Fate, karma, whatever, makes its determinations that are beyond our prediction, but we have the freedom to determine how we will respond to that, and in that freedom to decide how we will respond to life’s unexpected events, we find a kind of inner security.
Robert: Welcome to Inner Sight. Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way with new eyes. So, stay with us and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our theme for today is security. So many people avoid things in life and they’re looking for safety. They’re looking for security and perhaps that need for safety and security even prevents them from achieving greatness because they end up making that their main concern. There’s a thought by Helen Keller that I think is In sync with this idea, and I quote, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate, is strength undefeatable.” I guess there’s a lot of truth to that. I think a lot of us are so afraid of losing our security that we don’t even make positive changes in life. There’s so much emphasis today on security, especially after September 11th, and there has always been concern about financial security, medical security, physical security, home security, national security, and we could go on and on. Why do we have all this insecurity and fear?
Sarah: I think it’s human and I wouldn’t want our listeners to think that we regard ourselves as immune from these cravings and fears. I think it’s very human. The world is in fact a scary place and there are terrible things that happen to people; there’s no denying that. Life has its tests and its sorrows and some people’s row to hoe is harder than others’. There are accidents and there are traumas that can happen totally unexpected. I think what Helen Keller was trying to say is that in spite of all that, we have to live, we have to draw the next breath, we have to go forward with our lives as if it’s working towards something evolutionary and something that is part of the greater good. I personally think that you either have this conviction of the basic goodness of life in the world, or you don’t. It makes me think of that statement by Albert Einstein, that from everything that he could see he concluded that the universe is a friendly place, and I think I kind of resonate with that. In spite of everything, in spite of September 11th, in spite of Sudan, in spite of Rwanda, the universe is a friendly place all in all.
Dale: Yeah, there are legitimate fears, given our present state of consciousness; fears about our security. But I think it’s largely as I say, a matter of consciousness and where we’re focused, because a lot of our focus is largely on our material way of life. And that being the case, we…
Sarah: We want to hold on to it. We want to protect it.
Dale: Yeah, that’s what I mean. There is a tendency to hold on — a very strong tendency — because we identify with the material world so closely, in our material selves as material beings. That in itself has the seeds of insecurity because there is so much separateness in the world. Fear comes from holding on to the material world and the material things and there is an instinctual reaction that takes over in these times and it comes from having too close an identity with the material world than we have with the spiritual world. I think it’s this attachment that we have to material things which is the culprit here and fear producing. It isn’t materialism in itself so much as it is our attachment to it and our identity with materialism, which keeps us and holds us kind of imprisoned.
Sarah: I suppose everything that we have in life, from our material things to our family, to our career, to whatever attainments we’ve made, we have to hold it all with a very light touch and be prepared to let go of it when something greater than ourselves determines that that’s going to happen. I think this is what Helen Keller was implying when she said that we have to keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate. That we still have a certain amount of freedom. Fate, karma, whatever, makes its determinations that are beyond our prediction, but we have the freedom to determine how we will respond to that, and in that freedom to decide how we will respond to life’s unexpected events, that’s where we find a kind of inner security.
Dale: Yes, and as Helen Keller implies here, to keep our faces towards change is in a sense looking forward and not backwards. When there is a very deep material focus in one’s life, there is a tendency to look back at what we’ve accomplished and at all the material things that we’ve purchased. So, I think rather than looking ahead to the changes that are coming — that can come in consciousness that is — this backward looking also produces more fear and insecurity.
Sarah: I always like to think about what seed of progressiveness, what seed of spiritual growth might lie in any particular inclination or attribute, and I wonder if there is some seed of growth that lies in this deep need for security that tends to get focused on the material plane and on preserving the outer form, whether of a house or a loved one or whatever. That misdirected focus nevertheless veils an urge to protect and to salvage and to watch over; that maybe this is an impulse that’s only right in the experience of life — that we preserve and foster what we love.
Dale: Sure. I think it’s a basic instinct of survival that comes from very deep within us.
Sarah: A mother couldn’t say or think to herself about her children, well, when God wants them, he can have them. I don’t think that’s natural for a mother to feel that way. She wants to protect those children instinctively. Look at how animal mothers behave when their babies are threatened. It’s instinct, and I think there’s a basic goodness in it, a willingness to sacrifice and to risk everything for what one loves. But like everything in life, it has to be transformed and uplifted and that’s where I think we’re putting our focus in this discussion on security.
Robert: In current times we have so much security or at least the illusion of security. We have unions that protect us from losing our job at the whim of some boss who might be unscrupulous; we have a multitude of insurance policies to protect us and to make us feel secure. But would you say that in spite of all these things that we have, people in general feel more insecure today than they did forty years ago?
Sarah: I don’t know that they do. I can remember as a child being afraid of the Russians. The Cold War was very much in sway as I was growing up, the Cuban missile crisis, all that sort of thing. The other great fear of my childhood that I remember was of polio. How that would take children and disable them for life. We don’t have those fears today. The Cold War has been settled, I guess we could say; polio is no longer a threat. But there are other things that have taken its place. AIDS, economic disaster…
Dale: The nine eleven disaster.
Sarah: That sort of makes every fearful person say well, I rest my case. The world is a scary place.
Dale: Yeah, there’s more fear of flying today, a lot of insecurity in flying.
Sarah: Rightly so!
Dale: So, sure, in some cases there is more insecurity and in other cases there is more security. People were feeling secure at the stock market going up and up and up, and then the bubble burst and suddenly they felt very insecure. So, it comes and goes and it depends there again, on the physical circumstances.
Sarah: I don’t know, I think this sense of insecurity may also be due to a kind of heightened sensitivity that we find in a lot of people today. It’s just my opinion, but it seems to me that people’s imagination, their ability to put themselves in another’s shoes, to imagine possible outcomes—that, combined with the tremendous barrage of information that we’re all given via the media about things that are happening all over the world — earthquakes, famines and so on — that maybe people do have a sense of greater insecurity because they know more about what can happen in the world. It’s partly a matter of information.
Dale: And I think you also mentioned just a moment ago that it has to do with consciousness. There’s more of a sensitivity and consciousness now and the mind is much more awake and aware. We have all this sensory input coming in and we’re able to process all this input that we’re getting from the world and about what’s happening in the world, and I think that it just increases our sensitivity to how threatening the world can be in certain places.
Sarah: And I think this growing awareness of globalization is part of the issue of security because people are realizing that our fates as nations and peoples are interlinked with each other today in a way that cannot be undone. I think Pope John Paul XXIII must have sensed this coming because thirty or forty years ago he said that the social progress, order, security and peace of each country are connected necessarily with the social progress, order, security and peace of all other countries. Knowing that is a sign that we realize our sense of security will rise or fall on the well-being of people all over the world, and not just our own little circle.
Robert: Security is something that so many of us want. Sometimes we want it too much, to the point where we stop growing, and that’s what I guess we’re talking about today. If you want to read about security and probe this further, I actually like the autobiography of Alice Bailey because it demonstrates how someone who started out with a lot of security more or less rebelled against it, and what most of us are seeking, she tossed over her shoulder. I guess if she hadn’t done that, she wouldn’t have become the person that she eventually became, who had such an impact upon human consciousness. So, you might want to take a look at her viewpoint of security and what we think is security. I always think of security as being similar to maybe a ship in a harbor. I remember a friend of mine who bought a yacht and he never went out of the harbour. I think that to some extent people who are overly indulgent in security are like that ship. We’re designed to achieve goals and overcome obstacles and not be like the ship that remains in the harbor. But more importantly, too, is how evil thrives on insecurity. Why do the forces of evil thrive on insecurity?
Sarah: Well, I think one reason might be that they thrive on fear, and fear is directly the outcome of insecurity. When people are fearful, they turn inward, they isolate themselves from others, they become separated and therefore more easily divided. That would be one reason.
Dale: And evil thrives on chaos. Evil thrives on uncertainty and divisiveness, misinformation, lies, and all of that bad stuff. That’s its bread and butter and that’s what it does. This tends to focus our consciousness at the emotional level, which is where fear is really generated, at that emotional level, stirring up the emotions. This makes it more easy for people to be manipulated by fear because they operate at that level where the mind isn’t in tight control. That’s why they can create chaos and they can create more insecurity and fear.
Sarah: A fearful people can be, like you say, manipulated, misinformed, misdirected, misled, because they’re not using reason. They’re not putting truth first. They’re acting by their gut, you could say, responding by their gut and it makes them malleable and manipulated by evil forces.
Dale: Yes and we’ve seen some examples of this in recent times — people being manipulated by fear — just recently the September 11th attack. Mr. Bin Laden himself has been stirring up his people and using them and manipulating them at their emotional level to create uncertainty and distortion and lies.
Sarah: Unfortunately, the Internet is also a way that people can be manipulated and misinformed, and that’s because gossip and rumors can fly fast and furious across the Internet and create a great deal of steam and hot air without really revealing any truth at all. Sometimes it’s kind of frightening to see how people can be mobilized so quickly by things that are not true via the Internet. That has to be watched because, combined with a sense of fear and insecurity in people, it can be used to destabilize a society. I think it’s something we need to be aware of.
Dale: Right, and another example of that is probably in the anthrax scare. A lot of that has turned out to be not true. We hear a lot of misinformation about all of this and people think they’re doing right, but actually they’re feeding right into the forces of divisiveness and misinformation, which are the forces of evil. Not that these people are evil, but it’s their focus, and their reaction tends to keep the pot stirred up and keeps human consciousness out of focus.
Sarah: Maybe that’s why some people say that the best response to the forces of evil is to laugh at them. It’s probably not sufficient on its own but being able to laugh at that which could frighten us can lift the consciousness up to the mind, because laughter is so closely related to the mental view of life rather than the emotional. And I think of the comedians today who are doing what they can to make us laugh, not at the tragedy of it all, but at the ridiculousness of some of the worldviews that underlies the evil.
Dale: Yeah, that’s what Mel Brooks is doing.
Sarah: Yes, he’s a great example with The Producers’ “Springtime for Hitler” — to laugh at evil.
Robert: The Alice Bailey books, upon which this show Inner Sight is based, have so much in them about spiritual philosophy. What is the spiritual foundation of security?
Sarah: Well, coming back to that statement by Einstein, which I so love, that the universe is a friendly place, I think that is a suggestion of the spiritual underpinnings of security—the belief that the world is created for a good purpose and heading toward the realization of greater good. As I said earlier, I think you either believe that or you don’t and I don’t think anybody can be talked into it; it’s something that you conclude out of the depths of your own human nature. But Helen Keller must have believed that when you think about what she coped with in life. She was deaf and blind. If you just take a moment to imagine how the world must have seemed to her. She couldn’t hear anything and she couldn’t see anything; to me that fills me with a sense of absolute terror. So, for her to be able to talk about being undefeated in her trust of fate says that she had a very positive, spiritual world view and what a great soul she must have been.
Dale: She couldn’t see with her eyes, but she could see with her mind very clearly, and it comes out in that statement that we used for the opening thought. The question about the spiritual foundation of security — I think it comes down to right relationship, wouldn’t you say? Of building right relationships because we’re so concerned now about the insecurity in the world and a lot of it is because we don’t have good and right and harmonious relationships with other nations, for example.
Sarah: Yes, and that’s why I think focusing on protecting one’s own and what one has is not the answer, because that doesn’t build right relationships. It keeps you focused on yourself.
Dale: Well, that keeps us divided. We have wonderful relationships with a lot of nations in the world, and we don’t have any threat of insecurity with those nations. It’s from these places in the world where we haven’t built or put enough emphasis on building goodwill and used the energy of goodwill to build relationships and a sense of caring and concern for what’s going on. I think those are the things that enable us to reach out.
Sarah: Another factor in spiritual security on an international level is the existence of the United Nations. When we look back on the world fifty years ago without the United Nations, I think it was a much more dangerous place because nations now can talk to each other and air their differences and work out agreements. Another thing that comes to my mind about spiritual security is the statement from the Bible that says, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” “In the enunciation of truth, security for all people lies,” Alice Bailey said. Truth makes us free.
Dale: Yes and I agree with everything you said about the United Nations. That’s another example where nations come together and this energy of goodwill flows very smoothly in those cases. That’s really at the crux of the whole problem in the world — the divisiveness. It has to be overcome and the only way to overcome it is by the application of goodwill.
Robert: That’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with a world prayer called the Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight”. This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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