Author’s Note: The original text of this reflection was a stream of consciousness outpouring written to a dear and deeply trusted friend in the summer of 2013. I have edited it slightly and the few sentences of afterward were also written today, August 9, 2021.
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I had what felt like a revelation this morning about the spiritual significance of 9-11, not only for America as a nation but for each of us as individuals on our personal journeys. The Twin Towers represented the concept of duality – good and evil, and any and every other pair of “opposites” of which we can conceive or experience in our lives; be they physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual. Although I have never had any interest whatsoever in politics and am more or less ignorant on the subject, I do know enough to be aware that America has a “holier than Thou” attitude toward much of the rest of the world, and believes it to be our place to “set things straight” for the peoples, countries, and religions deemed to be less than ideal in our eyes.
Considering the state our country is in – everything from our economic debt to the statistics about the general health of our population, and most significantly how we perceive and attempt to deal with crime and “criminals” – it is not difficult to see an awful lot of hypocrisy in the attitude that we know anything better than anyone else about how to live a healthy peaceful life. I see 9-11 on a national level as being a strong and stern reminder to America of the importance of really and truly cleaning up our own backyard before we set out to try and change or “improve” the rest of the world. Were there in fact radical Muslims before WE started invading their space with OUR ideas about how WE thought they should be living and believing in their lives…? I wonder.
On a personal level, this whole train of thought today got especially juicy for me when the concept of “Ground Zero” hit me. Once the concept of good versus evil has been uprooted – if only momentarily – from our consciousness; once we have fully and consciously seen and accepted the fact that ultimately, we DO NOT KNOW what is good and what is bad – if only momentarily – AND we no longer make the slightest bit of effort to recreate the illusion that reflects the belief that we DO know the difference, we have reached a state of “Ground Zero” in our journey. Ground Zero is a space where the pain of duality is at its most intense. At Ground Zero we are conscious of it ALL – of the eternal perfection behind and beyond every word, thought, feeling, or action, no matter how horrific in time; of the human pain and emotion within the events that trigger us as individuals; of the complete lack of ability to even muster up the strength to fight to change or rearrange any of it. It is a place of utter hopelessness and yet simultaneously, paradoxically, where the greatest potential for being of divine service lies.
I played a game of Scrabble recently and “lucked into” an eight-letter word with horrendously bad letters, using one letter on the board that was the only one that would have allowed me to make the word. The word was “Inaction”. After the fact, the irony of this got a good chuckle out of me. Ground Zero. IF our ultimate goal is to go beyond ALL illusion and merge again into the pure Awareness that Is and Was before any waves of movement in the Ocean of creation began, we must be willing not only to endure the pain of getting to Ground Zero within ourselves but of STAYING THERE until God Herself comes to get us. For however long this may take and regardless of what does or does not happen on the other levels of our life and being in the interim.**
…and I would challenge that not until we can say a heartfelt and soul-deep THANK YOU to the Osama bin Laden’s in our lives, the things, events or the people who raze us to the Ground Zero of our own beings, do we have the right to be using words like “Love” and Gratitude”, and truly feel as if we know what they mean.
**When I speak of the need for “Inaction” at Ground Zero, I am not saying that we should become couch potatoes or move to caves in the Himalayan mountains and become monks. The inaction is required at the level of mind where we believe we cannot tolerate feeling out of control, totally helpless, utterly despairing, without immediately seeking to “feel better”. The opportunity at Ground Zero is for the kind of genuine surrender to Source so desperately needed by our world to occur. Grace comes to find us when we no longer make any effort to rekindle the illusory “Story of Me.”
And when this happens, once this happens, nothing is ever the same. And we ourselves become Miracle Workers.
