The Brain Keeps You Safe

This tiny brain is designed to keep the physical organism safe. It has been preprogrammed to do so. It is also designed to learn about the current environment so it can adapt its hardwired presets to allow for new dangers to avoid.

The problem emerges when this moves into the realm of the psychological. Over time, after say the first three or four years of our lives, we begin to generate a psychological sense of self. This self, that exists only within the mind, begins to experience a phenomenon known as fear. Fear can also be called hurt, or pain.

Now the brain, which is wired to take care of a physical entity, now has developed a psychological entity that it has to take care of, the psychological identity, or ego. This psychological sense of self is threatened not by fire or by physical harm, but by the ideas of such things, the possibility of such things. It is also threatened by imagined hurts that do not even exist.

Now the brain attempts to deal with psychological stresses and threats like it would physical stresses and threats. It will attempt to avoid them, run away, hide, or fight them. There is a problem here. How does the brain fight an imagined fear? How does it run away from a hurt that has taken place in the past? How does it avoid a sense of despair?

It doesn't.

It becomes neurotic. It tries to wall the identity off from threat. It also attemps to destroy any threat 'out there' that is creating fear for the identity. It tries to run away from those psycholgical threats that are fragments of memory from the past.

The brain keeps you safe.

The physical you, yes.

The psychological you, never. The brain is not designed to do that. There is no such thing as psychological security. It can never be found. Life is uncertainty. The brain tries to invent a certainty through tradition, religion, ideology, and so-called culture. But it is all unstable and ever-changing.

So if the brain keeps you safe, what can set you free?

Could it be this thing that is called the heart?

The heart is not the organ. It is a gateway. It cannot be explained. It is a feeling. It is wordless. Soundless. It doesn't speak. It knows. It transmits information holistically, completely, entirely. There is no confusion. It is an energy that is intelligence, that is love, that is joy, that is space, that is emptiness.

It cannot be spoken of.

It sets us free.