One of the “lessons” so many of us learn as children is that we are not safe. My own formative introduction to that was through being locked out one evening. I’d been to visit the neighbours and I got home a few minutes later than I was supposed to. And the front door to the house was locked. I rang the bell, I knocked, I shouted, I knocked and rang again and again, and kept on appealing. At one point, I started crying and I don’t quite remember the rest (I didn’t spend the night outside!)—but I learned two “lessons”—I’m not safe and I’m alone.
Lack of safety creates a void in us, which we try to fill with stability, security, growth and success, in whatever shape and form—relationships, career, money, possessions. But we never get there. No amount of security, stability, assurance makes us feel safe. Whatever we get, or achieve, or experience, the underlying fear and lack and safety remain.
There are two reasons for this: a) we’re looking for what we can never find; and b) we’re looking for it in the wrong place.
Safety is the absence of fear. As such, it’s not something we can find—because it’s not a feeling or an experience, it’s the absence of an experience. We feel safe when we’re not threatened, when we are not frightened, when we are not worried, when we’re not alone or separate.
The second reason is that we look for safety or rather absence of unsafety on the level of our egoic mind—on the level of our physicality. But on that level we can never experience true absence of fear. The ego is always threatened and frightened, because on the level of the egoic mind, we are always a separate being, in a separate body, with a separate mind, disconnected from everyone and everything else, in a world that’s dangerous, unloving and unkind.
Fear results from separation. Because when we are separate, everything else is a potential threat. We can’t experience safety because we’re looking for it in the egoic mind which is the very product of lack of safety. The ego is rooted in separation, and as such always fearful.
But there’s another level to our mind—and that is the universal mind. On that level, which is also the level of spirit, heart and consciousness, we are connected with the greater intelligence of life. We are an intrinsic part of the whole, intertwined with everyone and everything else, both an extension and a unique manifestation of all that life is.
On that level, we are always safe—because we are not separate. We are not a little, limited being in a hostile universe—we are the whole. We are life, everything that life is, and one with it.