September 11, 2001

It was a beautiful September morning. For the last time, the sun rose between the Twin Towers.
At 8:55 am, I came out of the subway and the first thing I saw was an enormous band of black smoke in the sky. I rushed to my office building, two blocks down from the subway station, and asked the doorman if he knew what had happened.
“An airplane flew into one of the twin towers” he said in a somber voice.
“Oh my God! Was it a commercial plane?” I asked, suddenly aware of what this would mean for hundreds of people.
“We don’t know, nobody knows….”
I took the elevator to my office and as soon as I was there, the phone rang. It was a colleague from Milan.
“I am watching TV and I see the tower in flame! Do you know what happened? He asked.
“No, I am just arriving….”
“Santo Dio! He exclaimed, another plane just hit the second tower!!!
I dropped the phone and rushed to the TV room where all my colleagues had gathered. They were all was crying, screaming, calling names of the people they knew who worked at the World Trade Center. We could not believe our eyes.
“This is a terrorist attack! It’s no accident!
We stayed in front of the TV, mesmerized, until the first tower fell, and then the second. It was like a nightmare! Maybe it will go away; maybe it’s a bad joke!
The towers were located a few blocks south and west of the office, and very soon we were asked to evacuate the premises for security reasons.
I tried to call Joe to let him know that I was okay, but all the phones were out. We all took the stairs to get out of the building. In the street, people were crying or just in shock, a blank look on their face. The streets had been closed to regular traffic, except for police vehicles, firefighting trucks and ambulances. Buses had been chartered to go downtown.
With no public transportation available, hundreds of people started to walk up towards the north of the city. The smell of burning buildings was everywhere. Pedestrians were led by a police officer from one sidewalk to another. We were too devastated to have any reaction, and we followed the orders in silence. Some businessmen who had escaped the disaster zone were covered with gray powder. Women took their high heels off and walked bare feet.
New Yorkers are usually very talkative and lively, but today no one says a word. There are no smiles on their faces, just question marks and despair.
Who did that to us? Why? Our city is wounded and we all feel the pain. These people who died and are still dying are our brothers and sisters; it could be us out there! New York is our home and we are a family.
We walked a long time. I finally made it home and watched TV for three days, not even going out to buy food. I could not stop crying, even though nobody I personally knew was buried under the fallen buildings. Even now, while I write these memories, I am crying. Close to 3000 people died that day. Why? Can anybody tell me why?

The Magic of Colors

Can you imagine a world without color? Eveything around us would be grey, black or white, like in old movies. How dull this world would be! Fortunately, Nature abounds with color and just looking at a blue sky is a feast for the eyes. For artists, it is a pleasure to play with colors, mix them, invent them, splash them into a canvas, or a wall, and see a flat image come to life. For digital artists, the computer monitor is their canvas and the mouse is their brush. The images in this book are the result of such mouse painting and they express the joy of being alive in a universe filled with color.

Please visit http://stores.lulu.com/Lybis to view or buy these books. Thank you.

For more of my artwork, please visit http://www.bigapplefractals.com/index.htm and http://artscad.com/@/lydiabisanti.

Religions, their meaning and purpose

The word religion comes from the Latin “rilegare” which means “to link”. Religion is therefore what links man to his Creator, and it is “revealed” to mankind by God Himself, since a religion is also a“Revelation”

In today’s world, there are three main religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and three oriental doctrines: Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. These doctrines cannot be called religions because they are metaphysical in nature and their goal is “metaphysical liberation”, whereas the goal of religions is “salvation”.

Religions are destined to the mass and, for this reason, are presented as “dogmas” not to be discussed but accepted in “faith”, because the common human does not have the intellectual qualifications to grasp metaphysical concepts. Therefore, the “form”, or the exterior of a tradition will be emphasized in a religion. This also explains why these forms are different from one another, each form being “adapted” to the mentality of the people to whom it is addressed.

A new “revelation” does not imply that the old one was wrong, but rather that is has lost its spiritual power on the people to whom the new revelation is destined. For instance, Christianity was directed to the Roman world whose religious practices had become mere superstitions at the end of their civilization. It was not destined to the Jewish people whose tradition was alive and well, or to other parts of the world which were unknown to the people of those days.

Because of these geographical, historical and human requirements, a religion has limitations and its exterior cannot be “universal”. It appeals to the emotional side of human beings, faith, love, passion, which can easily become “fanaticism”. The reason is that religions are only concerned with the individual, and their goal is “salvation”.

The human who obtains “salvation” through observance of his religious faith during his lifetime, is “saved” from returning to another life in a form lower than human (an animal, for instance), thus guaranteeing the possibility to reach higher states of consciousness.

Therefore, a religion is necessary to give the common man a spiritual vehicle to ascertain his progression on the vertical plane of the cross, or, in other words, to be able to continue climbing the ladder of universal existence as a “central being”, i.e., the equivalent of human being with free will. This is why the Tantra says that “the one who has obtained the human state and does not try to transcend it is like one who commits suicide”. Because “death” is really “stagnation, i.e., the impossibility of reaching the higher states of the being.

LB

Dreams come true…sometimes

Since I was a child, I have had precognition dreams. I was not aware of it until they came true. Later in life, I learnt how to interpret my dreams and listen to their advice and messages.

Dream interpretation is a very personal endeavor, since our dreams use what is stored in our brains and translate it into symbols. For instance, let’s say that you dream of a cat. This cat might represent a person, or a side of your personality, and the feelings you have for cats in real life will describe the feelings you have for this person or for this side of your personality. So, the first thing to do before interpreting a dream is to find out what the images it shows represent for you. If you love cats, then the message is a positive one, if on the contrary you hate cats, or you are allergic to them, then you have to find out who, in your life, makes you feel this way.

In my personal experience, I found four categories of dreams:

1. Immediate messages about ongoing problems of everyday life (health, work, relationships, etc.)
2. Messages of a psychological nature (revelations about oneself, mirror image showing our weaknesses)
3. Messages of a spiritual nature (showing our stage of spiritual development, answering questions about life and death, etc.)
4. Precognition dreams. These are very vivid and usually wake us up in the middle of night, and they seem incomprehensible.

Of course, there are dreams which do not fall in any of these categories because they are too vague and have no value, except to let our brains wander.

Some people say they never dream. This is not true! We spend most our sleeping time dreaming. The reason why we do not remember is because we do not give ourselves a chance to remember. Most people wake up in the morning in the worst possible way:
with an alarm clock. We go from the sleeping state to the waking state without any transition, back into our everyday worries and obligations. Even without an alarm clock we have a tendency to get right back to our waking state and full consciousness. The secret for remembering our dreams is to give ourselves a few minutes before opening our eyes, while not fully awake, in order to review the images of our dreams, still fresh in our mind. This will allow us to perceive messages received from our higher mind (or our subconscious mind) and solve a problem, or have a breakthrough.

I found it very useful to write down my dreams and study them later. The more you write them down and study them, the more you remember significant details. If you do this regularly, channels of communication will open between you and your higher mind, revealing to you a world of information about yourself, the state of your spiritual development, and things to come.

A very good friend of mine wrote a book entitled “The Intelligence of Dreams” in which she teaches a “method” on how to remember dreams and use them in your everyday life.

Lydia Bisanti

Reading :

“Intelligence of Dreams” by Anna Mancini

www.buenosbooks.us