We Are Safe!

It's a solid truth that there is nothing that can hurt us now.

We could discover in the future that our parents are not ours, or that an asteroid is heading for Earth or perhaps more profoundly that the whole of our existence is based on a Matrix or lie. But none of this can change us now.

The mind plays tricks however. We think that were it "true" that our parents were not ours it would undermine everything. But it would change nothing now: what we are experiencing Now is unchanged by any truth only how we interpret and respond to it. We can imagine it would but is doesn't. Imagination can pretend it is changing things, but the reality is it has not.

The point is that this safety right now is not imagined, it is real. What we may imagine is not real.

It's a bit of a tautology. It is like saying if you are reading this you must be alive and have survived death. If you are reading this you are safe.

But it is more profound and I realise I don't have time to finish this. But if you are safe now, in a deep way, you are always safe.

What really can upset that safety? SO your body will die but each step along that road is another Now just as safe as this. The idea of death is just more imagination spoiling the day. As long as there is Now we are safe, and since there is always a Now we are always safe.

How could there not be Now? Perhaps when we are in a coffin in our grave? More imagination! This will never happen as you would need a Now to have that experience and then you would be buried while alive, in which case you still have the Now and actually everything is safe. You might not imagine it is safe being buried in a coffin alive, but silence that imagination (easier said than done in a panic like that), but if there is a Now you are always safe.

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Where I have struggled with this in the Past is what feels like a fight between the Present Moment and the Imagination.

We habitually use the Imagination for making narratives that can be planning the future, or expecting things to happen, or analysing the past and trying to understand things. In every case we are creating a story or explanation of things and this is our usual mode. It is the mode I am using here to do exactly that. I am imagining all the things I do when narrativising. For example I'm not actually planning anything right now but I can imagine that I am and describe it in this text.

In this mode of activity it means that when we think about time we do so from the outside. We imagine a line with the Past to the left and the Future to the right and Now in the middle. And we are in the Now, sat in the middle travelling forward like a train. Robert Pirsig uses the analogy of a train too.

But the thing to realise is this is all Imagination. We are picturing, add labels and narration to things. Big arrow point to Past, Present and Future. What we imagine like a film is not real. They often say don't worry about the future because it is never what you expect. Like a watched kettle which never boils the watched future never unfolds as expected: there is always something unexpected even for the "best laid plans of mice and men." This is because the Future is only ever an imagination. The Future never becomes the Present. The train does not pass from Now to the Future because the Now is real and the Future is imagined.

The future is extremely unpredictable, so unpredictable that you cannot decide before hand which parts of your expectations will come true and which won't. How many times has an apparent certainty not happened. In fact I have a bit of a superstition about this. The more sure I am about something the more cautious I have learned to become. It is the things we are most certain about which let us down the most. Perhaps we just notice it more when a certainty falls through.

Anyway that was a run through of the Imagination.

The Present Moment is not like this at all. And it is not sandwiched between the Past and the Future which we can only ever b imagine. The NOW is all there is. It is like a huge room open in all directions. Quite unlike the linear view of time. Inside the NOW room we can turn on a projector and create images of what we think the future will be like, and we can build a door and say through here is the future but it all happens in the NOW. You can't actually escape the NOW. Everything is always NOW in reality. The only way out is day dreaming and imagination.

The scale of the NOW is beyond ordinary imagination. When we think about the Present normally we only give it a slice of time between the Past and the Future. But we can bin that completely. Everything is NOW. When we think we can escape the NOW we think perhaps of taking a sleep. But even in the unconsciousness of sleep actually we are still in the NOW. It takes great practice to reveal the NOW so solidly that we can see the way it infiltrates everything. Similarly even when we are day dreaming about our holiday next year we have to admit that while we are thinking about "next year" when we get interrupted we realise we were doing it NOW. Daydreaming is something we do in the NOW, although what we daydream may have labels and narratives attached to it that tell us it is next year. This is the same in a story which starts "In a land far away and a long long time ago" we aren't really going to a land far away and a time long in the Past but our imagination can create this.

The battle appears to be how hard it is to stop the narratives and pull us out of imagination into reality and what is really going on. It is true that daydreaming is "going on" but for some reason (I don't yet understand and can't narrate) the reality of daydreaming cannot be seen. It is like watching a film and then in the middle of the film pulling ourselves out to look around the auditorium and see everyone watching the film. Of course to do that we are no longer watching the film. It is almost like an SRH moment. You can't be seeing yourself watch a film AND watch the film at the same time. This is almost the difference between Concentration and Mindfulness. Watching the film with great focus is Concentration, pulling out and noting you are watching the film is Mindfulness.

Anyway length exposition of the Power of NOW. There is only one reality and it is NOW. Everything else is imagination that we create in our minds.

Now as declared at the top in the NOW we are safe. This is because all the things we are afraid of are actually Imaginations. When we feel unsafe it is the work of our imagination.

This raises another subtlety. The person meditating when a tiger creeps in (a problem obviously in India not the Europe) and decided to just meditate through the experience staying in the NOW. Okay great you can do that and you can be in the NOW as the tiger eats you. In actual fact not so crazy. Buddha remained in the NOW while King Kala tortured and dismembered him. But Buddha had no choice. If a tiger does walk in there is nothing wrong with engaging imagination picturing the implications of this and planning a move to the exits. Imagination is there for a reason. But note we have to enter the Imagination to feel unsafe and realise that we could be eaten any moment. However a person entering Imagination with the explicit desire to rescue their body from become a tiger meal is very different from the person who lives in daily fear of their belief they will be eaten.

Being is NOW is instantaneous. I believe people who live in the NOW won't have that shock as they drift from their day dreams into the "reality" of a tiger and the sudden panic that consumes them. They may well have panic, I think the body will always react instinctively to these things and a dose of adrenaline will make exiting the room all that faster. But a person strongly in the NOW could see all this unfold in the NOW without ever seeing the future where they die and struggle for the future where they live. Slamming the door closed and realising they "could" have died only happens when we are outside the NOW and start imagining different ends to the story. The person in the NOW has only one present and there is only one story which is this one. Suppose the tiger eats them: well that is just the story. No panic or regret that they "could" have done differently.

That begins to show up where the Safety comes from. Being in Danger is Imagination of a possible end to the story and then we have to struggle to find a different ending. But this is all story writing. Living in the NOW there is just this and what we do next all occurs within the NOW. Not that people in the NOW don't have dilemmas but they are not real they are just dilemmas.          

The take home is that the Imagination no matter how real it seems it not real. No matter how certain we think we can picture the future it is not real. What is Real is only the NOW. For this reason we should never confuse what is imagined with what is NOW. All our body responses like panic and passion are all triggered by the Imagination. All this stuff occurs within the Body. The Now however is vast and in fact boundless. It goes all the way through our body and what we are feeling, all the way through our mind and what we are thinking or imagining and extends out into the world and what is NOW. For this reason the NOW is actually greater than ourselves. Realising the NOW we can actually see all of our self unfolding in the NOW. We can see the mind thinking and doing things and triggering fear and pleasure. After all anything that is happening is Real and is part of the NOW. Getting beyond the self means obviously we are Safe as we are beyond that core source of all our fears and anxieties.