you are safe

with Rumi, Nic Askew, and even a guest appearance by Tom Robbins.

Fear says, “I’ll make you safe. 
Love says, “you are safe.” 
I cannot remember who wrote these two lines. 
The message nevertheless unambiguous.

You. Are. Safe. 
Do you really know this? 
You are inherently and ever safe. 
“But…” you say. “What about…”

Of course, yes. This is not about physical safety. 
Your body may well stumble into harm. Your body as you perceive and sense it 
and through the filter of your body’s own sentient capacities
is an object amid objects in a perceived world. 

The mind’s job is to keep the body safe in relation to other objects. 
It creates a subject (your body, aka “you”) and looks for threats and opportunities in objects (aka “others, the world.)
It orients itself in space and time. 
It feeds itself on comparing data in the current moment with reference data from the past and planning a safe (r) future. 

Safety is concerned with worldly phenomena. It’s the domain of the mind. 
Fear-oriented thoughts are the mind’s specialty: just doing its job. 
Grounded in the physical laws of nature, safety keeps us safe through measures of caution and constraint. 
Safety is epistemological. And absolutely has its place. 

Safeness lives on a different level and has no opposites.
You are ever safe.
Safeness is the Self knowing and being its indivisible unity.
And being is safe: for what is cannot not be. 

Even with the physical body in danger, you, the real You, are safe. 
Safeness is peace. 
Transparent, clear, undefinable yet known, it shines with clarity and courage
on the phenomenal experience of human life. 

Safeness points to your true nature. Your spaciousness. Your reality. 
A reality without which no experience can be experienced. 
A reality that is experiencing itself without ever being affected by the experienced. 
It is before anything else can be. It must be before anything can be perceived by you. 

Can you be open to the possibility that this Reality that is You is not bound?
Not by the five senses, not by the boundary of skin, not by the body-mind, not dependent on the body-mind? 
Can you be open to the possibility that this Reality that is You is the Reality in which 
the five senses, the apparent boundary of skin, and the thoughts of the mind appear?  Try it out. See for yourself.

Rumi writes:
“Forget safety. Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.
I have tried prudent planning long enough.
From now on, I’ll be mad. “

An infant in her cradle. Free of concepts, worries. Free as yet of memories, reference points, plans. No notion of time nor space. 
She reaches for the moon with glee. She reaches for her mother’s finger with glee.  Her physical needs are met. 
She just is. She is open openness, free experiencing. She is. Aware. Everything an exploration. Perceptions, sensations. 
Now she sleeps. Now she is awake and looks around, listens. Nothing really disturbs. 

She just is. And things are as they are. She is loved. 

“I don’t dream
of the freedom
that speaks of
my liberty to
act as I wish.
I dream of the
freedom that knows
beyond all shadow
of doubt that
I am everything.
For it is here,
beyond the high
prison walls,
that peace lies
still and unyielding.”
Nic Askew (soul biographies)

Safeness is love. An expansive knowing, an inner trust, all is well and as it should be. 
Safeness is freeing, free, freedom. To be who or what we are. To express who or what we are. 
Weird and wonderful. Quirky and wise. Spontaneous and intelligent. Safeness gives us space to learn, grow, expand. Safeness allows us to care. 
Safeness is practical, liberating, ontological. 

Safeness whispers: 
Sweetheart, enter the unknown. Know the knowing that Is. 
My love, fall into a space beyond words. And surprise the heart with your beauty.
Question the beliefs you were taught about life.
For you are life. You are infinity and eternity.

You, your true Self, is safe and cannot be not safe! 
But we have been taught that we are this body-mind. 
It’s an unquestioned belief that lingers over most humans.
Have you ever asked, with sincerity, “What am I really?”  

Isn’t it the case that your body-mind sensations, perceptions, and thoughts arise and vanish
within a stable witnessing awareness? 
Doesn’t the world as it appears, in images, concepts, and perceptions appear in your witnessing awareness? 
Even your beliefs and assumptions, don’t they also appear in your awareness?

Awareness is. It is your reality. Explore, explore. 
Is your awareness different now than it was when you were five years old?  
Within it, all phenomena of body, mind, and world appear.  
Do you have any evidence that your awareness is limited to the body-mind, is dependent on the body for its survival? 

Can you intuit the Reality of awareness as boundless? Go deep within yourself. 
Dare you be open to the possibility that your “ordinary” awareness is the one indivisible awareness of the universe? 
One awareness. With access to many minds within it. Can this be a model to explore?
Each mind limited to its own perceptions, yet steeped in the one awareness, one reality, entirely free. Possible? 

Fact: You have no proof that awareness is limited to and dependent on your body-mind. 
We don’t have absolute proof that we as awareness are unlimited either.
But most of us spend a lifetime believing that we are limited: it’s the root of all our psychological suffering. 
The alternative is to say: I do not know. I do not know that I am limited. And I am willing to give the unlimited perspective a chance. 

From the possibility of my unlimitedness, I am ever safe. 
I can live in the unknown. 
Safeness, paradoxically, thrives in our willingness to live in the unknown:
To know that we are and not what we are. It is enough. 

In deep sleep, awareness of phenomena entirely disappears, but do you? 
No, rather, after waking from deep sleep, you feel a lingering peace. 
You are That. Free from all that you are not, free from all phenomenal mentations, you are that. 
You cannot describe it. Yet you are what you are.  

Infinite, eternal, neutral. The background of all experience. 
The screen on which worldly movies unfold. 
Stripped from all labels and nouns, of birth and death: Reality remains. 
And we are That. 

Harm can happen to movie characters within the movie. 
But the action in the movie does not harm the screen. 
The one Reality that you are whatever this Reality is is ever safe. 
Awareness. Presence. Stillness. 

From stillness the world pours forth. Ever changing. 
No lasting safety can be found in the world. 
But safeness is. 
Stillness speaks through love for its Self. A Self that always is. 

Stillness is love is free. Safe, it ever wants to play! 
So here is the late Tom Robbins, in an unusual commencement speech he held in June 1974 and that was long lost:

“Get in harmony with nature. Listen to the loony rhythms of your blood. Look for beauty and poetry in everything in life. Let there be no moon that does not know you, no spring that does not lick you with its tongues. Refuse to play it safe, for it is from the wavering edge of risk that the sweetest honey of freedom drips and drips. Live dangerously, live lovingly. Believe in magic. Nourish your imagination. Use your head, even if it means going out of your mind. Learn, like the lemon and the tomato learned, the laws of the sun.”  

credit: fylkesarviket vestland | unsplash