Safety and Caution

October 11, 2001 

Dear friends: 

One of the participants in the upcoming Florida workshop/retreat wrote to me expressing her concern about the discovery of Anthrax in the Palm Beach area of Florida.   

Her concern was valid, and it inspired a response that I thought was worth sharing with site visitors in general.   

It is sent with love and concern for everyone’s well being and protection.

Susan    

Dear_______:

The volatility of these times is encouraging us all to seek safety and security in something other than routine, projection, habit and human systems.  Our best calculations and our best defenses have failed us.  But genuine Spirit--which is free from all systems--will not.

The upcoming Florida seminar is about a number of things—most importantly spiritual destiny (versus human fate) and how to live in the “space” of radical faith.

Radical faith is much more than some religious virtue.  It is much more than mustering up "faith" IN something.  When we start talking about--and more importantly start living--radical faith we begin to approach a brand new ground of being.  Radical faith is the authentic ground of existence and the only genuine ground there is.  It overrides all our imaginary projections about what life is supposed to be, what the day is supposed to be, what this minute or the next is supposed to be. 

Unfortunately, most of us rarely if ever even touch this ground.  Instead, we live entirely in an imaginary world, one of our own creating that exists only in our heads.  We touch base with existence almost never.  We feel secure not because we necessarily are secure, but because we habitually imagine the next moment to be a certain way or shape, and then we find a momentary comfort and security in imagining that what we have imagined will actually happen.

Then, when the next moment does not turn out to be what we imagined it was going to be, we are shocked.  Something seems radically wrong!

But have we not yet caught on?  The next moment is never what we imagine.  Our degree of shock and upheaval is proportionate to how different the next moment is from the imaginary moment we conjured up in our minds.

Stop for a minute and ask yourself—“Do I really have any idea what is going to happen at 2:00 this afternoon?” (For example)  Or in the next ten minutes?  Do I really know if the doorbell will ring, or who will call or whether the person I thought was going to call, will or won’t? .  Do I really know what the headlines will read? 

Why did we all feel safe at 8:00 a.m. on September 11th? 

Disaster was about to strike, but we were all fine.  Two hours later our world was in chaos and we were too.  Our world was shattered, because we had never expected, never imagined in our wildest nightmares such a thing happening.  However, the executors of this madness had been planning and expecting September 11th to go (at least to some degree) pretty much the way it went.  So their world was not shattered--it was confirmed.

I am not dismissing or minimizing the actuality of the grief, the pain, the horror of hate, and the insanity of self-destruction that our species suffers from.  And I am not suggesting that our grief and horror regarding a tragedy is simply because we aren’t or weren’t expecting it.

I am, however, trying to point us toward a new ground of security--one that is radically intuitive and totally responsive to the moment, within the moment. 

There is nothing wrong with trying to use our highest sense of common sense, to avoid trouble and be cautious.  But it seems to me that the trials of these times should be waking us up to the fact that the only possible safety and security must be in the "radically spiritual" -- something far superior to human precautions and defenses.

I keep reading on the Internet and in the papers, President Bush's warning to American citizens to be extremely cautious and alert.  This is sound and sensible advice during these times.  But I also want to ask, "To what?"  "How?"

How can we be adequately equipped against the totally unknown?

Why would we go to work and check to see if our computer keyboard has a little anthrax bacteria in it?  Why would we get on a plane and wonder if it is going to fly through the World Trade Center and topple not just a building but bring a nation to its knees?  How can we stay "constantly alert" when we get on a Greyhound bus, or take a Scandinavian airline into Milan, or work at a petrochemical factory in Toulouse, France?  The list of recent tragedies has (sadly) not been confined to New York. 

How can we be prepared when tragedy is so rampant as well as random?  If we go out to dinner, should we take our own plates and silverware?  Or maybe bring our own food as well?  Or maybe never leave the house again?

It is simply impossible to be alert to every form and invention of evil.  And we will never find an abiding sense of safety and security if we go down the road of trying to second guess or imagine what form evil may take next.  Instead, we will find only fear and neurosis.

This is a time for radical faith and radical listening.  It is a time for radical commitment to finding one's thread in life--meaning, one's destiny--and living it with a passion as never before.  If there is one blessing in tragedy it is to remind us of just how unstable is the “house built on sand.”  To the degree that we build our life on human hopes, systems, expectations, and guarantees, we will be disappointed.  And in the midst of trial we will be uprooted, ungrounded, and in despair.   We need to find something more sure that human prognosis, statistics, predictions, and chance.

The era of imagining life to have some sort of guarantee has come to an end.  The era of buying into the marketing hype that we can have everything we want if we just think a certain way, or that the universe will play itself into our hands according to our will, has come to an end.  And when I look around at what we are having to face in the real world—this world, the world of here and now--I want to ask what happened to all those promises we’ve been hearing about that we have entered a more “enlightened” era than ever before?  Or about the seven (or four, or ten or twelve or however many) spiritual laws through which we will be controlling the universe?

The United States of America has been spoiled for the last sixty years with a type of economic indulgence that has camouflaged the harsh realities of existence.  Existence is full of trials and dangers.  At every bend, at every instant, absolutely anything can happen.

But this has always been the case!  And we should have always been living accordingly.  The fact that we weren't is only a testimonial to our own stupidity and naivete, not to some fact that the world has changed. 

For the record, and once again:  We don't control the universe.  We don’t create reality.  The many thousands of victims who died on September 11^th, didn’t “create” that reality with their thinking.  PLEASE!!!   

And it is a good thing that we don’t control the universe!  WHY?  Because we haven't even learned how to control ourselves! 

We must stop imagining we possess powers we don't, and start using the power we do have to address the one thing we should and can--namely,   

• How can we come to know radical availability to Spirit? 

• How do we come to live in the space where the only thing going on is Spirit--Truth and Love--living its life as us?

• How can we come to desire and know only that which Spirit desires and knows?

Our world--our American world--has changed.  But existence hasn't changed.  What we are tasting as Americans may be new to us, but not to the world at large--not to millions of Somalians, Jews, Palestinians, Africans from all nations, Americans of color, the Chinese, women and children in sexual slavery all over the world, and the citizens in Afghanistan—to name just a few general groups of people who suffer oppression, attack, and tragedy on a regular basis.

The world is not a stable place.  But it never has been.  Confusing economic comfort for genuine security was a foolish mistake.  Of course we are in shock. 

But for the person who truly seeks only Truth, the volatility of existence is not a shock.  Nor does it create paranoia.  Instead, it serves as an invitation to step into a radical and daring availability to Spirit's being and action upon each minute.  It invites us to break free of chronological time and its so-called laws into a different sense of time altogether.  This different sense of time is what we might call “destinal time.” 

Destinal time is what happens when we stop living according to habit and the pre-programmed “time-line” of human expectation, and start living instead according to what Spirit has in mind for us.  Destiny isn’t about a place we are supposed to end up.  Destiny is about living within Spirit’s being and design upon the instant—being who we were meant to be all along.

If we truly seek only Spirit’s will and design for us—versus our will and design for ourselves—then the volatility of existence can also serve to break us out of the deadness that habit and projection create, the deadness of imagining the future instead of living in the present. 

And most of all, living within spiritual destiny destroys the dullness that all too often financial prosperity creates.  It makes us truly God-dependent--which is where real life begins.  Everything else is already dead.  Everything other than Spirit living its life as us is a living death that we mistake to be life.   There is nothing “alive” about life apart from Spirit.   When we live within the confines of our own will and design, we are just acting out a ritual.

But let this letter serve as a small reminder: Please use your God-given intuition to know where you need to be when.  Don't try to figure it out by calculating the risks. 

Today's headlines keep reminding us that there is only place and only one way that we can be safe.  And to do this, we need to redefine not just words such as "alert,"  and "safety."  We need to also redefine our basic “modus operandi”—how we operate and the ground from which we are operating.  

Security, safety, comfort, healing, hope—these are the heart and will of Spirit itself.  Spirit isn’t fearful.  And it doesn’t need to “guestimate” its chances for safety and survival.   As we “be” the space where Spirit lives its life as us, we know this same security and safety.  It is a security not built on human calculation, fear, rumors, and warnings.  Rather our security will come forth, as do we, from our original and authentic ground of being.  This ground is Spirit itself.

With love and concern,

Susan Dane