Thoughts About the Unthinkable
Suzanne Taylor
September 13, 2001

I'm sending this to people close to my heart, as well as in response to pieces that have been sent to me. I have appreciated all the outpourings that are linking us at this time of heightened reality, and this email is my contribution as we grope for what to think and how to be.

Of all the pieces that are circulating, Deepak Chopra's, saying that what we are dealing with is our "collective soul," is the one that affected me most. My God, what have we done to deserve this? How has America so abused other people that women and children would cheer at such awesome human devastation? It's unthinkable that Americans would celebrate if this tragedy had occurred in another country. But what is it – coexisting with the caring in American hearts – that would let us do what would drive people to such a retaliation?

No one need wag a finger. We are all in this together. And life will extract its due. We will be moved. We will take part. It is us. Where is that higher ground that Einstein pointed to where problems can't be solved at the level of consciousness that created them? It's this higher ground that we must find. There are no experts. It's a quest we're all on.

Is there a scenario where America is humble instead of defiant? Can we say we are powerless against this kind of aggressor? That is the truth, whatever else we say. Then what? Can we offer to come to the table to make the world work – to start again? Is there some way that we can yield to whatever insanity overtook the world, prepared henceforth to do only good? Could good prevail because it is good?

If getting our pound of flesh results in world destruction, isn't capitulation to the truth a sane alternative? This would have to be for real. Real humility in the face of the unworkability of any other worldview. Whatever that higher ground might be, it is clear that the alternative to it is to wipe out the enemy. Since that isn't doable, we have no intelligent choice but to grope for something else.

It is chilling to listen to Bush declare that Americans would be 100% behind the use of strong force. I am incredulous at the thought that he might believe this.

Kim McDonald, our WebDesigner, who always sees the truth of things, says this.

My thoughts: This entire tragedy is part of the intricate weave of our red-carpet to salvation. I feel it's a slow road humanity is on and we could merely be incarnated at the midway point, with countless years ahead of us as a species to tread before we SAVE OURSELVES. There is no magic pill, no savior, no way out except to stay on the carpet and keep walking. Every single decent person in this country and all over the world is ALREADY opening themselves up to a greater power than themselves...there is nothing left for us to do but love each other.

Yes, I say this, too.

What follows is a conversation about this. Chime in via email and let's figure this out together. More posts will be added as the conversation continues...

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George Cappanelli of The Information & Training Company says: Thanks for your piece, Thoughts About the Unthinkable. This is a time in which each of our thoughts and experiences add to the dialogue. I hope the piece I wrote, Right Action, contributes in some way to that process.

Suzanne replies: Thanks back for your wise words. Yes, what can we do but pour out our hearts and pray that our outpourings have the power to evoke an essential good that will prevail?

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Appreciation to my friend Andy Thomas of Swirled News in the U.K. for this:

Like many on September 11th, I cried when I watched the TV footage of the American tragedies. But I also had a strong feeling of resoluteness - it made me even more determined to do something to make a difference for the better while I'm on this planet.

The world isn't an evil place - such acts are carried out by such small minorities. Most people are ordinary folk, who just want to get on with their lives and have loving friends and families around them. I hope very much that in all the clamour for retribution which is beginning to mount, that it is remembered that this is true for most from the countries of the perpetrators, too...

Two wrongs do not make a right. The word 'war' has been bandied around rather too much this week. Certainly some kind of response is required. But what can possibly be achieved by hitting back with the same force against a different set of people? What can that realistically do to help anyone? Only more misery will be created. What can be done against people who believe they have God on their side? How can you fight souls who feel so passionately about what they are doing that they will sacrifice their own lives to kill what they see as evil? You can never win against such self-belief by force; it will only make them more resolute. Some other approach is needed. As we shed tears, some countries celebrated what they saw as the vanquishing of evil. It's all a matter of perspective. Until that truth is understood and properly examined by the human race, there always will be conflict.

The world is a good place, ultimately, and worthy of help and rescue. We must believe in that, because it's easy to be misled into thinking otherwise by all the focus on the terrible things. But they are transient, and love isn't. Onwards!

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Palden Jenkins, also of the UK, writes:

In cereology [i.e. crop circles], I do believe that current world events could either have a quickening, faster-forward effect or could 'harden the battle lines' and bring things into a different sharpness of focus. I don't get the sense that things will simply trundle along as before. Yet it seems to me that the process of change in public cereological awareness will be 'background' for a while - while the world's attention is being vacuumed up by pressing concerns. There's a massive contextual shift happening in many or all departments of life, and it's just beginning. This will affect cereology, and cereology is part of its catalysis. I'm not sure what we can get ready for that though, or when or how a major change might arise – but next season will probably give some clues. The circlemakers will 'say' things.

Humanity's collective unconscious is splurging stuff at present, spilling over both the horrible and the visionary variety of accumulated content. There's a lot of 'updating of registers,' perhaps a virus-scan, and a 'defrag' going on. Unconscious computing space is fully engaged, and modems are wobbling, but systems are still up.

With regards to the 'everyone helps' you mentioned, what's interesting is that the kind of visionary, 'utopian', 'idealistic' stuff is looking more and more like a practical solution. Mutual empathy is growing - round the back door. Necessity being the mother of invention, the blessing of emergency situations is that they bring forth motion. People like us have experienced a lot of battling with resistance and conservatism in recent decades, as strangers in a strange land, and things are now starting to move, grate, creak everywhichway. It's the 21st Century! Im's'allah! Hang in there, because I think we're going to see a lot more pragmatic cooperation developing in our world in coming years, generated out of pain, dilemma, sense and force majeure. Our challenge in coming years might be to act to calm the energies, arguments and wrenchings in a context of increasing global hullabaloo. A massive global growth process has just hoiked up a notch, and there's more to go.

Referring back to cereology, instead of worrying about 'winning the argument' (whatever that is), we need perhaps to start thinking about potential response to demand, about availability of cereological records, protecting crop formations from excess trampling, working out protocols and support for farmers, and goodness knows what else. Perhaps we need to think forward a jump, in case it happens. My intuition is that public acceptance of such things as crop formations might happen surreptitiously - and suddenly we're landed with a load of work catering for it. Might this take 2-5 years?

Who knows? In the 21st Century, we perhaps just gotta get used to cliff-hangers, perpetually, in waves. The definition of 'security' might be fundamentally changing, as well as national and personal interest, belief and reality. There's a general underlying shift of 'positions' oozing into motion, and cereological 'positions' might be due for loosening up too! I hope our sheer variety, as croppies, increasingly becomes our strength.

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Palden writes again: At my end, I'm stepping back a bit from all that has been happening, to digest things. Trouble is, there has been a volcanic eruption of stuff, only some of which is valuable (at least, to me). I think there's an element of indulgence going on as well - we in the West have had too comfortable a life. I can't help thinking of my mother, who was under Hitler's bombing of London for two whole years, never knowing whether she'd make it, and regularly hearing of someone else who had died. That kind of thing makes the WTC look a little like a small event.

Suzanne replies: Please God WTC won't be small by comparison to what comes next. For all that you could see the gestalt, where most essentially the disparity between the rich and the poor created the tension that resulted in this, at some level that's just a story now, true as it may be. Being in hell is this reality, however understandable it is that we got here. It is "a teachable moment." Is there no action to be taken? Why don't we at least talk about [the intelligence behind the crop circles?] The stamp of the sacred is unmistakable now, and what we would have this hurting world come to see. It is the greatest hope to bring us to another level of reality. Maybe it is early to start efforts to bring this to pass, but timing is what we could be talking about. I feel it is my duty to bring my best to the world, and I know nothing more hopeful and positive than this.

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Palden replies: It's not primarily wealth and poverty which causes terrorism, it's national/cultural arrogance and the active blocking of people's chances to improve their lives. Wealth and poverty can be resolved through less violent means, but the extremity of these acts is born of despair from being perpetually blocked. Poorer and disadvantaged people, given a more level playing field, can and will then sort themselves out through their own efforts. They will then see what they themselves do and omit to do to cause their own problems - but while there is a visible oppressor, it will always seem that it's the oppressor's fault. Many people don't want the worried affluence that Americans and Europeans possess – we are afflicted with another kind of poverty, and we are only half-alive, half-happy and are undernourished by the appurtenances and fat chocolatey-ness of our lives. For me, the Milk Hill crop formation was a turning point in my own path. A second turning point for me has been the steps I've made in relation to WTC – choosing to risk writing and circulating some awkward things. So I've been going straight to my contacts in the heart of the British government and BBC. I am brining out of the cupboard two things I put away. One was a book, "Healing the Hurts of Nations," that I wrote in 1995, which was turned down from publication, and another is a spiritually-oriented project I ran in the mid-90s, the Hundredth Monkey Project. I'm considering a newly-revised book and an interactive website, to interlock with each other, possibly called "Defining Moments." I'm seeking support from no less than the United Nations. It's time. Something in me has fallen away. In retrospect, the most memorable and defining moments of my life have been those times when I have "come out with it" and put my cards on the table. Re the intelligence behind the crop circles being helpful at this time, we're faced with the in-our-face reality that we just *do not know.* Emptiness and stillness is the birthplace of something new. There's more to this story, yet to come, and we're waiting for the next episode – just as with WTC.

Suzanne replies: The rich poor thing was the underlying cause of the "world problematique," that was identified some years ago very cogently and compellingly by a network of brilliant analysts that I was privileged to be privy to. When there's poorer and poorer juxtaposed to richer and richer, ultimately the tension cannot hold. Your own turning point can only be good. I don't know about all the things you reference, like who you are talking straight to at some risk to yourself and what talking straight even means. Maybe it is that darkest of dark stuff, which is rippling through emails. No saying it ain't so. But if it ain't, we are being put through horrible ringers. Who knows now, when anything is possible – but still certain things seem too far off the charts to be in play. Reptilian stories, for instance, still elude me. As you are reaching for what to do to deliver yourself, so am I and those close to me here. We are all activated as never before. So much good can come of this, and the world needed those goods that can come. But let those suitcase bombs go off and all will be for shit. The human race seems maybe seriously about to destroy itself, which of course is what's making for all the creativity. I am drowning in email. I keep falling further and further behind. I can't turn off the TV. The thinking is inside the lines, though. Except when the force of events propels someone beyond. Like the CEO of Canter Fitzgerald, who lost 700 people – 80% of his staff. He has sounded a new note for business. I hope you've heard that today. He says he can't do business (Wall Street) the same way – all he can do is be able to take care of the 700 families. Many tears. He is not the same person. This is what September 11 will do beyond all our ideas and suggestions. Something is happening. We must mostly wait to see what. I'd be interested in your ideas about healing the hurt of nations. How? I wonder if there is some interaction among the really bright lights that would be in order. Still, there are just individuals sounding their calls, when all that I know is that alignment has a power. Is there some way to sound a common voice that would be a next step beyond the individual ones? You would identify in spirit with Robert Jensen, who wrote Why I Will Not Rally Around the President. He is a possible voice to rally round. He's just one among many stating what he states, but he perhaps has said it best. He also co-wrote America's Unlimited War, an expose of our "just" war.

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Suzanne writes to Palden:

Thank you for forwarding your email exchange on "the future." I've excerpted my favorite parts, below.

I think this is original and astute, helping us understand the water we're swimming in so we can paddle in the best direction. Very valuable – as we all come to see ourselves in the same picture, then we can grapple with changes to be made.

...there comes a time when everyone simply gets fed up, and something else has to happen. These things can just run out of steam. It's painful, and there are occasional flare-ups, but we're watching it in Ulster at present - the best people have left, the rest are all shot-up, the old leading lights are ill, old, obsolete or dead, and people are deeply tired and fed up. They want to 'get a life'. This bottom-line, had-enough feeling is probably the biggest force for real transformation in the world today. Buddha: 'the path to enlightenment begins with the experience of suffering.'

...the twist is that consequent mayhems can break out, such as, in South Africa, the crime and AIDS issues they've faced there. In Germany and Japan in the late 20th C, affluence hit them - the pain was internalised to an extent, bringing peace by consumerism. All nations have their own definitive form of collective pain...

Worldwide immunity needs developing. Strangely, the mass media and Internet are helping here, inasmuch as people worldwide are experiencing the pathos of others' extreme human situations much more quickly and intensely than earlier in history - so the experience is getting spread around, felt worldwide. As a result, the dramas tend to localise in vulnerable 'black spots', where the emotional glue holding society together is weak - and the cameras go in and siphon it out to the world. These are stage-sets - 'theatres' - for the unfoldment of a drama - with audience-participation thrown in. World War is no longer needed - the media sorted that.

It's as if the collective unconscious is getting closer-knitted and closer to conscious awareness - by creeping degrees, yet in waves which lap over our resistances and indifference. This is why it's not necessarily the enormity of a crisis which attracts public attention and feeling - it's the symbolic poignancy of it - hence the death of one person, Princess Di, had a similar emotional magnitude to a hurricane affecting millions of people in central America. Hence WTC...Activating deeper, semi-conscious collective processes which ultimately are positive. This, surely, is one of the key evolutionary processes for humanity to go through in the 21st C - the development of greater one-minded/heartedness.

This is interesting, since the duration of events has little relation to their impact. The WTC tragedy, which took place in hours, catalysed indelible shifts of awareness and understanding which, though buried beneath other stuff soon afterwards in people's 'official awareness', nevertheless lurks there, brewing. Something shifted underneath, and the remaining time is taken up with catching up with it. The events of recent decades have shifted the collective unconscious forwards quite fast, and while things remain officially 'normal', they are different underneath. We live in an acculturalised form of controlled schizophrenia. Then, when something eventually gets accepted, it's taken to be given and normal quite quickly. This is because it had been fermenting long and hard deeper down.

...in those moments of horror, dismay or shock which come at us several times a year in the public domain, deeper connections and significances are seen, and those connections unify things...Nation-states and other traditional group identifications are dying painfully - yet within this we are uncovering human subgroup diversity in a new light. In this conflict of agendas, there is vulnerability, and the virus of extreme mass pain gains a foothold and creates mayhem. To the great grief of those who are victims. The light in this tunnel is that illness can become a healing crisis...

Coming back to Afgh, perhaps, on behalf of us all, Afghans are reaching such a point. There will be some further horrors there, but I think that country has turned the corner - it's deeply tired and just needs to rest. We need to watch out for side-spins now - places where the virus goes next. Kashmir is an obvious example - watch out for Burma too. Yet, there's hope. The darkest hour is just before dawn - and there can be infections of positivity too...It's such human qualities as goodwill, truth, cooperation, sense and forgiveness we need to focus on - and the rest follows from that.

A final thought. I believe that, when we look back on our time from ages hence, we'll see that it was the 20th C which was the darkest time, and that the danger, the revival, was already lifting in the early 21st C. I believe the demons are now coming out - we've entered the healing crisis. We got the medicine from the 1960s onwards, but it was highly potentised and worked through from bottom up. The problems are not solved - they're worse - but they're coming out in an intensely localised fashion - and we're on our way. We're on the bridge - look over the parapet, and it's a long way down, with steep cliffs and a raging torrent down there! I reckon we might reach the other side around the 2040's. And then the real stuff begins. You didn't think we came to planet Earth for a quiet time, did you? ;-)

[To read the entire email this came from, visit: THE FUTURE]

Have a look at the Joe Simonetta conversation on my site which is just getting underway with a few people who are interesting to me. See if you might want to be part of it. Have I ever gotten your comments on "The Universe is a Green Dragon," which I think I gave to you, and which you'll keep reading about? You might enjoy being part of it.

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Suzanne writes to Jon Ward, author of Unsettled Dust Hi Jon – I'm sending Unsettled Dust around in email. I am so resonant with what you say, and you say it so well. I hope it gets widely distributed. Surprisingly, the intelligence that I find on the Net seems possibly to be penetrating the halls of power. I pray that this is so. CNN is talking about "more restrictions on our freedom than we have ever seen in our history." The path we are on is hopeless. We must find another one.

Jon replies: Thank you for your email, and for sharing your thoughts. I'm down with the flu right now so my mind is too fogged to say much. I think this is at least in part a delayed reaction to the events of 9.11 because I never get sick usually. I guess many people have experienced these indirect somatic reactions. I think we have to deal with fear, too. The possibility of sudden death appears much closer, at least in the imagination. This calls for some reflection. I will try to write something in the next few days. Browsing the Internet, and the emails flying around, it's remarkable to me how wide and loud is the chorus for a change of consciousness. That should give us hope.

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Liza Persky, Suzanne's daughter and a producer for the Rosie O'Donnell Show in New York writes: Hey mom, we did our show today, first time since 9/11. Try to watch. I produced Valerie Harper. It was good. I think you'll like what Rosie said about her son. Love you.

Suzanne replies: God, Liza, it is so dicey in the world. Does Rosie think about getting out of New York? I'd like us all to get out of the cities. I wish they were not calling it "America's New War" on CNN, like it's a fait accompli. There is much intelligence surging though my email, and even getting on TV, where people talk about getting to the root cause of why people in other countries hate us. We talk about our intelligence failure, and we don't talk about our behavior failure. We have been terrorists in other countries. If we weren't hated, people wouldn't commit suicide to get us. War is a losing posture for us. It makes the enemy hell bent on defeat. What have these enemies got to lose in devoting themselves to our destruction? We already are 100% in our aggressive stance to get them. We know our intelligence is not good enough to prevent terrorism. We are utter fools, rushing to Armageddon. How many more World Trade Centers will it take to bring us to our knees? Werner Erhard used to talk about people with terminal diseases unwilling to change the belief systems that could have been holding their illnesses in place – that people choose to be dead right. We are choosing the dead rightness of our righteousness rather than looking at what it would take to gentle this violent world.

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