Dancing in Babel

That our outer world reflects our inner condition—an insight Michael Brown highlights in his book The Presence Process—is graphically portrayed in two movies currently playing, but with opposite outcomes in each movie.
In Babel, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett are a Californian couple on a tour bus in Morocco, when a bullet pierces the window of the bus and seriously injures the wife. The tourists, in a state of panic, assume there’s been a terrorist attack, a mistaken judgment that triggers an international crisis. This only complicates and delays the severely bleeding woman’s rescue by medical helicopter courtesy of the U.S. Embassy.
In fact, there is no international crisis. There’s been no terrorist attack. Instead, the shooting is the tragic result of a well-meaning gesture turned sour in the hands of ordinary folk who haven’t yet learned to live responsibly.
It all began when a Japanese businessman took a hunting trip to Morocco and left his rifle as a gift. In time the rifle found its way into the hands of two young boys who had no idea of the gun’s range. Trying the rifle out for distance, they hit the bus.
This is a difficult film to watch as the consequences of people’s actions unfold with devastating impact on the wellbeing of others. A gift turns into an inadvertent shooting, which leads to the childcare provider back at the couple’s home in California having to miss her son’s wedding in Mexico because the parents are holed up in a desolate mountain hamlet awaiting rescue. Driven by an emotional reaction, she takes the couple’s two children across the border without authorization. On the trip back, in a car with an inebriated relative, she ends up in police custody and is deported.
Meanwhile, the Japanese businessman’s deaf-mute teenage daughter illustrates another key insight of The Presence Process—that all of us are in search of unconditional love, but that the only place we can find it is within ourselves.
The daughter is in crisis, occasioned by her discovery of her mother’s body. The mother had shot herself, a reality with which her daughter couldn’t cope, not having grown up with a knowledge of the power of Presence. Desperately wanting to be accepted and loved in the absence of awareness of the loving Presence within her, the young girl throws herself at any man with the potential of showing her affection—even appearing naked to the policeman who comes to their home to ascertain the ownership of the rifle.
Says Michael Brown, “We are completely responsible for the quality of our life experience.” Babel is a tragic reminder of how so many of our actions are carried out without real awareness. We react to life’s situations—assuming an attack is terrorists, taking children across a border without proper papers, getting in a car with someone who is too intoxicated to drive—instead of responding consciously, guided by our deepest essence. Little things, when handled irresponsibility, can escalate and rebound with painful consequences.
By the same token, awakening to ourselves and becoming truly aware enriches lives. In Happy Feet, Emperor penguins have developed a society that can’t make room for a penguin with dancing feet. Emperors just don’t dance, they sing! This penguin has zero singing talent.
As circumstances will have it, the penguin colony is in danger of losing its food supply to humans, who are fishing the Antarctic at an unprecedented rate.
When the misfit leaves his home, he in due course comes across a different kind of penguin that also dances. Emboldened to be himself, the outcast embraces his dancing ability. This is when circumstances really seem to deteriorate. He finds himself captured and flown to a zoo in the United States. Here, bored out of his mind, he eventually begins doing the one thing he can do—his feet start moving. Noticed by a little girl, he attracts an audience. Just when everything seems hopeless, he’s soon on his way back to Antarctica, with a radio tracker attached. Back home, he tells of his adventures and teaches his whole colony to dance. When the scientists catch up with him, they are so impressed by the dancing colony that the world decides to save the fish supply for the penguins.
Nothing has gone according to plan in this penguin’s life. But as he becomes attuned to his true self, he enables all who are around him to expand their understanding of themselves, recognize the impact of their actions on the lives of others, and develop their ability to make choices that are responsible and loving.
Happy Feet is a fun movie, well animated, uplifting. Babel isn’t fun at all, and not for everyone. As a CNN review reports, “The cumulative effect is more grueling than cathartic, even if it may also be good for the soul.”
Circumstances that aren’t what we planned on burst into all our lives. The question is, do we react destructively? Or do we respond creatively?
There is a Presence within you that has awesome power. No situation is of an order of magnitude too big for this Presence to cope with. Not only can you survive, you can thrive. In fact, the more attuned to Presence you become, the more aware you are that, as Michael Brown puts it, “All that has ever happened to us, no matter what form it has taken, is what has deliberately brought us to this moment.”
Babel is all around us. Action and reaction characterize so much of what happens in everyday life. But in the midst of the world’s chaos, there is an oasis of peace that anyone can tap into. Will you allow your outer world to define you? Or will you redraw your outer world as a reflection of your loving inner Presence?
Your life has brought you to a point at which you can become free of the kind of panic that characterizes the lives of the people portrayed in Babel. Calm and centered in yourself, you then begin making choices that are creative, and that have a positive impact on the people with whom your life interfaces. Capitalizing on your gifts, you become a gift to others. Your happy feet become a channel for generating happy people.