Am I safer?

As We, the People, prepare to 'celebrate' the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the media is asking questions like, "Are we safer?" and "Do we feel safer?" As Dirty Harry would say, "Well, do ya?"

Now is the time when all those fears get dragged up again for us...and it's clear: they've never gone away. And in Course terms, just as there is no order of difficulty in miracles, so there's no order of magnitude of fear. One fear is no bigger or badder than any other...fear is fear. Worrying about anything in this illusory world, even though it seems ever so real from our perspective, is the same as worrying about anything else. There is no difference, in truth, between worrying about whether the stock market will fall in value and whether the plane we are taking tomorrow will fall out of the sky. One may seem preferable to the other in those two scenarios (and the preference may differ among us!), but they both symbolize huge fears that are common to most of us: the fear of survival on the physical level.

It's the ego's job to keep us focused on this fear, so it can distract us from the process of awakening from the dream, and undoing the ego itself. Its goal is survival at all costs, and it aims to play as dirty as it must to accomplish its goal. It seems the closer we get to the possibility of awakening, and the more we do our "forgiveness exercises" as they come up, the more opportunities to do them show up also. Seems like, in my own experience, just as I think I'm willing not to exclude anyone from my own list of those forgiven (and I do mean that in the advanced forgiveness way, not in the old fashioned way), I create the illusion of someone "doing something to me" and I get to have one person who is more challenging to include in that list, and whom I get to choose whether to hold out as separate from "the rest of us" or not. Even though I know that if anyone is excluded, then I, myself, am excluded from the forgiveness list (it's my list, afterall!), it still amazes me how my ego fools me into seeing at least one other person as "unworthy" of my forgiveness at any given moment in time. Since we're all one, that person is me, no matter who it looks like they are.

Anyway, back to fear and feeling safer. As we review all those terrible images from that day five years ago, (and believe me, the images are etched indelibly in our consciousness, whether we actually go to YouTube to see them again or not) it might be helpful to remember to ask the Holy Spirit to help us see these images through His vision from now on, and not through the vision of our own egos. It doesn't serve any higher purpose to revisit those horrific images in our memories of that day without the willingness to see it differently. And that willingness is what opens the door for the Holy Spirit to truly transform the fear into forgiveness of a world that doesn't exist.

Once we can make a habit of looking at any fear, from the most minor to the "big" ones in our lives, with the Holy Spirit by our side, we can begin the process of awakening to the Truth that we have always been perfectly safe in God's presence...as the Course states, "[We] are at home in God, dreaming of exile but perfectly capable of awakening to reality." (T-10.1.2)