At Ground Zero
Letter from Mexico | October, 2001
At Ground Zero
Michael and I just returned to San Miguel from a week in New York City. Taking some of my own advice from "The Way of the Traveler," I went with an intention: to learn and to bless. The blessing came easily; the learning was more difficult, and much more complex.
We flew into La Guardia at night and, passing the Great City on the left, could see the glow from the bright work-lights at Ground Zero. To me, it looked as if a powerful light was shining not into, but out from a hole in the earth. Something enormous had been birthed down there, and the light from that opening in the mother planet still radiated, three weeks after the Event.
The next day we got closer to the site from the top of the Empire State Building, squinting into the afternoon sun to try to see something more than a thin trail of smoke and a kind of astonishing absence. It was the only time I have ever waited in line for two hours to see an empty space.
A few days later, we hiked into Lower Manhattan to within two blocks from where the World Trade Center complex stood. There, seeing the cranes among the ruins, breathing in the acrid scent of burned electrical wires, we felt the full impact of the Event. Mike said, "I feel...so sad." If something had been born here, it had left not only blood but also a mass of tangled, melted metal in its wake.
In the shadows of early evening, with a friend of ours who had come up from Washington for the day, we recited Psalm 91, the ancient prayer of protection, which contains the lines, "You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday."*
CULTURE ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
Reminders of Old Time hit me in New York when I least expected it. I was sitting in a subway car one day, half-mesmerized by the gentle swaying and jostling of the ride. I looked up at a poster — an ad for a university, with a smiling coed in the foreground and the famous New York skyline in the background...except that now the skyline, with those Towers, is what I saw. For a moment, I seemed to be in a time warp, and I felt an abrupt shift — a dislodging.
Last week, Maureen Dowd* said, after receiving the new Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog in the mail, "Even though it was printed only a month ago, it now seems as detached from the moment as cave drawings, a document of an extinct culture." Every image of the New York skyline before the Event — on post cards, on calendars, on the sides of buses, on commercials, in movies — is like that, a picture of "an extinct culture."
This time-dislocation is causing problems in the cultural psyche. Suddenly a physical disorder known until last week only to medical students is seen as a major threat to the nation's health — and how perfect that anthrax should be spread by communication (mail to the media), externalizing the concept of fear-gossip as a disease. CNN.com headlined "cyber-terrorists," warning that computers all over the world might crash at any moment. Yesterday a Delta plane was rerouted in flight and made an unscheduled landing because two men with foreign accents were conspiring in the back seats. The supposed highjackers turned out to be two Orthodox Jews who were praying for world peace.
This is a nervous time, as all times of transition must be. Fear is abroad in the land. In this morning's New York Times, Columnist Bob Herbert says, "You can behave normally, pursuing so-called normal activities, but there's no way to escape the fact that something profoundly sinister is going on." What is going on — really going on — is far from sinister, but it must seem that way to people who have never entertained the idea of global consciousness emerging, or understood that its birth might have the look of cataclysm. "What the caterpillar sees as the end of the world," says Richard Bach, "the world sees as a butterfly."
CAVES
And so, not knowing what is happening or what to do, the culture withdraws into rage and fear — and goes to war. But attempting to slaughter our Shadow (picture for a moment what going to war with your own shadow would look like) is not only futile, it is downright dangerous. As I write this, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is being interviewed on NPR about recent U.S. attacks near a village in Afghanistan. "There were weapons in those caves," he is saying. "You don't dig caves that deep unless you are developing and hiding weapons that can do tremendous damage."
And I am thinking of one of Albert Einstein's last interviews. Einstein is asked if he believes there will be a Third World War, and he says, "Sadly, yes. One-fourth of mankind will survive that war and they will live in caves, and then the fourth World War will come and then they will fight it out with clubs."
A RARE OPPORTUNITY
One of the better articles I've read in the past two weeks is Joel Garreau's piece in last Sunday's Washington Post, titled "Hinges of Opportunity: When the World Moves, the Important Thing to Figure Out Is What's Being Born."* He does not actually figure it out in the article, but just seeing the title in the mainstream press — the government's hometown newspaper — was encouraging.
What is being born in our human species is the awareness that we are one. What is dying is the illusion that we are separate from one another. At this remarkable moment, with our world turned upside down, with Old Time gone and New Time just beginning, each of us has a rare opportunity to understand the truth of our oneness with the rest of the human family. We are awakening to ourselves as the human (thinking, self-reflecting, feeling) stratum of the planet, the collective child of mother earth.
THE LEARNING
I am learning from my recent experiences, both in New York and here in San Miguel with our wonderful retreatants, that a global consciousness is emerging. Our part in that emergence is to do the work of healing the planet — and we are to do it, apparently, by healing ourselves. We are to undertake our healing not in a spirit of fear, but in the spirit of love, and with the certain knowledge that as all the scattered parts of ourselves come together, so does the world...since we are the microcosm and indeed the very substance of the planet.
And the healing is to end our sense of separation from each other.
All of us at the retreat center send you our affectionate regards,
Joseph Dispenza
LifePath
San Miguel de Allende
Mexico
NOTES
- Psalm 91: Psalms, from The Holy Bible, Revised Standard version
- * Maureen Dowd in the New York Times: All That Glistens
- * Joel Garreau in the Washington Post: Hinges of Opportunity
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