Radical Departures, or The Fantasy of the Status Quo
By Judith Taylor
Interfaith Center
What is fantasy? It can be our refuge from reality, or it can be our point of departure for a leap into the unknown. What separates the two is our attachment to our need for security. No one is immune to that need… there is the righteous need for stability and security when raising a child,
or caring for our elders and those who are unable to care for themselves.
There is the need for knowing that certain methods of practice yield certain results. Then there is the need for having mental and emotional security – we need to have the concepts which define our roles in society and to ourselves, be the same tomorrow as they are today. Even the most prominent thinkers and philosophers are not immune to this. One example of this is a thinker and innovator in the realm of mathematics whom I greatly admired because of his daring - Albert Einstein. But even he succumbed to his need for security. This led him to fudge his math, inserting a “cosmological constant” to modify his General Theory of Relativity, because he needed a predictable and stable universe (what does this tell us about the universe if a brilliant scientist needs to lie to himself and to others to create the fantasy of predictability?) Our spiritual lives are particularly vulnerable to this need for predictability. Most religions demonstrate the emotional need to have theological stasis, stability, predictability and dependability – the primary focus is on “ancient wisdom”. I’ve heard it said that many people act as though God wrote the Bible and then died. Why? Perhaps some religions need stasis so they don’t offend their supporters. Others want to keep bringing in new people, so they avoid controversy or pushing the envelope of the comfort zone. One constant I’ve observed is that we humans tend to flock into groups, then only grow at the pace that the group as a whole is willing and able to sustain. This is as true of the “new age” seekers as it is members of more traditional paths. Religious doctrine can be quickly established in any group path, be it a Pagan coven or a Christian
church, a Jewish synagogue or a Buddhist songha.
How do we avoid this clinging to the fantasy of the status quo? Religious doctrine which deteriorates into dogma strips the breath of life from my spirit. The only cure for the spiritual blahs I’ve found to have a lasting effect for me is the initiatory path. Initiation is change, growth, entry into the newness of creation. It can vary from the relatively mild ‘aha’ of the light going on when we see an old concept in a new way, to the radical departure from comfort zone that spirit serves us when we have done long preparation with our spiritual practices. Initiation can be as gentle and peaceful as a mother’s caress, or it can be the wild flinging kundalini rocket ride into states of ecstasy. It really gets radical when we have spent a lot of time by ourselves out in nature. Yeshua (the ancient Aramaic name for the one most now know as Jesus) was a true radical for his time… he stretched his peoples’ comfort zone, and really rocked their conceptual basis for religious practices. How did he prepare for this? How did he gather his energy? He was known to spend some time out there by himself… sometimes 40 days at a stretch. That boggles my mind. Could I do that? Spend that long in retreat – no phones, even the cell phone that my daughter claims to see growing out of my ear. No TV's. No restaurants. Nobody to talk to except myself and God and Her messengers. Am I willing to sit in the mouth of the dragon? To enter the cave of my own heart and face what’s in my own soul, whether I like it or not? To face the intensity of my own fears and angers? To face the intensity of the ecstasy? Ecstasy is even more intense – and scary. How long can I sustain a state of rapture before pulling away, before I have to think about it? Rapture and ecstasy require a certain state of purity to sustain the energy physically, and even more so mentally. They also require the willingness to burn all the old ways of thinking out to open the channels up to receive this state of being. This requires the sustained, repeated effort of the tried and true, the repetition of the spiritual practices which strengthen and purify the body and mind - and the willingness to get radical, to go where I’ve never gone before. The initiatory paths are the ones that keep opening their practitioners’ hearts and eyes to the wonders of this Divine Creation that we’ve been given to play in… and keep it forever fresh and new. I’ve heard it said that saints are so lighthearted because they feel a wave of bliss and have to laugh, then feel another one that is totally different and have to laugh again. Sounds good to me. This road is wide enough for a lot of travelers – who wants to go along?
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