Essay for
Dec. 2004

Spiritual Terrorism

All religions create borders of learning by their creeds, dogma, theology, rituals, constructs and beliefs. These borders establish moral and ethical conduct, providing pathways to live your life. Parents and educational systems also establish moral and ethical standards by creating patterns of learning and living. These instructional borders of learning create safety and security for you and others within a society. Those living within similar borders form a community. If you maintain those borders you are accepted as a participating member of that community. The acceptance creates security and safety, which is what a border does.

Defined borders require border guards to protect and maintain the integrity of those borders. But control by one always makes another subservient. The one that is subservient may acknowledge and accept the control, maintaining their secure status as an accepted member of the community: living within the safety of the border confines. Those that question or rebel against the imposed borders can lose the acceptance and protection of the community, jeopardizing the implied safety and security.

The borders of one community do not cross the borders of another community, even if each community shares common ground. A held border of one community creates an invisible wall of stone, defining what is enclosed within. The border defines what is on one side, leaving the other side within another definition. The other definition equally has its defining borders. Within the definition of each, the common ground is easily overlooked or ignored, as maintaining the walls takes precedence.

Within each community the borders are held as sacrosanct, with each member of the community being self-appointed border guards. If the governing body of the community overtly maintains the borders, then there are powerful border guards that control how the borders are maintained. If the citizens of that community maintain the borders, everything goes relatively smoothly. If one or more of its citizens want to discover what is beyond the borders that is when the border guards move in, both self-appointed and those with the controlling power of the borders.

Borders of any description, besides creating safety and security, equally establish border-fear, which is in two parts. The border creates acceptance, safety and security, establishing trust in the border. But that trust exists within the implied threat of what will occur if the border is not maintained, establishing fear encasing a trust. But fear and trust are a duality that cannot coexist in the same space.

Borders create trust hemmed in by fear. The essence of trust is totally unrestricted. If contained by a restraining fear, trust is no longer unrestricted, but is now restricted or contained within the borders of a fear. The containment destroys the unrestricted essence of trust, allowing fear to rule the trust. And fear always destroys in the guise of protecting. It is subtle entrapment without being aware of that imprisonment.

The second part of border-fear is rejection from a community that has provided you with safety, security and acceptance. The border was your protection. To transverse the border you must abandon your protection, which is negating the border-fear that is encasing the trust. When you move beyond the restrictive borders that the containing fear created, the border guards perish. Those border guards lived upon fear and cannot survive in an environment that provides no food to sustain them.

Borders always create fear encased within trust. It is a diabolical system of control with good intent. The fear-based good intent establishes borders, and those borders can be defended and used to attack. They are simultaneously both a shield and a sword. The borders of one will continually run into the borders of another, resulting in border wars where humans become the disposable cannon fodder of construct wars.

That which apparently provides protection and security for one can surreptitiously deny it to another. A border held by one is a potential security risk to another. If the other sees that potential as real, border wars can be preemptively initiated to neutralize the potential. But potential is just that, it is not real. Such is the power of a belief in a border.

A border standing alone is always a valid tool of learning. If the border is maintained with trust it retains its flexibility and evolves as the community evolves. It becomes a living guide, pointing out a direction for the community to take. If the pointer transforms from flexible direction to inflexible control the pointer easily turns into stone, preventing those within from escaping and keeping outsiders from entering.

The wall creates an element of containment and secrecy, establishing fear in those outside the wall, as what is not seen is not understood. To be seen, the wall has to come down, exposing that what was potentially fearful as nothing but a protective barrier. The protective barrier was not designed to attack others, but to provide safety and security for those within the walls. And those walls cannot be removed by those on the outside; they must be removed by those on the inside: sometimes one stone at a time. Any outside help is not seen as help, but as attack. This establishes endless cycles of attacking and defending, and once again humans become the crushed mortar maintaining the wall.

Borders, if controlled, potentially establish spiritual terrorism, both within and outside the walls. From the inside a wall creates the fear that can be used to attack, falsely protecting a trust. From the outside the wall can be attacked, which is attacking the fear and not the trust. Those on the inside experience the attack as an attack on the trust, as the fear is hidden within the border. It is fear versus fear, and nothing of any value will ever eventuate from such an encounter. It never has and never will.

If you maintain your borders of learning with open and directional trust your evolution is on the move. If you run into the borders of another, that is trust centered but controlled and confined by fear, allowing those borders to reinitiate the border of your trust. You have devalued your trust to once again be controlled by fear.

If border walls exist, simply allow each to dismantle their own walls, without help or support from another on the outside, as it can be viewed or experienced as an attack. The borders of fear confining a pure trust will ultimately disintegrate by themselves with no requirement for outside help. Then trust will meet trust on an open and progressive playing field that contains no element of fear. It is at that moment within an advancing civilization that the clarity of equanimity of compassionate insight will dominate. Each within that civilization will be seen as belonging to one family, and that family will always be supportive no matter where you move.

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