Peter Mond, December 2009

 
A fifteen year old Ethiopian boy, a resident of northern Israel, was evacuated along with other Ethiopian children from absorption centers during the Second Lebanese War. They were housed temporarily in a youth village near Jerusalem. Pamela, a founding member of ITQS and a refugee from the north herself, had decided to volunteer there. She offered to set up an ITQS room to help children, family members and staff cope with the stress of war and separation from family. A room was soon found to serve as the ITQS space. After his first session in the room the boy said: “I never thought such a place existed in the entire world.”
 
A forty-year-old married woman arrived early for her first session and waited in the ITQS Centre for a short period alone. When our staff member arrived, the woman told her that she had experienced a strong feeling of “love and giving in the room”. What sort of place can arouse such strong reaction? There are many examples of positive reactions to the ITQS environment, the common denominator being a feeling of being in a special place, unlike anything previously known or experienced. Maybe you can imagine what such an environment is like before I describe it. Take a few seconds to imagine a place you didn’t know existed. What does a space of love and giving look like?
 
Before I describe the space let me tell you something about the ITQS approach, the basis for the space's consecration. If we understand the intentions of ITQS's founders, the picture might become clearer.
 
Mark Cohen, philosopher, author, and one of ITQS's co-founders, described the ITQS space as sacred. His vision at the beginning of the 21st century was to introduce a new environment into schools - and, in effect, all modern institutions - as a vessel for a higher consciousness, characterized by being, wholeness, quiet, exploration of deep issues, and self-control.

 
ITQS allows the manifestation of “being”, it acknowledges and recognizes us for who we are - our uniqueness - in a very non-judgmental way.

 
ITQS provides a place for wholeness, where body, mind, feelings and spirit can connect. Here we can really feel at home; we can feel joy, contentment, love and well-being, truth, authenticity, and healing.
 
ITQS is a safe place where we can open our hearts and our souls, and be heard; and held in respect, trust and love.
 
ITQS is a place of quiet, allowing us to connect to stillness and silence, to not-knowing and listening. It is possible to listen to someone in inner silence, to be an empty vessel to receive the gift of another’s speech.
 
ITQS is a place that allows the deep exploration of issues.
 
ITQS is a place that encourages us to take control of our lives. It empowers us.
 
What enables this consciousness to appear? Is it the staff member who facilitates and focuses these energies, witnesses them and contains them for all those entering the sacred space? Is it the room itself: lovingly prepared to provide balance to the senses, beauty to the eyes, and a vessel for silence? Is it the silence of those visiting the space? Or is it something more? Summing up the “Quiet Space,” we can see that being in it is intrinsically very valuable.
 
What makes such a place so important in our society today? The molecular biologist Darryl Reanney offers an answer. He states that the biggest problem facing western civilization is a “gap” at its center caused by the breakdown of old faiths and myths. Science and technology, rationality, and materialism have triumphed, but at what cost? Myth and religion provided reassurance, safety, belonging and vision. They dealt with the fundamental elements connecting the individual to spirit and the universal.
 
The triumph of understanding has dethroned man from his divinely ordained place at the center of creation (astronomy). Evolution states that man, who shares 98% percent of his genes with the chimpanzee, is not made in God's image (biology). Deep time has reduced the span of human life to utter insignificance (physics). The decay of mythical reassurance, the removal of the shield of faith, the breakdown of ancient familiar patterns has resulted in “an unparalleled loss of identity” (Reanney 1991).
 
The individual self has taken center stage in modern western society; but, without their protective mythical armor, men and women find themselves increasingly caught in the cage of ego: alone, vulnerable, isolated, and full of fears and anxieties, many imaginary. They take respite in entertainment, sex, drugs, drink, sport and gambling, all billion dollar industries. Social solidarity inevitably suffers at the hands of self-indulgence, irresponsibility, escapism, narcissism and materialism.
 
This gap at the center of western civilization, according to Reanney, needs to be filled by a renewed sense of the sacred, for we no longer have any sense of sacred time, space or purpose. He does not use the word referring to objects worthy of religious veneration, respect and devotion; but rather understands it as something of the highest value, that inspires, enabling man to transcend his personal ego-boundaries, his limitations. This sense of sacred alleviates the sense of separateness, encourages commonalities, deep knowing, a sense of unity and wholeness.
 

Seeing this task as the most important of our generation, Reanney urges us to fill the gap with an experiential sense of trust and caring and a renewed sense of beauty. How we do it he leaves up to us, though he understands it involves telling a new story, a parable, a poem of reality rich and beautiful that transcends. It involves reintroducing a cycle of rituals, participatory ceremonies that connect us to elemental simplicity and to the sublime glory we shall be. We all need human contact, to belong to something bigger, to remember the past but affirm the future. Breaking down the barriers that wall us off from each other and the world is the most practical patent for survival.
 
Ten years after his book, The Death of Forever, was published, in another part of the world the ITQS approach was developed, realizing Reanney’s call for a new environment to take us out of our ego cage, to a place where we can “lose ourselves” in beauty, music, nature, friendship and silence. Speech may be our most valuable tool but it is also our greatest handicap, trapping and confusing our intuition. (Reanney 1991)

The ITQS room's raison d’etre is to provide people — young and old, healthy and sick, challenged and fully capable, children and adults, of all religions and cultures —with an experience of the future, a new environment to further learning, personal development and healing. It is a place of experienced security and reassurance; for many people it is unlike anything they have ever experienced or could imagine. We ALL need a place like it.
 
It is a sacred space, and in order to really understand the significance of sacred space we are in need of a greater perspective. Eliade, one of the great historians of religion, provides one with his examination of how ancient religious man experienced the world. Ancient man wandered around the globe initially in homogenous space, infinite space with no points of reference, no orientation. This amorphous mass of endless, more or less neutral places was a world of chaos, into which there suddenly irrupted a higher power, breaking through homogenous space to create heterogeneous space. The opening, symbolized by a pillar, ladder, tree, mountain, or pile of stone, enabled ancient man to communicate with heaven with absolute reality. The place of irruption became an absolute fixed point at the center of the world, a cosmos, a point of reference making orientation possible, fixing limits and establishing order. The world becomes a place where the sacred is manifest. 
 
Territory outside of the cosmos was unknown, occupied by foreigners, ghosts and demons. When it was conquered and inhabited it became transformed, consecrated by the ritual repetition of the cosmogony, the divine creation of the world through which the gods make order out of chaos. Religious man moved about only in sacred space. (Eliade 1957)
 
Initially ITQS was introduced into schools, a classic modern environment of homogenous space filled with endless corridors and similar classrooms. The creation of a unique heterogeneous space, set aside from all the others, made a complete break from the surrounding environment. All around was noise, technology, information and constant pressure of one kind or another. Entering the room required a ritual, involving the removal of shoes and wiping of feet, waiting in turn quietly before entrance and being individually introduced into the room by a caring member of the team. The room had been lovingly prepared to cater for one’s physical and aesthetic senses. It aroused awe and wonder in those who entered, child and adult alike.
 
The world of chaos is reflected in the increasingly violent school atmosphere, the race after achievement and acquisition, and the influence of events in a very volatile Middle East. It reflects also our inner chaotic world, populated by fears, anxieties and stressors. How are these transformed into order and structure? To be in the ITQS room is to be exposed to an atmosphere of respect, love and silence that enables us to connect to a higher self, to share this place with others — this place of being where there is inherent structure.
 
But that is only half the story. Order and structure may be experienced in the ITQS room, but most of the territory outside of the room is “foreign territory”. This territory, the land of anxiety and fear, can only be made ours by repeated consecration, the ritual taking of possession. The ITQS team developed a conditioned calming tool enabling anyone to reach the land of trust, security and quiet. This tool provides the key, the reference point reconnecting the person to that profound feeling experienced in the ITQS room. After the technique has been learnt over a period of a month, whenever and wherever a person feels themselves in the land of anxiety, fear and stress, they can reconnect to a place of quiet inside of him by silently repeating the words. It becomes, at stressful times, a connection with a different reality from the one in which a person normally participates, just as the ITQS room is unlike any other in which we find normally ourselves. So we return full cycle to the Ethiopian teenager. 
 
Bibliography
Eliade, M., “The Sacred and the Profane,” A Harvest Book: New York, 1957
Reanney, D., “The Death of Forever,” Souvenir Press: London, 1995