Insecurity in the Eyes of Advaita Vedānta
The Root Cause: Ignorance of Your True Nature
Vedānta takes this inquiry further, and its answer is striking: the root cause of insecurity is not birth, not fallible parents, not an unkind world. The root cause is ignorance, specifically, the mistaken belief that you are a jīvātmā, a small, limited, embodied self, rather than what you actually are.
Every being is born with a twofold ignorance: ignorance of oneself, and ignorance of the world. Because of this, it never occurs to you that the security you're chasing outside yourself might already be within. This misidentification means you miss the limitless reality already present within you, and so never find the peace and security that alone could satisfy you. Instead, you build a private world of likes and dislikes, hoping happiness can be assembled there. Your own journey mirrors this: first a toy, then a friend, then a spouse, then grandchildren, each mistaken for the thing that will finally complete you, when completeness was never missing to begin with.
Am I Truly Insecure?
You have never actually investigated whether you are insecure. You concluded it the way a child concludes a shape in the dark is a monster, without turning on the light. Vedānta asks directly: Am I really insecure, or is it something else, something I've mistaken for myself, that is insecure?
The Impermanence of Worldly Security
Relationships don't deliver security, because an insecure person leaning on another insecure person doesn't average out to stability, it tends to worsen. Money doesn't deliver it either, one person is insecure for lack of it, another is insecure because of it. Anything acquired for happiness can become a source of sorrow, because anything finite is subject to time, decay, and loss. Insecurity and impermanence are twin forces: wherever something is impermanent, which is everywhere in the known world, insecurity is built in.
When you ask a finite thing to give you infinite security, you're asking it for something it was never capable of holding. This isn't the fault of the money, the relationship, or the achievement. It's simply outside their nature.
Discovering Limitless Security Within: Your True Self
The deepest teaching is this: “I am insecure” is a thought you accepted long ago without ever putting it on trial. Because you're ignorant of your true nature, you concluded, without investigation, that you are incomplete, bound by time, and insecure. But in Vedānta's view, that conclusion is mistaken. Your true nature is not lack. Your true nature is sat-cit-ānanta, existence, consciousness, limitlessness itself. The feeling of insecurity is a superimposition: a false identification with the body-mind, which is genuinely limited and perishable, and therefore genuinely bound to feel insecure, the way anything mortal must. The body is subject to microbes, age, time, and will one day join the dead. If you take yourself to be only this body, insecurity is an accurate response to a fact. But if the body-mind isn't the whole truth of who you are, then insecurity was never the whole truth either.
You are the security you've been seeking. You simply haven't recognized it yet.
Based on the Teachings of Dr. Tina Rampadarath
