Imagine that you’ve just been in a difficult situation, let’s say in the jungle, and let’s say there were wild animals, and let’s say you were in a position where you were afraid that you were in jeopardy, and there was a shelter that you knew about that was about a mile and a half away or so, and you decided that your best option was to run to the shelter as fast as you could, and you did. You ran as fast as you could, and when you finally got to the shelter you could barely breathe, and you open the door to the shelter and you walked in.
Now since we’ve done all this running, let’s think about what we’re thinking about once we got into the shelter. Well, we’re probably thinking, mostly, about trying to catch our breath, about the fact that we’ve reached safety. We are in the moment when the terror that is our existence disappeared and we’ve reached a safe haven, we’ve reached a place where the terror doesn’t exist so all of a sudden we have no thought of it. And we’re so exhausted that we have no energy to think about anything; we don’t think about what we need, we don’t think about what we want, we don’t think about what we’re going to do next, we’re there and we’re safe and that is sufficient.
How do we go to that place without having lions and tigers and bears around to chase us? How do we go to that place and how easy is it or difficult is it to get to that place? We are in a world where, for many people, terror exists everywhere. Some people can’t go outside, I think it’s called agoraphobia. Some people have difficulty in crowds of any size. So let’s think it through. What’s the point?
The terrors that we have are distant from us and, for the most part, not in our control yet we associate with those terrors anyway. And different people are terrified by different things. As a matter of fact, some of the things that terrify some people are a comfort to other people, and that which is a comfort to some people terrifies other people. Look at the political parties, half are terrified of the other half, and each side is equally terrified, and each side points fingers that say, “Doom and gloom, doom and gloom.” So how do we escape? How do we go to that place of sanctuary? How does sanctuary become available to us?
In the world, we have had, in the past, people who were in difficult straights because of their involvement with the government, so they went to churches, and inside the church was a sanctuary. You could not be apprehended once you were in the church, it was safe.
Most of us aren’t in a state of being apprehended, and we aren’t in a state of fearing that we’ll be apprehended, yet we are also in a state where we’re susceptible to terror; we’re susceptible to thoughts that make us afraid, and that’s the key word: THOUGHTS that make us afraid. We make thoughts into our reality. We make thoughts into what we react to…
