911 and the Remembered Self

This is a difficult post to write, just as a post on the Holocaust would be difficult to write. The pain, suffering and anger we feel over such tragic events is real. We know it is real because we have all experienced it, both subjectively in the inner world of our psyches and objectively in the outer world of physical matter. We know the pain, sorrow and anger at having our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and friends ripped from our lives with malice aforethought. We rage at those who have perpetrated such an enormous act of human destruction in the name of God. We rage at God and wonder if science is right in claiming we’re all just a small cog in a mindless machine. But then we recant because a part of us recoils at the possible finality of death. We must see those we lost in a better place. We simply must, for if they are not then all hope is lost.

I write this because The Forgotten Self’s world gives no satisfying answers to the soul as to why so many innocents should be cast upon the ruins. I write this to try to make sense of what appears at first, second and third glance to make no sense at all; to have no meaning at all. If, in telling the symbolic tale of 911 through The Remembered Self’s eyes, I should further wound those who have lost loved ones on that day, I offer my deepest apology. It was not my intent. My intent is to offer meaning to their death. My intent is to offer meaning to an apparently meaningless world.

A Few Reminders
The Remembered Self’s world is unimaginably complex, varied, intricate and creative. We are unimaginably complex, varied, intricate and creative. Time and space is a construct of consciousness. Consciousness is a’priori to matter, which is to say that matter is a symbolic objective construct of a subjective inner world of feelings and beliefs. We play by the rules in physical existence and the primary rule is that our beliefs create our reality. Who you are is multi-dimensional. You exist in more than the one world and the one time your five senses perceive. You and the creator are one, and yet individuality is never lost. Nothing ever happens to us without our agreement, for the multiverse is cooperative, not competitive. All actions exist as a probability and any probability can and will be actualized. All of eternity exists in the spacious present, which means our point of power is in the present moment. There is no death.

The following quote are the closing remarks by Seth in his and Jane Robert’s book, “Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment – Volume Two.”

“You have lived in a world in which you believed you must struggle to survive – and so you have struggled.
“You have believed that the natural contours of nature were somehow antagonistic to your own existence, so that left in the hands of nature alone you would lose your way. You have believed that in the very framework of your psychology. In your experiences, therefore, all of these things have largely proven true.
“Nothing taught that you were creatures. I have been trying to lead you into a new threshold of perception, where the old myths of evolution can be seen as outmoded, ancient or forsaken castles amid a forest of beliefs - a forest that is indeed itself a magically formed one. The forest is the world of your own imagination, surely, the imagination of your minds, and yet given force and power by the innate creativity that rises up from an inner world that represents much more truly the origins of man and beast. The world has been largely hidden by the camouflages shed by science and religion alike, but in your times the landscape began to appear so dark and threatening, so forbidden and alien to your own desires, that its end seemed all the more inevitable and swift.
“I hope to have given you in this book a far more gallant and true picture, that represents the origin of your life, structure and being and thought. The inner world of reality, the world of dreams, presents a model of existence in which new energy, vitality, and being is everywhere apparent, ready to come forward to form new transformations, new combinations of energy and desire.
“That inner psychological universe is a psychic gestalt, propelled, formed, sustained or driven by value fulfillment, love and desire, by the loving values that have no limit. The universe does not give up on itself, or on any of its creatures. It is ruled by a different set of values, and by an inner cooperative exuberance.
“You may need some time before the old beliefs become less prominent, and finally fall into their proper decay – a decay, incidentally, that does indeed have its own kind of majesty, energy and beauty. But the inner natural leanings of all consciousness within the realms of your being now yearn for constructive change, clearer vision, to experience again their inherent sense of corporeal spirituality, physical and psychic grace. They want to sense again the effortless motion that is their natural birthright.”

With those words let’s see what the events of 911 might look like in The Remembered Self’s world.

The Symbolism of 911
Two things are of importance in determining the meaning of the events of 911. We must first understand the belief system that created the event, and secondly we must understand the symbolism of the targets selected. I’ll address the belief systems that created the event after I go into the symbolism of the targets. Whether the terrorists consciously chose September 11 because the date represented our national emergency call number, we may never know. What we do know is that the date of the attack contains the same numbers we call when we need help, and that call for help is always answered. Very few Americans missed the significance of the date. Whether the terrorists planned it that way or not does not matter. What matters is the significance of the date in the mass consciousness of the world’s most powerful country. 911 is our cry for help. But what kind of help is it we are crying for? We are the richest nation in the world, so I doubt it would be a cry for more wealth. We are the most powerful country in the world, so I doubt it is a cry for us to grow stronger. Keep in mind that a belief in wealth presupposes a belief in poverty, and a belief in power presupposes a belief in weakness. When you are already the richest and most powerful, asking for more of each goes against The Remembered Self’s idea of value fulfillment where each and every creature in the universe is driven in a cooperative venture to fulfill not only their own highest value, but in doing so fulfills all others as well.

In The Forgotten Self’s world bad things fill us with rage, bitterness and hatred, and a need for revenge, even though that is not what they come into our lives to do. Nothing is ever lost in The Remembered Self’s world, and so our task after an event such as 911 is to uncover what it is we are trying to tell ourselves. I’ll talk about our response to the events of 911 later, but for now I wish to stick to uncovering the reasons we created the tragedy. What did our cry for help in the outer world of physical manifestation represent in the inner world of subjective reality? The answer may lie symbolically in the targets that were actually hit. Oddly enough, they were the world’s symbols of wealth and power and protection; the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Keep in mind that in The Remembered Self’s world the events of 911 were a joint cooperative venture between the terrorists and us, and neither is to be judged. Beliefs create reality. No life is ever lost without the individual’s deepest consent. This is an important point if any sense at all is to be made of this tragedy. The only meaning to be gleaned from The Forgotten Self’s world is confirmation of our deeply held belief in good and evil, in victimhood and mindless destruction. In The Forgotten Self’s world thousands lost their lives long before their allotted time because of the insanity of twelve Muslim Zealots. We believe they are evil, or at the least, fanatics, and they believe we are the minions of Satan. And so, as in Israel and Palestine, as in Northern Ireland, we begin an endless cycle of attack and counterattack. Tit for tat ad infinitum. We believe in terrorism and we believe in victims and therefore they are created and recreated by the energy our judgment gives to them.

Wealth and power, in and of themselves, are not evil, and so in selecting the World Trade Center and the Pentagon the terrorists and us had to be sending a different message to the collective consciousness of the world. And remember, the collective consciousness of the world was in on the act, although not through thought. Wealth and power is an issue, however, if in seeking it the acquisition robs others of their own value fulfillment. Consider Enron, Worldcom and Adelphia as but three examples of large corporations that had lost sight of the true meaning of value fulfillment. Consider a world where wealth and power becomes a substitute for meaning. If we are really just a cosmic coincidence, the offshoot of a random combination of primordial chemicals; and if evolutionary theory is correct in its supposition of the survival of the fittest, then the pursuit of wealth and power, not for the sake of the whole, but for the individual, is not a problem. It remains a Forgotten Self kind of thing. It is simply a natural outcome of what science has been trying to tell us all along. In The Remembered Self’s world wealth is not bad. Its effect, however, if not acquired with value fulfillment in mind, becomes a violation.

Wealth and possessions become a problem only in so far as we become attached to the point where its acquisition hurts others and keeps us unconscious. And if you think it is only the wealthy, or the large corporations that forsake value fulfillment, think again. When President Clinton tried to pass a universal health care bill it was soundly defeated by both the House and the Senate because the cost of covering all Americans would be too high. It was you and I that defeated that bill, not the hundred men and women of the Senate and not the 450 men and women of the House. We are Buffy St. Marie’s Universal Soldier. It is, after all, you and I, that killed the Kennedys, as Mick Jagger pointed out in Sympathy for the Devil. There is a deep part of us that has always known that wealth and power does not bring meaning into one’s life. In The Forgotten Self’s world we ask, “what does rampant malnutrition in the third world have to do with me?” When we believe we are all separate, as we do in The Forgotten Self’s world, one country consuming one third of the world’s resources is not a problem. What is the meaning of a bloated African baby whose eyes have become a banquet for flies? Does our consumption of one third of the world’s resources contribute to that malnourished baby’s value fulfillment? When we see the conditions in the third world countries our natural guilt rises to our throats, for it is a violation that any human being should live under such conditions when the resources exist to change it.

The world’s resources are not evenly distributed, and so wealth becomes a problem, or, better put, the belief in wealth becomes a problem. For, as long as we believe that wealth is good, we will create poverty to offset it. There is a deep understanding in every human being on earth that meaning cannot be found in a dollar bill, but a dollar bill can, if used properly, do a lot of good.

That starving African baby creates its own reality as well, and to believe otherwise is to rob it of its individual power. Everything is experience, but that is not to say we have no responsibility in our own creations. Every human being on the planet participated in the selection of the targets of 911, and in that sense the events were both individually and jointly created. We chose the twin towers for they represent the enormous structure of our belief systems regarding trade, finance and their necessity in our lives. Our beliefs in the area of trade, finance and wealth have been invisible, which is to say we held them as facts and not beliefs. We see them as absolutes, and yet nothing is an absolute. In The Remembered Self’s world we created in the objective world an event of such magnitude as to lay bare our belief systems before us.

The Pentagon

The combined mass of the World Trade Center made it the largest building in the world and therefore symbolic of our most culturally ingrained belief system. The Pentagon is also one of the largest buildings in the world, but sprawls outward instead of upward. At first glance it appears to represent our belief in the need for power, but real power in The Forgotten Self’s world was to be found in the World Trade Center. The belief is: Wealth is power. The Pentagon, however, represents another core belief. It is the belief in our need for protection. The belief in our need for protection is secondary to an even larger and more invisible belief. In The Forgotten Self’s world this immense belief is supported by an even bigger and deadlier belief. The first is our belief in victimhood, which is under girded by the larger belief in our powerlessness.

In the western world, which in general is considered the first world as opposed to the third or the second world, we have locks for everything; cars, homes, bikes, suitcases, computers, bathrooms, phones, windows… You name it and we have a way to protect it from others. The biggest and yet the most invisible lock, however, is the lock we have around ourselves. It is interesting that the Pentagon is laid out in such a way that its five sided concrete and steel outer shell surrounds an open courtyard. Symbolically the Pentagon becomes a boundary for open space, just as the bars of a cell keep a convict locked up. How much more fully could we experience life if the walls of our belief in victimhood and powerlessness and our need for protection came tumbling down? How much more could we do in the world if the energy that goes into building a massive military machine was spent in such a way that our value fulfillment added to all others?

Because of the nature of the Pentagon building, that of sprawling outward, the jetliner could not possibly destroy the whole structure. Symbolically it tried to open a window in the structure of our beliefs. It punched a hole in the perimeter and allowed those of us in the central courtyard a glimpse of a larger world, a Remembered Self world. That is, if we were so inclined to begin to think outside the box. It opened a symbolic door and gave us a choice; stay in the central courtyard, rebuild the outer wall and remain in The Forgotten Self’s world, or, keep the outer wall symbolically open, thereby affording a larger view of reality and gradually move into The Remembered Self’s world. It is not encouraging that we rebuilt the outer wall with an almost frantic haste. This may be an indication of the strength of our belief in the need for protection.

The Implements of Destruction
If everything in the objective world combines to form a symbolic manifestation of the feelings, emotions and beliefs of the subjective inner world, then the jets of 911 are highly significant. Could it be that they represent consciousness itself? They are solid structures of enormous power that disengage us from the grip of gravity, and move us wherever we wish to go at a speed we could not sustain by ourselves. It is much like our imaginations, or, better put, like consciousness itself. The jetliner is a perfect symbol of freedom as well. It has allowed us to experience first hand far off lands and exotic people who think and act differently than us. Not better. Not worse. Just differently.

The bird is an ancient symbol of spirit, and the jetliner is in every sense a man-bird. We have chosen the perfect symbol to bring down a belief structure that no longer serves us. If we can begin our transition into The Remembered Self’s world we can see the jetliners not as implements of destruction, but as symbols of consciousness, freedom and spirit. Keep in mind that in The Remembered Self’s world there is no death. There is only experience.

The Forgotten Self’s thinking asks the good verses evil question. Why would consciousness, freedom and spirit create such an evil? The answer can only be found in The Remembered Self’s world. In the movie Silence of the Lambs, Anthony Hopkins portrays the epitome of evil in our world, Hannibal Lechter, but we don’t really associate Hopkins with the character he portrays. In The Forgotten Self’s world Mohammed Atta, the mastermind of the 911 plot, is small, powerless and only Mohammed Atta. We don’t see the metaphoric Anthony Hopkins underneath. We also do not see our cooperative participation in the play. In a movie everyone knows they participate not as themselves, but in a role. In The Forgotten Self’s world we maintain that the role we play is the essential us. There are no Anthony Hopkins portraying the Hannibal Lecters. In The Forgotten Self’s world the movie is the real deal.

The jets were used in a way that no one, other than the fanatics, could have imagined. In a way this is similar to our current conception of consciousness. We see consciousness as a by-product of brain, certainly powerful, but nothing without the body. Until 911 we understood the power of the jet in a different way than we did after 911. Now we know it can destroy as well as bring us to soaring heights. But, this is also the power of consciousness. In the hands of skilled pilots it can create the best humanity has to offer. In the hands of madmen it creates the worst in us. It is all us, however, and unfortunately there have only been a few skilled pilots of consciousness. Jesus and the Buddha are considered two of the best. We all need to become skilled pilots of consciousness so that everything we create will add not only to our value fulfillment, but to all others as well.

Heroes by Choice – Heroes by Chance
The above heading was the title of a CNN one-year anniversary program on the heroes of September 11, 2001. The heroes of choice, of course, were the fine men and women that paid with the price of their own lives attempting to save others. Whether in uniform or not, these were the people that knew they could not live another day if they did not give their all to help. These were the people that knew the answer to Schopenhauer’s metaphysical question: How is it, he asks, that an individual can so forget himself and his own safety that he will put himself and his life in jeopardy to save another from death or pain – as though that other’s life were his own? Such a one is acting, Schopenhauer answers, out of an instinctive recognition of the truth that he and that other in fact are one.

Heroes have always had one foot in The Remembered Self’s world if but only for a moment. Sure, they were afraid if they had time to think of their own fear, but their fear was secondary to their deeper understanding of the true nature of reality. No, they could not articulate it as it is stated in all of my posts, but their actions speak symbolically of their ultimate knowing. The heroes of 911 are no different than the soldier that throws himself on a live grenade to save his buddies. Heroes go against evolutionary theory that says passing on your own gene pool is paramount to all individuals of every species. Heroes go against the evolutionary idea of survival of the fittest. Heroes are often the most fit of us and yet they willingly sacrifice themselves for a greater good. If survival was what we are all about then everyone would have been climbing over each other to get out, the strongest stepping on the weakest. Heroes fly in the face of our most commonly held ideas of who and what we are. They are part of the evidence that we are more than we think we are.

The CNN program referred to them as heroes of choice, but heroes rarely think before they act. It is almost as if they have no choice, for their actions are usually immediate, like the soldier throwing himself on the grenade. The grenade, with a fuse from three to five seconds, does not allow the hero time to mull over his choices. He acts from the deepest part of his being with the understanding that he will die only to this particular focus of his physical self. This is not Forgotten Self thinking, but rather automatic Remembered Self thinking.

The heroes of United Airlines flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania did have time to think and they chose The Remembered Self’s world. They were willing to risk their lives right on the spot in order to save their fellow passengers and those that would be killed if the terrorists made it to their target. There were no pilots among the heroes of flight 93 so they must have had a strong sense of the fate that awaited them. They embraced that fate despite everything science taught them about cause and effect, rational thinking, and the universe as machine. That part of all of us that is never fooled took over for the passengers of United Airlines flight 93. It took over for all of those that gave their lives to save others. There is nothing in us that science can identify that makes heroes out of ordinary people, unless, of course, there are no ordinary people and we are all heroes. If such is the case that we are, as Nelson Mandela says, powerful beyond measure, then let’s explore the role of the victims in this drama.

Heroes by Chance
There are hundreds of stories that came out of the events of 911 that tell of delays, odd mishaps, chance encounters that kept people away who ordinarily would have been in the World Trade Center that fateful day. It never occurs to us in The Forgotten Self’s world that those events were created not by chance, but by choice. If, as Seth tells us, no one can create a choice for us then those people who were saved from tragedy because an alarm clock didn’t wake them up in time to go to work chose not to be at the World Trade Center that day. There are no accidents.

If you believe there are no accidents you are beginning to move into The Remembered Self’s world. If you are to plant both feet in this new world then you must transfer the power from the “cosmos,” or God, or whomever you ascribe the power to and give it back to yourself. You become the creator of your own “accidents,” and heroes-by-chance, those we call victims in The Forgotten Self’s world, become heroes-by-choice. Why would anyone choose to die like that? The Forgotten Self’s world provides no answer. It does make sense, however, in a world that is a unified whole, where each aspect of the whole is aware of the actions of every other aspect and where no action is ever undertaken without the whole’s agreement.

We think our feelings are in response to the actual event, but if, as Seth and Elias stipulate, the event is a response to our feelings then we better take a good look at those feelings. Seth says this:

Your world and everything in it exists first in the imagination, then. You have been taught to focus all of your attention upon physical events, so that they carry the authenticity of reality for you. Thoughts, feelings, or beliefs appear to be secondary, subjective – or somehow not real – and they seem to rise in response to an already established field of physical data . . .
You are, of course, literally hypnotized into believing that your feelings arise in response to events. Your feelings, however, cause the events you perceive. Secondarily, you do of course then react to those events.

This being the case then all “victims” become heroic participants in the disaster. They have chosen to leave this particular physical focus in such a way as to give us the most dramatic picture possible of our feelings and emotions. The manner in which they left this world was chosen by them for them. To believe otherwise is to say they have no power of choice in the manner in which they leave this world. Who they essentially are is as alive now as before 7:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001. They are as alive as the soldiers in a war movie after the battle scene is shot. But, there is responsibility beyond the mere experience of one’s life, and in this very big sense life is more than just experience. For, in the essence of who we are, there is no evil, there are no villains. The heroes of 911, at the level of their true essence, knew that at the exact moment of their death. They did not sacrifice their physical focus to teach us to hate more, but to love more.

Our feelings of meaninglessness and fear had grown so strong that only such a catastrophe could symbolically represent them. Three thousand people died, not as victims of a fanatical idea, but as willing ( but not through conscious awareness) heroes to move the race forward. They knew, as did our own deepest self, that a shock was needed to punch a hole in the manner in which we think about ourselves. How many of us questioned, or even railed against God after September 11? How many of us had our faith shaken to the core? September 11 was not created as a test of faith any more than AIDS was created to punish lasciviousness. September 11 was created as a call to a wider view of reality that could make sense out of such an apocalypse. Who we are is so large, and so vast that only such a symbolic act as 911 would be sufficient to knock us out of our belief in our insignificance and powerlessness.

The Terrorists
If you want to change the world for the better, then you are an idealist. If you want to change the world for the better, but you believe it cannot be changed one whit, then you are a pessimist, and your idealism will only haunt you. If you want to change the world for the better, but you believe it will grow worse, despite everyone’s efforts, then you are a truly despondent, perhaps misguided idealist. If you want to change the world for the better, and if you are determined to do so, no matter at what cost to yourself or others, no matter what the risk, and if you believe that those ends justify any means at your disposal, then you are a fanatic.

Fanatics are inverted idealists. Usually they are vague grandiose dreamers, whose plans almost completely ignore the full dimensions of normal living. They are unfulfilled idealists who are not content to express idealism in steps, one at a time, or indeed to wait for the practical workings of active expression. They demand immediate action. They want to make the world over in their own images. They cannot bear the expression of tolerance or opposing ideas. They are the most self-righteous of the self-righteous, and they will sacrifice almost anything – their own lives or the lives of others. They will justify almost any crime for the pursuit of those ends.
(Jane Roberts for Seth in “The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events”)

There is nothing wrong with wanting to change the world for the better. In fact, Seth tells us that changing the world for the better is our mission in life. In terms of value fulfillment this means that we do no harm to others in the process of making our own lives better. The word “better,” however, is as relative as Einstein’s time, and presupposes a “worse.” With that in mind I think most sensible people in the West would agree that the terrorists are fanatics based on Seth’s description above. But, you may remember that Seth also said that the taking of any life, other than for food, is a violation. Remember, also, that all life is a unified whole. There is no separation. To take any life in the pursuit of an ideal, then, makes the idealist a fanatic. In The Forgotten Self’s world the terrorists are fanatics and we are not.

What the terrorists nor we realize is that even though we believe in The Forgotten Self’s world, we live in a Remembered Self’s creation. What that means is this: All individual action toward an ideal will have an effect. No individual is powerless and therefore, in making yourself better, you make the world better. We believe that the individual, especially in the face of such apparently staggering odds, is powerless to change anything. And so, we don’t even bother to change ourselves, let alone the world. It is the fanatics’ belief in their individual powerlessness that propels them to such acts of destruction. Seth tells us: “When you fulfill your own abilities, when you express your personal idealism through acting it out to the best of your ability in your daily life, then you are changing the world for the better.”

It never occurs to any of us that the heroes of 911 were really victims of their own and our beliefs. It never occurs to us because we believe matter creates consciousness. If we begin to move into The Remembered Slef’s world where consciousness is a’ priori to matter then the events of 911 will begin to take on a whole new light. And, lest you think the terrorists are the only fanatics, consider this. Any time any life is taken for the sake of an ideal then the taker of that life is a fanatic. Even if the taking of that life is in defense of an ideal already in place, the taker of the life is a fanatic. This includes individuals, groups and nations. Seth suggests an expansion of a commandment present in most religions of the world. He suggests expanding “Thou Shalt not Kill,” to “Thou Shalt not Kill Even in the Pursuit of your Ideals.”

Killing has become so commonplace in The Forgotten Self’s world that even our priests give their blessings to killing for the sake of an ideal. It is called War, and whether it is defensive or offensive matters not a whit. It is a violation and it is fanaticism. Here is another example of fanaticism. The ideal involved is the saving of human life, a noble ideal by any standard. Medical science, seeing all life as separate and human life as paramount, has sacrificed millions of animals over the years in the pursuit of this ideal. If we cannot hold all life as sacred then we cannot fully embrace human life as sacred. If we cannot treat ourselves as sacred we cannot treat any life as sacred.

When one of the central beliefs of our time is that we are all separate beings and separate from God; When one of the central beliefs of our time is that we are the result of billions of years of evolution, a chance happenstance; when one of the central beliefs of our time is that “we are good and they are evil,” it is no big leap to take a life, whether it be human or animal. When one life in The Forgotten Self’s world is more precious than another, then the “collateral damage” of a smart bomb won’t even interrupt digestion. But, when in The Remembered Self’s world each life is as precious as all life combined, then the “collateral damage” or “any damage”of a smart bomb wounds us all and you feel it in the pit of your stomach.

Terrorists and fanatics will always exist in The Forgotten Self’s world, and judging from our response to 911 we have begun to create more of the same. What are the core beliefs involved? Evil exists in the world. We are vulnerable. Fear. We are victims. We must protect ourselves. Preserve the ideal at all costs. History has shown that these beliefs perpetuate the evidence that makes the belief necessary. Put another way, if we continue to believe the things we believe, nothing will change. Strike – counter strike. Strike – counter strike. You hit me – I hit you. You hit me – I hit you. I blow-up your home – you blow-up mine. I blow-up your home – you blow-up mine. I destroy your city – you destroy mine. You kill me – my bother kills you. Your brother kills my brother – my brother’s sister kills your sister. And when you repeat it out loud, just as I wrote it, doesn’t it sound just a little ridiculous? With psychology like this the meek just might inherit the earth.

I have chosen to honor all those who sacrificed their lives on September 11, 2001 by finally looking at them through the eyes of The Remembered Self, whose eyes are also my eyes. The heroes of 911 have precipitated a change, but have, as always, left the choice of how we view that change up to us. We can remain angry and frightened beings, separate from each other and from God, or we can finally acknowledge that part of us that is never fooled and step fearlessly into The Remembered Self’s world. The choice has always been ours to make.
Bill Marshall