In love and support,
Sharon & Clark Cameron
CompuMind, Inc.
Expanding Human Potential
"Attitude makes all the difference!"
(Email) Camerons@Compumind.com
(Web) http://www.compumind.com
Quote - World Trade Center Building
Architect
"I feel this way about it. World
trade means world peace and consequently the World Trade Center buildings
in New York ... had a bigger purpose than just to provide room for tenants.
The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man's dedication to world peace
... beyond the compelling need to make this a monument to world peace, the
World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a representation
of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs
in the cooperation of men, and through cooperation, his ability to find
greatness." - Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1987), chief architect of the World
Trade Center
Deepak Chopra The Deeper Wound
As fate would have it, I was
leaving New York on a jet flight that took off 45 minutes before the unthinkable
happened. By the time we landed in Detroit, chaos had broken out. When I
grasped the fact that American security had broken down so tragically, I
couldn't respond at first. My wife and son were also in the air on separate
flights, one to Los Angeles, one to San Diego. My body went absolutely rigid
with fear. All I could think about was their safety, and it took several
hours before I found out that their flights had been diverted and both were
safe.
Strangely, when the good news
came, my body still felt that it had been hit by a truck. Of its own accord
it seemed to feel a far greater trauma that reached out to the thousands
who would not survive and the tens of thousands who would survive only to
live through months and years of hell. And I asked myself, Why didn't I
feel this way last week? Why didn't my body go stiff during the bombing
of Iraq or Bosnia? Around the world my horror and worry are experienced
every day. Mothers weep over horrendous loss. Civilians are bombed mercilessly,
refugees are ripped from any sense of home or homeland. Why did I not feel
their anguish enough to call a halt to it?
As we hear the calls for tightened
American security and a fierce military response to terrorism, it is obvious
that none of us has any answers. However, we feel compelled to ask some
questions. Everything has a cause, so we have to ask, what was the root
cause of this evil? We must find out not superficially but at the deepest
level. There is no doubt that such evil is alive all around the world and
is even celebrated.
Does this evil grow from the
suffering and anguish felt by people we don't know and therefore ignore?
Have they lived in this condition for a long time?
One assumes that whoever did
this attack feels implacable hatred for America. Why were we selected to
be the focus of suffering around the world? All this hatred and anguish
seems to have religion at its basis. Isn't something terribly wrong when
jihads and wars develop in the name of God? Isn't God invoked with hatred
in Ireland, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, and even among
the intolerant sects of America?
Can any military response make
the slightest difference in the underlying cause? Is there not a deep wound
at the heart of humanity?
If there is a deep wound, doesn't
it affect everyone?
When generations of suffering
respond with bombs, suicidal attacks, and biological warfare, who first
developed these weapons? Who sells them? Who gave birth to the satanic technologies
now being turned against us?
If all of us are wounded, will
revenge work? Will punishment in any form toward anyone solve the wound
or aggravate it? Will an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and limb for
a limb, leave us all blind, toothless and crippled?
Tribal warfare has been going
on for two thousand years and has now been magnified globally. Can tribal
warfare be brought to an end? Is patriotism and nationalism even relevant
anymore, or is this another form of tribalism?
What are you and I as persons
going to do about what is happening? Can we afford to let the deeper wound
fester any longer?
Everyone is calling this an attack
on America, but is it not a rift in our collective soul? Isn't this an attack
on civilization from without that is also from within?
When we have secured our safety
once more and cared for the wounded, after the period of shock and mourning
is over, it will be time for soul searching. I only hope that these questions
are confronted with the deepest spiritual intent. None of us will feel safe
again behind the shield of military might and stockpiled arsenals. There
can be no safety until the root cause is faced. In this moment of shock
I don't think anyone of us has the answers. It is imperative that we pray
and offer solace and help to each other. But if you and I are having a single
thought of violence or hatred against anyone in the world at this moment,
we are contributing to the wounding of the world.”
Rev. John Strickland Atlanta
Unity Church-- PRAYER FOR OUR GRIEVING HEARTS IN A TROUBLED TIME 9/12/2001
We still our troubled minds for
a time and turn our attention Godward. When the world seems crazy with senseless
violence our souls cry in anguish, "Why?!" We may never know why, at least
while we are in our earthly bodies, but we know that God is good, God is
for us and God will bring comfort if we let God.
We ask for God's guidance to
know what is ours to do and we ask for God's strength to do it. May we overcome
hatred with love. Rather than give in to the darkness let us be bearers
of the light. God is still good. Love will triumph. Courage is rampant.
And peace will always have a chance when we say, yes, to God. Let us grieve.
Grief is good. Let us cry. The tears will help. Let us feel all the feelings
and let us be channels through which God becomes more real, more manifest
in the world. If we will not be God's minds, hearts and hands in times of
adversity, who will?
We affirm the goodness of God
and the oneness of all humankind, even in the face of tragedy. Yea, though
we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we will fear no evil,
for God is with us. Let us help however we can, as much as we can. Let us
not let the love in our hearts be buried with thoughts of hatred or vengeance.
Love is always good. Hatred and vengeance are not. Love heals. Hatred destroys.
Let us choose love. Let us seek the sanctuary of peace that God placed inside
us from the very beginning. And let us resolve to live, especially at times
such as this, our highest understanding of God's truth, regardless of what
others are or are not doing around us.
All men and women are our brothers
and sisters. All children are our children. What we do to them we do to
ourselves. We must resolve to rise above bitter, vengeful, hurtful thinking
to light, hope, faith and love. We thank God, every day, for being our loving
Creator, ever-present Companion and our all-nourishing Sustenance. We bless
those who have lost their lives and we bless their families. We bless the
untold numbers of courageous rescue workers, medical care personnel, firefighters
and unselfish volunteers who are doing what they can to make things better.
We bless all people, everywhere, who feel that violence is the answer to
their problems.
May we witness the miracle of
changed human attitudes so that these people know that God is the only answer.
May the minds and hearts of all people be purified and uplifted so that
we may live in peace, in safety and in good health. May all have a sufficient
supply of everything they need to live full, happy and free lives. Thank
You, God, for being our sure and certain faith that even in our darkest
human moments we can know that the sun will shine again. We pray these things
in the name of the living Christ and in the name of all that is holy, pure
and good. Amen. http://www.atlantaunity.org
Letter from Neal Donald Walsch,
Marianne Williamson, James Twyman, James Redfield and Doreen Virtue:
The events of September 11, 2001,
cause every thinking person to stop their daily lives, whatever is going
on in them, and to ponder the larger questions of life. We search again
for not only the meaning of life, but the purpose of our individual and
collective experience as we have created it-and we look earnestly for ways
in which we might recreate ourselves anew as a human species, so that we
will never treat each other this way again.
The hour has come for us to demonstrate
at the highest level our most extraordinary thought about Who We Really
Are.
There are two possible responses
to what has occurred today. The first comes from love, the second from fear.
If we come from fear we may panic
and do things-as individuals and as nations-that could only cause further
damage. If we come from love we will find refuge and strength, even as we
provide it to others."
This is the moment of your ministry.
This is the time of teaching. What you teach at this time, through your
every word and action right now, will remain as indelible lessons in the
hearts and minds of those whose lives you touch, both now, and for years
to come.
Let us seek not to pinpoint blame,
but to pinpoint cause.
Unless we take this time to look
at the cause of our experience, we will never remove ourselves from the
experiences it creates. Instead, we will forever live in fear of retribution
from those within the human family who feel aggrieved, and, likewise, seek
retribution from them.
To us the reasons are clear.
We have not learned the most basic human lessons. We have not remembered
the most basic human truths. We have not understood the most basic spiritual
wisdom. In short, we have not been listening to God, and because we have
not, we watch ourselves do ungodly things.
The message we hear from all
sources of truth is clear: We are all one. That is a message the human race
has largely ignored. Forgetting this truth is the only cause of hatred and
war, and the way to remember is simple: Love, this and every moment.
If we could love even those who
have attacked us, and seek to understand why they have done so, what then
would be our response? Yet if we meet negativity with negativity, rage with
rage, attack with attack, what then will be the outcome?
These are the questions that
are placed before the human race today. They are questions that we have
failed to answer for thousands of years. Failure to answer them now could
eliminate the need to answer them at all.
If we want the beauty of the
world that we have co-created to be experienced by our children and our
children's children, we will have to become spiritual activists right here,
right now, and cause that to happen. We must choose to be at cause in the
matter.
So, talk with God today. Ask
God for help, for counsel and advice, for insight and for strength and for
inner peace and for deep wisdom. Ask God on this day to show us how to show
up i the world in a way that will cause the world itself to change. And
join all those people around the world who are praying right now, adding
your Light to the Light that dispels all fear.
Today the human soul asks the
question: What can I do to preserve the beauty and the wonder of our world
and to eliminate the anger and hatred-and the disparity that inevitably
causes it - in that part of the world which I touch?
Please seek to answer that question
today, with all the magnificence that is You. What can you do TODAY...this
very moment?
A central teaching in most spiritual
traditions is: What you wish to experience, provide for another. Look to
see, now, what it is you wish to experience-in your own life, and in the
world. Then see if there is another for whom you may be the source of that.
If you wish to experience peace,
provide peace for another. If you wish to know that you are safe, cause
another to know that they are safe. If you wish to better understand seemingly
incomprehensible things help another to better understand. If you wish to
heal your own sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of another.
Those others are waiting for
you now. They are looking to you for guidance, for help, for courage, for
strength, for understanding, and for assurance at this hour. Most of all,
they are looking to you for love.
Letter to friends from Tamim
Ansary, an Afghani-American writer in San Francisco
The Afghanistan Situation
"I've been hearing a lot of talk
about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO (in
the San Francisco Bay area) Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean
killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity,
but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we
do?"
Minutes later I heard some TV
pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done." And
I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from
Afghanistan, and, even though I've lived here for 35 years, I've never lost
track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen
how it all looks from where I'm standing.
I speak as one who hates the
Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people
were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must
be done about those monsters. But the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan.
They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of
ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997.
Bin Laden is a political criminal
with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazi SS. When you think Bin Laden,
think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the
Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had
nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators.
They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and
clear out the rat's nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don't the Afghans
rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted,
hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated
that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no
economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been
burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land
mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the
reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of
bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done.
The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already
suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble?
Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut
them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all
that.New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs.
Would they at least get the Taliban?
Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have
the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would
get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't
even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't
really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually
it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again
the people they've been raping all this time.
So what else is there? What can
be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way
to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak
of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms
of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome
any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out
of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just
because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan
to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that, folks...."
“You see where I'm going. We're
flirting with a world war between Islam and the West. And guess what: that's
Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this.
Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes
Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he
can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers.
If the West wreaks a holocaust
in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose; even
better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the
West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years
and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for
that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?” ~ Tamim Ansary
Finally, for those of you who
read "The Grinch who Stole Christmas" or saw the movie: Don't stop singing!
Dr. Seuss style rhetoric--as if he wrote it himself.
Every U down in Uville liked
U.S. a lot, But the Binch, who lived Far East of Uville, did not. The Binch
hated U.S! the whole U.S. way! Now don't ask me why, for nobody can say,
It could be his turban was screwed
on too tight. Or the sun from the desert had beaten too bright But I think
that the most likely reason of all May have been that his heart was two
sizes too small.
But, Whatever the reason, his
heart or his turban, He stood facing Uville, the part that was urban. "They're
doing their business," he snarled from his perch. "They're raising their
families! They're going to church! They're leading the world, and their
empire is thriving, I MUST keep the S's and U's from surviving!"
Tomorrow, he knew, all the U's
and the S's, Would put on their pants and their shirts and their dresses,
They'd go to their offices, playgrounds and schools, And abide by their
U and S values and rules,
And then they'd do something
he liked least of all, Every U down in U-ville, the tall and the small,
Would stand all united, each U and each S, And they'd sing Uville's anthem,
"God bless us! God bless!"
All around their Twin Towers
of Uville, they'd stand, and their voices would drown every sound in the
land. "I must stop that singing," Binch said with a smirk, And he had an
idea--an idea that might work!
The Binch stole some U airplanes
in U morning hours, And crashed them right into the Uville Twin Towers.
"They'll wake to disaster!" he snickered, so sour, "And how can they sing
when they can't find a tower?"
The Binch cocked his ear as they
woke from their sleeping, All set to enjoy their U-wailing and weeping,
Instead he heard something that started quite low, And it built up quite
slow, but it started to grow-- And the Binch heard the most unpredictable
thing... And he couldn't believe it--they started to sing!
He stared down at U-ville, not
trusting his eyes, What he saw was a shocking, disgusting surprise! Every
U down in U-ville, the tall and the small, Was singing! Without any towers
at all!
He HADN'T stopped U-Ville from
singing! It sung! For down deep in the hearts of the old and the young,
Those Twin Towers were standing, called Hope and called Pride, And you can't
smash the towers we hold deep inside.
So we circle the sites where
our heroes did fall, With a hand in each hand of the tall and the small,
For America means a bit more than tall towers. It means more than wealth
or political powers. It's more than our enemies ever could guess. So may
God bless America! Bless us! God bless!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Expanding Human Potential"
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