In The Blink of an Eye

Crisis precipitated inspired concern, consideration, and care. The desire to seek others was overwhelming. Impulses just to touch others, to express feelings, and to experience community surged through America. What should not and could not be carried individually was shouldered communally.

Along with violence and death, unconscious forces called for human intercourse. Numbers far greater than those who died were conceived on 9/11. These additional ones will pour through the collective womb in June of 2002.

The world had been massively transformed—in the blink of an eye.

Or had it?

As I centered in my heart, that forbidden question entered my mind. The destroyed and damaged physical structures, symbolically powerful, were but specks among our vast national physical assets. The numbers who had died were dwarfed by the numbers who were killed in recent acts of horrific terrorism in Africa, Asia, and Asia Minor.

So what had happened? If the world actually changed very little, what did change?

Ah, I see now. Human perception changed. The fundamental change was an intrapsychic one, involving huge collectives.

Then another question arose. If a worldview could so change in less than two hours, could it be changed again in less than two hours—into a perception that would evoke well-being and a constructive, hopeful attitude in the majority of the planet’s people? And if so, how?

Aside from the arrival of a world Messiah or a super-intelligent peacemaking alien, there is one human being who could bring about that change. That person is our President. I am not naive about his politics, his power drives, and his personal attributes. Still, he is the one human being at this moment in history who could so alter our worldview.

Here is a man who has known weakness, defeat, and disdain. Here is a man who has brought with him to the Presidency a personal experience of spiritual rebirth and the power of the Divine. Here also is a man who, in his capacity to express himself with honest feeling and simple humility, provides what aloof and alienating intellectual insights cannot. And here is a man who knows the redemptive power of asking for and receiving Forgiveness.

Drawing on these resources, after the Scapegoat is offered up and after we have revealed to the world our own terrorizing ability to defend ourselves, our President could acknowledge to all of us and to the world that the events in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania had causal antecedents; that crisis can bring maturation, allowing us to perceive our collective shadow, already well-known to many peoples of the world; that our mask of victimization belies our collective action that manipulates governments, displaces whole cultures, enslaves economically, exploits land outside our borders, and supports terrorism against large masses of people whose ways of life differ vastly from our own.

The President could further acknowledge that we are capable of honoring and revering other humane cultures; that we can be a caring friend; that we can listen and then respond with an outpouring from our vast resources without inflicting our cultural values and laws on the recipients; that we are capable of asking for forgiveness; and that we are capable of expressing our enormous power with compassion, concern, and civility.

These acknowledgments, combined with a tangible demonstration of our firm resolve to make amends, could lead to unprecedented international renovation that would rekindle respectful and reverential world relationships.

Human perception could change—again in the blink of an eye. The ancient Holy Wars would be over.

A Radiance of Love,