Carrie Triffet: The Ogre and the Safety Dance

There once lived a very large ogre. He wasn’t a particularly ill-intentioned ogre; in fact he rarely operated with any intention at all: When he got hungry, he simply ate. And he was hungry most of the time.

He gobbled up people, houses and helicopters. Elephants and motorbikes. Ice cream factories and used car dealerships, post offices and natural history museums. He ate whatever was in front of him. And as he ate, he got bigger and bigger, heavier and heavier.

The ogre lived in a lavishly appointed castle high on a cliff overlooking the ocean. The people who lived nearby were quite nervous about his presence, as you can imagine. They did whatever they could think of, to protect themselves from his astounding appetite.

They bathed in vinegar, hoping to make themselves less tasty. But as it turned out, the ogre liked pickles. They bought insurance policies in case of accidental consumption, but found it didn’t bring much comfort. (Or compensation. Should’ve read the fine print.)

In desperation, they began to meet every Wednesday night, to perform a safety dance together. The band would play, the drummers would drum, and the people would sway in unison and stomp their feet to declare their need for safety. It felt good. It felt empowering. It even felt kind of safe.

And the ogre thought it curious, what was going on in that brightly lit village hall, every Wednesday night. But so far he’d found other things to satisfy his Wednesday appetites, so the people were hopeful that their safety dance was working. (And who knows. Maybe it was.)

Over time, the ogre got so big and heavy that the ground shook beneath him with every step he took. The cliff on which his castle was built began to crumble, bit by bit under his weight, the rocks and earth tumbling into the ocean far below.

At first he took no notice. He just kept eating and getting heavier. But then big chunks of cliff started to fall away, taking his electric fences and private bowling alley with them. The movie theatre went next. He was sad to see his favorite playtime stuff go, and hated the thought of losing the rest of his beautiful home. But then he shrugged and thought to himself, Well I’m not going to let all this perfectly good food go to waste. I’ll eat it all instead.

And so he did. He ate his classic car collection and the garages that housed it. He ate all 76 rooms of his castle. He ate the 4 heated swimming pools and the boiler room too. He ate the gardener and his ride-on lawnmower.

The cliff groaned under his weight, and the entire village began to slide toward the sea. The frantic people convened a special, non-Wednesday meeting to perform an urgent daylight safety dance. But (wouldn’t you know it), the stomping of their feet caused that final tiny tremor, the one that crumbled the very earth where they stood.

The terrified ogre and villagers alike, all hung by their fingernails onto the rapidly crumbling cliff.

This is not a fairytale, by the way. (But you probably knew that already.)

But let’s freeze-frame here for a minute. Because although the scene admittedly looks pretty alarming, it actually holds the clear potential for magnificent liberation from fear itself.

Think of that cliff as our current world: The world made of fear. (Not the greatest place to cling to, but it’s all we’ve ever known, right?) And think of the ogre as our worldly society, which is a reflection of, and operates according to, the world’s fear-based dictates.

And the villagers? Well that’s you and me, obviously. Swaying and stomping in hopes of keeping the fear-based world we inhabit at bay, while simultaneously trying to hold onto the fear-soaked status quo.

Problem is, our safety dance itself is made out of fear—every bit as much as the fear-based world we see ‘out there.’

Not the most effective tool, then, for transcending the world as we know it.

But like I said: There’s incredibly good news inherent in this story. Because where are those random little crumbly chunks of the world all headed? They’re falling into love.

The ocean of love

And that’s the real point of the tale: Within view of the cliff, yet seemingly separate from everyday life, is the vast ocean of love—the world made of love. This, too, is no fairytale. It’s real, and it’s here. We are already in it. We are already IT.

Yet from the vantage point of the fear-soaked cliff dwellers, the ocean looks frightening. (But honestly, what wouldn’t look frightening, when all you know is fear?)

From dry land, we observe from afar the ocean’s many moods. The coming and going of the tides; the gentle lapping or fierce crashing of the waves, depending on the weather. It all looks alien and scary, out of control, and very, very wet. Everything about the ocean of love seems dangerous, and forbidding, and altogether best avoided.

So we struggle to keep our distance from it, lest we slip into its mighty depths, never to be seen or heard from again. We must stay safe, we tell ourselves. We must cling to that cliff—to stay in control of this oceanic threat, at all costs.

Ok.

So you may have noticed a couple of flaws in the fear-based logic, there:

1. We are never truly in control of the uncontrollable, no matter how hard we fight it. That doesn’t stop us from trying, of course. We’ll expend vast amounts of time, energy and even money, to pretend to ourselves that we’re in control. We all do it; it’s part of humanity’s current hardwiring. It’s a little bit bonkers, frankly…but it helps us feel safer. (Sometimes.)
2. As A Course in Miracles so succinctly puts it, In your defenselessness, your safety lies. Meaning, there’s no such thing as safety, as long as you’re still clinging to the crumbly cliff; as long as you’re still defending yourself against the ocean of love, in other words. Which is really what it’s all about.As long as we’re fighting to protect our self, and seeking to control the limitless ocean, we can only ever experience the temporary illusion of safety—not safety itself. Because that fight for self defense, belongs entirely to the world made of fear. Basically, the ongoing quest for safety is what the world made of fear is really all about. But funnily enough, the world made of fear contains no actual safety within it, and it never did.The only REAL safety comes from letting go of the cliff and dropping into that magnificent ocean of love—which is your true home, your eternal safety and your own sacred identity itself.

Here comes the ‘S’ word

Surrender. Yeah, I know. Surrendering is hard, no two ways about it.

Except, the opposite is what’s actually true: Surrender is the easiest thing in the world. You just stop fighting and you let go of the cliff. That’s it. Grace does the rest.

True, it feels plenty weird to stop defending yourself against the ocean of love. In my experience, you have to override a fair amount of inner programming, to hear love’s silent invitation more loudly, than all those inner fear-based reasons why not. Even so, the actual doing of it is incredibly easy. Relaxing, even.

Surrender only seems hard when viewed from the vantage point of the cliff-dweller. When you’re viewing the ocean of love from a perspective that seems to be outside of it, the ocean appears forbidding. You’re afraid to go there. You might drown.

Because there are always deep-down ‘outsider’ beliefs operating, that say things like: Love isn’t trustworthy. It’ll lure me in with kindness, and then kill me. Or, if you’re on a longtime spiritual path, it might be something like: Well ok, I accept that love is wonderful beyond all imagining. But there’s something fundamentally wrong with me personally—everybody else can be welcomed into love, but I can’t. Or a similar variation: Love is wonderful and I’m possibly worthy of it, except I’m doing surrender wrong. I’ll never get access to love.

Sometimes it’s big scary love that’s the problem, in other words, and sometimes it’s inadequate little me. Sometimes a bit of both. All of it is designed to keep love at bay.

But as an intrepid spiritual explorer, you might decide you’re ready to risk the unknowable ocean in spite of all that. So you mentally decide you’re going to surrender into love…but the rest of you says, Oh, hell no. We’re not going there. Because that silent majority of you, is still deeply afraid of love’s vast ocean. Because, yes, you might drown.

Yet the truth is always this: It’s impossible to drown when you know yourself as the water.

It doesn’t matter what the water is doing: Rising or falling, tranquil or stormy. You are it. You flow with it, as it. You are always safe at home, knowing yourself as love’s great ocean, whether that flow happens to be gentle or fierce, in any given moment. What greater safety could there be?

So. How, you might ask, do you learn to identify with the water, instead of the crumbly cliff? I would say it’s simpler than it seems.

Most people wait until they have some kind of life or death, ogre-iffic, cliff-crashing crisis, before they’ll let go into the scary, undefended unknown of love. But does it really have to be that way? Do we need a massive cataclysmic crisis, before we can surrender into love? I don’t think so.

So here’s my answer to that ‘how-to’ question, of learning to identify with the water: Go little and often. You want to know the sacred safety of the water as yourself? Go down to that metaphorical beach. Do it all the time, make it a regular outing. And while you’re there, start dipping your littlest toe into the ocean of divine love.

Just your littlest toe. At first even that may seem pretty frightening, sure. But really. If big scary love bites it off, well, you’ll still have the other 9. Right?

You’ll soon discover through your own firsthand experience, that your toe is perfectly safe in love. Gradually you and your toe can develop a tentative relationship with the limitless divine ocean. Over time, you’ll start to notice how infinitely patient and trustworthy it is. You’ll notice how cool and refreshed your toe feels, after taking its brief daily dip in the oneness of love.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll still need the catalyst of something moderately upsetting, some reminder that life isn’t in your personal control, before you’ll swim further out into the divine ocean. You might need one, or two, or ten, or a hundred of these episodes, depending on your level of stubbornness.

But then at some point, there you’ll be, doggedly doggy paddling out there, expending endless effort and energy to stay afloat, when yet another one of life’s uncontrollable upsets comes along…and you’ll just do it: You’ll just let go and sink. Gratefully. Because you’ve already recognized from your own experience, that the ocean is not only where you want to be—it’s who and what you want to be.

This letting go into love might also have to happen one, or two, or a hundred dozen times, before the mental/physical/emotional/spiritual surrender is complete. (Although by this stage you’ll likely no longer need an upset to catalyze you; the surrender into love is its own delicious reward.)

This is the phase of the surrender process that I’m currently in. Each episode of letting go brings incredibly rich, yet partial knowings of divine truth in its wake. And so the ongoing process becomes a wondrous adventure: You let yourself sink. Each time you relax, deeper and deeper into the safety of the great unknowable. And sooner or later, in its own perfect timing, love will surely take its rightful place at the helm of your being.

And that is when it’s impossible to drown.

It’s no fairytale.

(And they all lived their divine birthright ever after.)