Mr. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian man, was arrested on Christmas Day and charged by U.S. authorities with attempting to use high explosives to blow up Northwest flight 253. The bomb was said to have been secreted in his underclothes, and its partial detonation caused no great damage to the plane and no loss of life, though the man himself had to be given medical treatment for burns. The authorities are looking into his reported claim that he has links to al Qaeda.

One of the effects of this incident appears to be the likelihood that whole-body screening will be implemented in airports, raising the temperature of terror to an intimate level for those who fly into and out of the USA, Britain, and other nations involved in the Afghan conflict. The issue of personal privacy is likely to be crushed in the stampede for safety in the skies. Bombs can really be hidden in underclothes. So which will you have, a pat down or a body scan?

Another result of this incident has been the further identification of Yemen and Somalia as training grounds for future terrorists. The response by America is to extend the war against al Qaeda to these weak states. Yemen, being a neighbor of Saudi Arabia, raises the old fear among some Muslims of a Christian crusade. Western involvement in Yemeni territory will be seen by them as a threat to the sanctity of the holy sites of Islam, Mecca being relatively close to the Yemeni border. US involvement in the area to eradicate al Qaeda operatives is a clear case of  “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

So, that’s the latest news from the “war on terror”. But what of the terror you and I may be facing in our daily lives? Our little world is the setting for much more intimate terror. Most of us can say “forget it” to the problems of the wider world because they are not very likely to affect us. But we still have to face the terror of losing our job, our spouse, our mind. The airwaves are full of advertisers’ reminders that our heart may give us trouble, our prostate or breast may be cancerous, our brain may give  way to Alzheimer’s disease. Fear is hammered home every few minutes on TV by greedy pharmaceutical manufacturers, lawyers, insurance companies, and people who want us to be better than our neighbors. No wonder so many people are depressed.

WODEN SAYS: Now, Now, Now!

Our spiritual guides on the Other Side, the Masters of the Spirit World, teach us that planet Earth has been constructed with an equal balance of positive and negative energy. For every perceived evil there is a good. For every threat there is a promise. We live in a world designed to give us experience of negativity, but it cannot overwhelm our spirit.

The soul who incarnates on Earth does so for a purpose. It learns, by the experience of both the positive and the negative, to understand and appreciate its own nature. Negativity is the foil that shows off the nature of unconditional love that is the energy of the Creator. The inner nature, the very essence of our soul is the same love.

The human soul is creative and draws to itself what it needs to experience in life. We have the power to make choices. We do not have to live in terror. We can choose our own path and rise above the negative forces that would drag us down, by living in the present, by avoiding the past—which has gone anyway—and by not projecting ourselves into a vision of a future which does not and may never exist. Living in the Now takes away the sting of feeling overwhelmed. It is the keel that saves our boat from being blown over.

Take disease, for example. As we live in the Now we can tackle the problem of our  illness in two ways:

• First, we can get on top of the illness by recognizing that it represents a lesson, a challenge, that our soul itself has requested. There are no accidents. Our soul is eternal and will outlast every challenge, every sickness.

• Second, we can get to the heart of the illness by looking for the lesson it teaches us, what it means in our life as a soul now. Is it telling us that we do not love ourselves? or that we doubt our power to overcome fear spiritually?

Living in the Now is what all souls do naturally. It is only what our conscious mind says that paralyzes us with fear. But the conscious mind is temporal while the soul is eternal. There is bound to be a way to deal with the challenge. Even though we may face physical death sitting on a plane or lying in a hospital bed, we will never die because the “we” who lives in the Now belongs to the infinite. You cannot kill the soul, so nothing—but nothing—that causes terror to our consciousness has ultimate power over us.