Introduction Love Is Letting Go of Fear has had an amazing journey since its first edition was printed in 1979. No one could be more surprised than I at the journey this book has taken. It has sold millions of copies, has been published in dozens of languages, and continues to be a classic after all these many years. This book is about inner healing and spiritual transformation. In many ways, I wrote this book for myself. Being dyslexic and a slow reader, I like books that are reader-friendly, have larger print than usual, and have cartoons to help make the writing easier to understand.
The core principles are about having a willingness to see the world differently; seeing value in letting go of our control issues, judgments, and grievances; and making forgiveness as important as breathing. The principles in this book apply to every aspect of our lives, including our relationships with other people and with objects such as money and material things.
In celebrating the third edition of this book some thirty-plus years after its first edition was published, it seemed like it would be helpful to take a look back. I wanted to contrast my impressions about what I was like during those first fifty years with my reflections about the second part of my life after I began to incorporate the lessons in this book.
The first part of my life I thought of myself as not being good enough and not being very smart when it came to academics as I usually was in the bottom of my class. I was an undiagnosed dyslexic, a very fearful kid who grew up to be a fearful adult. I was shy, judgmental of myself as well as others, always wondering when the next brick was going to come down from the sky and hit me on the head. My fear made me overly controlling and at the same time fearful of intimacy. On the one hand I always had a mission of wanting to help other people, and on the other hand I wanted to make a lot of money.
Although the world saw me as successful, I was not a very happy camper and my inner life was miserable. I married when I was twenty-nine years old, had two sons, and had a marriage that looked great from the outside but was very challenging from the inside. What was important to me was financial security, how much money I had in the bank, and the kind of house and neighborhood I lived in. What other people thought of me seemed terribly important. I was a fault finder to others, but also to myself. Emotionally, I was on a treadmill machine going at high speed, and I was not capable of slowing the machine or stopping it to get off. My ego seemed to have me in a stranglehold.
No matter how much money I made, it was never enough. We seemed to be always spending more than we were making. At one point I bought a green Austin Healey and had a green hat that went with it. I was sure it would bring me lasting happiness. And of course, that did not happen. I projected my unhappiness onto my wife, and a twenty-year marriage ended in a painful divorce. I soon turned to alcohol to hide my pain.
I denied I was an alcoholic even after I was stopped by the police for driving under the influence of alcohol. Most of my friends were either heavy drinkers or alcoholics who denied they had an alcohol problem. During this time I was an atheist, and in my judgmental way I thought that people who were religious or spiritual were this way because they were fearful. I remember being proud of my atheistic stand and how I viewed life.
I do remember brief times of happiness. But most of what I remember of those days was a life where I had little if any inner peace. A lingering feeling kept bobbing up that I didn’t deserve to be happy.
I was fifty years old when I consciously started my spiritual journey. Before that I had no idea how hard I could be on myself or others. The word forgiveness had little meaning. However, I began slowly but surely to see the beneficial effects of being willing to forgive others--and, especially, myself.
By practicing the lessons in A Course in Miracles and Love Is Letting Go of Fear, I began to experience a sense of inner peace that I never had before, and I had never thought was possible. I began to sense, then believe in, what I call “inner knowing” and that there is a Higher Power that could, if I were willing, direct my life into a consciousness of love, giving and helping others. My focus on money and material things began to disappear. I was totally absorbed in helping as I started the first Center for Attitudinal Healing. I began to experience how everyone I met, or even thought about, was my teacher. Finally, I discovered I could make inner peace as my only goal, and forgiveness as my only function. I learned to listen to an inner voice of love directing what I thought, said, and did.
As I have advanced in chronological years, I have become more mellow and realize that I don’t know what is best for others but that each of us has an inner teacher that can show us the way. If I find myself in stress, I am more aware now that I have some more forgiving to do. As I have let go of some of the blocks I have put in the way of my experiencing love, I am more compassionate and focused on living in this present moment than doing what I used to do by getting caught in worrying about the fearful future and the fearful past.
In general I am more of a happy camper. I am not trying to change other people or their attitudes. I do my best to be a vehicle of love with everyone and not withhold or exclude my love from anyone, including myself. I laugh a lot more as I keep the six-year-old kid inside me--active, alive, curious, and playful. I don’t take myself so seriously. I am more careful about what I eat, and I exercise regularly and go to the gym several times a week.
Working with families with children who are facing death has shown me that there is another way of looking at living and dying and life and death. They have also taught me the value of living one day at a time and the great importance of discovering that it is always possible to have gratitude in one’s life. They have taught me that it is possible to experience peace of mind even when chaos is going on all around me or in my body.
The people who I spend most of my time with are no longer alcoholics. They are like-minded and like-hearted people who are also on a spiritual pathway and who believe that nothing is impossible. They also, like myself, tend to believe that it is possible to retrain our minds to believe that there are only two emotions--love or fear--and to see our fear as a call of help for love.
The year 1981 was another turning point in my life when Diane Cirincione showed up. I believe the angels were working overtime that day when I discovered my soul mate. I don’t think that was an accident or would have happened if I had not been able to let go of the shame and guilt I had been harboring in my own jail cell, resulting in my lack of self-love. Diane became an amazing partner and teacher for me of unconditional love, patience, gentleness, kindness, and forgiveness. Our joint goal became to demonstrate and teach only love. It has been a miraculous journey where our Higher Power, our Source, God, or whatever word you might wish to call it has become the most important thing in our relationship.
As far as how I look at my aging process is concerned, I now believe it is more important to count your smile wrinkles than your aging wrinkles. I think that age is but an abstract number, and that my mind knows no limitations. In the first part of my life I was fearful of aging and of death, but now I no longer have these fears. I feel the age I am now is the best one yet and the best is yet to come.
And in those first fifty years I believed there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and it was my goal to find that pot of gold. Now I realize that we are the rainbow, the pot of gold is love, and that is what we actually are.
Am I always in a blissful spiritual space? Of course not. I am a work in process and believe I will be a work in process as long as I remain in this body. Every day there are challenges around judgments of others and myself. I have periods of impatience and irritation and not feeling at peace with myself. What is different now is that these periods are much shorter in duration, when I choose to remember, as constantly as I can, that it is only my own thoughts and attitudes that can hurt me.
As I look at the world and what has happened to it since this book was first published, there has been amazing progress made in the field of medicine and in the treatment of diseases and traumas, and in the scientifically established relationship between the body and the mind. There has been awesome progress in so many different areas of technology. The first edition of this book =I wrote in longhand on a yellow pad. The advancement of computers, the ability to communicate information instantaneously any place in the world on the Internet, and the advent of social networks . . . and on and on . . . all these have changed the world.
There are many people and philanthropic organizations, businesses, and individuals who are doing important work to help the disadvantaged in the world. But at the same time, again through my eyes, fear continues to play a major role in why we are not more loving, compassionate, kind, gentle, and understanding with each other and ourselves.
We continue to have major problems in getting along and living in harmony with our families, with our communities, with our country and other countries, and with our planet. There are millions of children and adults who are starving and others who are living below the poverty line, who do not have enough food to eat or proper health care.
Addiction problems are on the increase as are physical and sexual abuse. The rate of suicide is increasing in the armed services as it is...