll always be two steps behind. The difficulty lies in approaching the esoteric with a proper framework. There’s no shortage of esoterism and symbolism in scripture, we just tend to gloss over it or dilute it with reductionistic literalism. We are left, then, with only secular (often pagan) resources to tackle biblical esoterism. This is obviously dangerous! Whether we like it or not, it’s in the Zeitgeist. And because we’ve largely abandoned it, Gnosticism is now touted as being the earliest form of Christianity. What’s a seeker or curious believer to do in the face of these complex, often-convincing arguments without a mature framework to bring to the study of esoterism? Building such a framework would be an invaluable project for a group of Christian scholars to tackle!
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