„Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure“

Feeling safe

This quote from the 13th century mystic Meister Eckhart, made me contemplate today. There was a strong  sense of truth in it, that I could not put in words right away. To feel secure – that is the ultimate desire in  life and to experience a lack of safety,  to sense that we are not enough, not safe, vulnerable – this is the ur-conditioning that is at the core of all our illusion about a world in division.

The sense of being inherently safe, is the first thing we forget when we come to this world of duality and gravity. There is nothing we need to fear, because we cannot lose the life that we are. However, there is this delicate human form, that shell we are to fill for some time, to accomplish our evolutionary task on this earth, Ultimately, it does not matter, if we damage or destroy this dummy made of skin and  bones, but to fulfil our mission of evolution, we have to be careful not to break it before it is time to go.

This sense of self-protection is built in our human form. The defense mecahnism is called a “stress-reaction” and it is that keeps us safe and sound, away from hot fire, icy waters, or wild beasts. Primary emotions, like anger and fear are associated with it and they are strong enough to motivate us to learn – and to change the approach accordingly.

When we grow up, inevitably something will happen that destroys our faith in being safe and  sound. Already the realisation that as a small human child we need an adult – an Other – to take care of us, is the basis, the fertile ground for creating a deeply ingrained belief – we are vulnerable, need protection and cannot survive on our own. The loss of the sense of Oneness is the greatest grief of all and it is at the bottom of our core belief that we are lost, abandoned and forsaken.

To forget who we are and to embark on a life in dreary illusion, this is the original sin, resulting from the Fall of Man.

So this is how it happens. We come to this world and soon we forget who we are. Instead we learn to operate in this clumsy body, learn to be limited and constrained. We have experiences that make us believe we are not enough, or not capable of defending ourselves and we build our whole life on this illusionary perception.

The purpose of the “ego” is to keep us safe. This is all it is concerned with and this is what we have to understand, when we awaken. The ego is not our enemy – the ego is a programme, that is built on the assumption that we are not safe and in order to fulfil our needs, we need to be bigger, better, stronger, faster or any other way superior than the next of kin. Fear is the henchman of the ego, because fear is like a sheet of ice, that freezes and paralyses instincts that may point to a direction the ego considers as unsafe. That which the ego encloses with a thick padding of fear, is anger. A hot, boiling stream of lava, that moves us into the direction of liberation, however it is contained by the walls of resistance, built to keep us safe.

So this is how our emotions are coming into being. A tremendous grief about the separation from what we are, the dynamic energy of anger that truly is the fire of transformation and that what moves us from one state to the other, and lastly the contraction of fear, that is encasing the impulse of liberation.

Later will the egoic mid co-opt the feelings of grief, anger and fear to build more differentiated emotions, modelled by the originals, Guilt, shame, jealousy, insecurity, envy and many more. They all use the same mechanism of our nature for a false purpose – to keep up the illusion of superiority in division: that we can feel safe, if we get bigger, better, more superior – or make others smaller, weaker or even annihilate them.

Think about it. All our conflicts, the dragons we are fighting, have to do with an illusion of not being enough, not being strong enough, not being safe.

Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure is what invites us to explore this feeling of inner strength, fulfilment and safety. It makes us stop and remember who we really are and it makes us reconsider our intentions. We are here to end separation – not to strengthen it.

Because Truth is always the safe choice.