--- by Rabbi Laibl Wolf (Australia)

No, I can't make sense of it all. But I am determined to give the events meaning - to honour the gut-wrenching dissipation of loving souls gruesomely disemboweled from their loved ones for ever.

My hand cannot reach across the ocean and comfort survivors and mourners. My wishful meanderings of mind and thought cannot mask the scream of inner torment deep within. But I believe with absolute resoluteness that you and I have been afforded a soulful wake-up call.

The price has been high, too high. But I cannot bargain with the dead. I cannot negotiate the terms or the coinage. I must pay the price of making their lives meaningful, their death a spur, their lives never reduced to futility. How do I pay? By making my life (and I ask you to make your life)

one of contribution to a new society of empathy, peace and mutual understanding.

Here are seven specific guidelines to draw upon for personal and global transformation:

1. Recognize that you are uniquely gifted from Above. You are a spiritual configuration unlike any that has ever existed, or will exist. Confer your specialness on those who have been deliberately placed in your environ - and that includes everyone you meet and encounter - friend or stranger.

2. Nurture your human qualities of compassion, sharing, and contribution. Practice these all the time, like a musician practicing scales. Keep putting small coins into charity boxes, dropping coins in the box of street buskers or vagrants. Pay compliments whenever the opportunity beckons. Offer random acts of goodness by maintaining a mindful and conscious awareness of life's opportunities. (You will be amazed at the prolific openings that come your way to serve others).

3. Respond to personal provocation and personal insult with a sense of wonderful opportunity to practice other- centredness. When someone insults, hurts, or demeans you, you are witnessing their pain, their camouflage, and their fear. They are the ones in true pain, whether knowingly or otherwise. Become a teacher/healer in that precise moment. Use your wisdom of words and silence to help heal them.

4. Practice compassion. Compassion is not the same as giving in, turning the other cheek, or simple submission. Compassion includes self-esteem, assertiveness, and wisdom. Compassion is the wisdom of giving wisely. Not all giving is wise. Sometimes giving spoils and denies an opportunity for the other's growth. Wise giving provides the other with the opportunity for a growth spurt. This is true compassion.

5. Nurture inner strength. Become strong of character, of purpose. Identify your visions, for self and humanity. Formulate goals for their achievement. Strategize practices for the soul's true expression - at home, at work, and in the world. Inner strength and self esteem include the courage to defend one's integrity as a person, and property as a nation, but with tears streaming down our cheeks when a just war and battle are thrust upon us, or when punishing a recalcitrant child, or removing anti social presence from our midst.

6. Dedicate your heart, mind, and body, to graceful balance. Mind: accumulate data, share people's life's experiences, and reflect & meditate. Heart: practice empathy and spend a few moments in the other person's genetic, environmental, and physiological 'shoes'. Body: discipline yourself to health and wellness practices so that the soul enjoys a beautiful temple as its abode and means of self-expression.

7. Choose to be a person of faith. Accept the axioms of the sanctity of life over abstract principle, of quality of life over quantity of possessions, of compassion over ego. Allow that faith to be practiced mindfully, consciously, soulfully, at all times.

The Twin Towers were monuments to our quest to touch the sky - perhaps a latter day Babel. Now we need to reach inwards - to touch the twin qualities of humility and love. Allow these new twins to emerge from the spiritual womb. Reincarnate the souls of those torn so rudely from us, but as practical visions for a much better, more caring, and truly faithful, stance of love and humility. You count. Do it and live it. You are a child of a living, pulsating, compassionate Creator. http://www.laiblwolf.com/feature/twin_towers.htm