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The events around the world in 2014—from Syria to Egypt, from Iraq to the Gaza Strip—are making it clear that humanity must find a new way to create life on Earth.
God has been very direct about this, saying in Tomorrow’s God:
“Humanity is very soon going to reach critical mass in its collective realization that Yesterday’s God cannot serve tomorrow’s world.
“Humanity cannot continue to resolve 21st Century dilemmas with 1st Century guidelines—much less guidelines that came from before that time,” God added.
This is akin, God said, to going into a 21st Century operating room with 1st Century healing tools. Tomorrow’s moral, ethical and social challenges cannot be met using 18th or 10th or 6th Century understandings and instructions. Those instructions and those understandings were not “wrong,” they were not “bad,” they were simply incomplete, the Deity went on.
Then, in a striking statement clearly meant to get the attention of our species, God said: “Yet unless you acknowledge this, unless humanity can admit that it does not know all there is to know about God and about Life, there can be no hope of continuing life as you have known it on your planet a great deal longer.”
You have, in fact, already given up much of “how it used to be” on the Earth. How much more are you willing to sacrifice before you see what is right in front of your eyes?
Asked about those who say that the real problem is that we have gotten away from the understandings and the instructions of our fathers and of theirs, and that humanity needs to return to the ancient guidelines of its wisdom traditions, God replied:
“Fundamentalist understandings of the holy scriptures of all your wisdom traditions are wise in many ways—and incomplete, and therefore dangerous, in many other ways. Honor the tradition, but expand the understanding. That’s the trick now. That’s what religions must do right now if they hope to be helpful to humans in the years ahead—or even to survive.
“Honor your wisdom traditions, but expand their understanding. This is what will occur when humanity embraces Tomorrow’s God.”
Persons wishing to learn more about what the God of our future understanding will be—if the human race lasts long enough to create that new understanding—may do so by reading the entire book, Tomorrow’s God, available from any online bookseller.
My dear Sisters and Brothers on this Journey of the Soul…
The subject of my letter to you today has to do with what is happening now in Gaza.
It would take—even by Internet standards, which allows for much more material to be presented at one time than any newspaper or magazine possibly could—voluminous screen space requiring endless scrolling through paragraph after paragraph of narrative for the reasons behind the violence in Gaza to be fully explored.
And without wishing to seem dismissive of the positions of either side in the long-simmering and too-frequently erupting dispute between Hamas (the quasi political/military organization which effectively governs the Gaza Strip) and the State of Israel, the situation can fairly be described as a case where both sides are “right” and both sides are “wrong.”
Sadly, both sides can acknowledge only the first case, and refuse to admit to even the slightest instance where the second case may be true. And so, while both sides endlessly pontificate on why they are “right” to do what they are doing (Israel bombarding the intensely crowded Gaza Strip in this most recent uprising with 4,600 air strikes, Hamas bombarding Israel with 3,200 rockets fired into Israeli territory), a reported 1,700 people—85% of whom have been civilians, including well over 500 women and children—have been killed in Gaza.
An article on Wikipedia quotes the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) as saying that as of 3 August 2014 in the Gaza Strip, over 485,000 Palestinians had been displaced, of which 269,793 were taking shelter in 90 UNRWA schools. (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.)
“UNRWA has exhausted its capacity to absorb displaced persons,” the Wikipedia article said, “and overcrowding in shelters risks the outbreak of epidemics. 1.8 million people are affected by a halt or reduction of the water supply, 141 schools and 26 health facilities have been damaged, 945 homes (10,690 families) have been totally destroyed or severely damaged and the homes of 5,435 families have been damaged but are still inhabitable.”
“Throughout the Gaza Strip, people receive only 3 hours of electricity per day. The destruction of Gaza’s only power plant had an immediate effect on the public health situation and reduced water and sanitation services, with hospitals becoming dependent on generators. More than 485,000 internally displaced persons are in need of emergency food assistance.”
The article noted that 64 soldiers of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) have been reported killed in the current fighting, as well as two Israeli civilians and a Thai worker.
This violent conflict between Hamas and Israel has been going on for decades, as I noted earlier (and as I know you are all aware). Nothing can stop it but a change in consciousness. As Rabbi Michael Lerner noted in a commentary Aug 3 at www.Salon.Com:
“The basic reality is that most of humanity has always heard a voice inside themselves telling them that the best path to security and safety is to love others and show generosity, and a counter voice that tells us that the only path to security is domination and control over others.
“This struggle between the voice of fear and the voice of love, the voice of domination/power-over and the voice of compassion, empathy and generosity, have played out throughout history and shape contemporary political debates around the world. Because almost every single one of us hears both voices, we are often torn between them, oscillating in our communal policies and our personal behavior between these two worldviews and ways of engaging others.
“As the competitive and me-first ethos of the capitalist marketplace has grown increasingly powerful and increasingly reflected in the culture and worldviews of the contemporary era, more and more people bring the worldview of fear, domination and manipulation of others into personal lives, teaching people that the rationality of the marketplace with its injunction to see other human beings primarily in terms of how they can serve our own needs and as instrumental for our own purposes, rather than as being deserving of care and respect just for who they are and not for what they can deliver for us, this ethos has weakened friendships and created the instability in family life that the right has so effectively manipulated (a theme I develop most fully in reporting in my book The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right on my years as a psychotherapist and principal investigator of an National Institute of Mental Heath study of stress and the psychodynamics of daily life in Western societies).”
Rabbi Lerner believes that the State of Israel, in its continuing attacks on Gaza that are killing civilians, including many hundreds of women and children, has stepped away from the fundamental ethics and spiritual principles of Judaism itself. You will find his complete commentary on this subject here.
For its part, Israel claims that Hamas is using civilians as “human shields” to ward off attacks by the IDF on what Israel has defined as important military or strategic-planning assets of Hamas. Hamas denies the claim.
Is there any way to end this cycle of violence that has engulfed Israel and Gaza for decades—and, indeed, has become a characteristic of life in many, many other places across the planet? Is violence and killing the only way we humans know how to resolve our most severe differences?
I know I keep asking the same question here, but I am asking you—all of you in the Global Conversation—to have your say here, to speak your truth, to add to the energy of An Answer that might then be heard, considered, spread, and shared by people around the world.
And while we are considering our response, may we gently ask…where are the spiritual leaders of our world? Where is the Pope? Where is the voice of the Archbishop of Canterbury? Where is the Chief Rabbi? Where is the statement from a globally respected Ulama? Can we do nothing but pray? Can these leaders do nothing but “urge peace”? Is there nothing more substantive that they can say?
The problem in the world today is not a military problem, and it is not a political problem, and it is not an economic problem. The problem in the world today is a spiritual problem—and it can only be solve by spiritual means. It has to do with what we believe as human beings about human beings…and about God…and about Life Itself, its purpose and its function.
Here’s a vital question: Is it possible—just possible—that there is something we do not fully understand here, about God, about Life, and about Who We Are…the understanding of which would change everything?
Who among the world’s most influential people will ask this question in a public forum? Where is our world’s spiritual leadership? Where is our world’s political leadership? Must the only ones speaking the truth, and publicly asking the vital questions, be Internet Bloggers????
Sincerely,
Neale Donald Walsch
P.S. Oh, and wait. You have to see this. You just really and truly have to. You want to know why our whole world is becoming more and more violent every day? Read THIS.
My Dear Sisters and Brothers on this Journey of the Soul…
Recent days have seen two headlines in the news that once again invite us all to deeply consider who we are as a species — and who we choose to be.
One headline focuses on just released official U.S. Government documents that reveal that this nation was, past the middle of the last century, seriously considering a proposal to establish a manned military base on the moon that could be used for global intelligence gathering purposes — with the possibility of exploding a nuclear device on our Earth’s satellite.
The second story involves the two-hour death by lethal injection of Joseph Wood in an Arizona execution chamber.
According to the first story, at CNN.com, “The purpose of a nuclear detonation near or on the moon would be for show, a document said. Its ‘foremost intent was to impress the world with the prowess of the United States’.”
The CNN story opened with these words: “The U.S. military races to the moon to build a base — to beat the Russians to the punch. Maybe test a nuclear weapon on the surface. Consider a lunar-based bombing system to target earthbound foes. That was the plan in the 1960s, according to declassified national security documents released this week — some of them stamped as ‘SECRET’.”
While the idea of a lunar military outpost never got off the ground (so to speak), this was not because anyone in any official position wrote about the moral or spiritual implications of such a plan. It was apparently shelved because it was consider too risky, the CNN report said.
This says something about the human mindset that we all may wish to ponder.
The second headline involved the two-hour-long death by lethal injection of convicted murdered Joseph Wood in an Arizona prison on July 23.
According to this story at NBCnews.com, Mr. Wood is described as gasping something like 600 times by an approximate count of witnesses, seeming to be reaching for air as his execution took two hours to kill him.
Reporters who have seen executions before wrote in the Arizona press that in the past executions by injection took ten minutes to produce death. Any suggestion that Mr. Wood may have suffered cruel and unusual punishment was, however, dismissed by relatives of the two people Mr. Wood was convicted of murdering in 1989.
Asked about the possibility that Mr. Wood experienced an excruciating death, Jeanne Brown was quoted is this report by ABC News as having said: “You don’t know what excruciating is. Excruciating is seeing your dad lying there in a pool of blood, seeing your sister lying there in a pool of blood. That’s excruciating. This man deserved it.”
Ms. Brown is the sister of the woman and the daughter of the man that Joseph Wood was found guilty of shooting 25 years ago. Her husband, Andrew Brown, was quoted in the above ABC News story as saying “Everybody is worried about the drug. These people that do this, they deserve to suffer a little bit.”
“I saw the life go out of my sister-in-law’s eye as he shot her to death,” ABC News said he added. “I’m so sick of you guys (referring to the media) blowing this drug stuff out of proportion.”
Without commenting on the merits of the sentiments expressed by Mr. and Mrs. Brown, I am moved to wonder: Is the death penalty the way a society can best teach its members that killing people is wrong?
Does an advanced civilization use killing to end killing, violence to end violence, hatred and anger to bring an end to hatred and anger?
And what if it is not about a deterrent? What if it is just about what some people call simple justice? Is it a demonstration of a high level of evolution for a race of sentient beings to embrace a philosophy of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”? Is that the grandest notion that evolution brings?
My Dear Brothers and Sisters on the Journey…I ask these questions in the spirit of gentle but important inquiry.
Pope Francis is really making headlines these days, “telling it like it is” in many areas of life seldom, if ever, commented on by anybody in the Vicar’s chair in Rome.
I am encouraged and impressed to know that a global spiritual leader is saying things that have needed to be said for a very long time.
Describing the rapid deforestation of the Earth as one of humanity’s biggest offenses, the pontiff s said that “one of the greatest challenges of our time,” is to “convert ourselves to a type of development that knows how to respect creation.”
“When I look at America, also my own homeland, so many forests, all cut, that have become land … that can longer give life. This is our sin, exploiting the Earth and not allowing her to her give us what she has within her,” the Argentine pope is reported to have told students in an address at the University of Molise, in southern Italy.
Francis’ remarks were reported on the alJazeeraAmerica internet news site.
Speaking not only to students, but to “struggling farmers and laid-off workers” as well in the university’s hall, the Pope urgently “called for more respect for nature…branding the destruction of South America’s rain forests and other forms of environmental exploitation a sin of modern times, the alJazeeraAmerica story said. The full report is found found here.
In a separate ajJazeeraAmerica news story last month, Pope Francis was quoted as criticizing the wealth made from financial speculation, calling it “intolerable” and saying that speculation on food was a “scandal” that compromised access by the poor.
“Addressing a seminar on ethical investing in the Vatican,” the Pope “said financial markets must serve the interests of the people and the common good of humanity,” the alJazeeraAmerica report said.
“It is increasingly intolerable that financial markets are shaping the destiny of peoples rather than serving their needs, or that the few derive immense wealth from financial speculation while the many are deeply burdened by the consequences,” the network further quoted the Pontiff.
“Pope Francis added, ‘Speculation on food prices is a scandal which seriously compromises access to food on the part of the poorest members of our human family’,” alJazeeraAmerica’s report went on.
The network’s story also offers the Pope’s urgent call to the world’s governments, and his powerful suggestion to global investors on how they could wield their financial power for the common good, and explaining why it would be “logical” for them to do so.
Francis’ remarks on this subject may be found in full here.
It has been a long time since the exploiters of the world’s resources and the world’s people have been called to task so openly by so powerful a global figure — and by any spiritual leader at all.
This pope has made it clear that he intends to use his high profile to challenge the world’s elite to overlay its so-often vaunted spiritual principles on its so-often shameful behaviors.
The raising of his voice in such a manner has begun to raise concerns in some quarters that Francis is creating more and more enemies in more and more powerful places—and could be putting himself in danger.
At no time was this more frequently whispered than when the prelate took the breathtaking step a few weeks ago of actually excommunicating every member of the so-called Mafia family in Italy, describing one crime syndicate as “the adoration of evil.” That story, also from alJazeeraAmerica, is found here.
The question now before the house: is the global public ready now to launch a global Evolution Revolution, calling on a worldwide basis for the application of the highest spiritual principles to the day-to-day machinations of our species?
I do not personally agree with all of the pronouncements of Pope Francis. I was particularly dismayed when a few days ago he decreed that the Catholic Church formally recognized an organization of priests who perform exorcisms, thus adding new papal authority to the notion that Satan exists and continues to inhabit people.
Yet leadership, in any position, is about taking positions that risk disapproval and virtually guarantee backlash, and I give high marks to this Pope for fearlessly speaking his mind, and being willing to call the minds of other people to explore and examine their own truths on topics with which not every person agrees.
A true leader is not one who says “follow me,” but one who says “I’ll go first”…and this pope is the first head of the Roman Catholic Church in a very, very long time to say the kinds of things he has been saying — such as, when asked about gays: “Who am I to judge?”
I like this man. I really do. The whole world’s falling in love with him. Now if we could find such leaders in the halls of our globe’s governments, we might actually change some things…
Yet if the world’s politicians won’t turn the tide, it will, in fact, be left to us. I invite you to check out the link at the top right of the Front Page, and join the Evolution Revolution.
On Monday, June 23, 2014 Mormon judges excommunicated women’s ordination activist Kate Kelly,” a story posted on the Internet by ThinkProgress.org said.
In the ThinkProgress story, a statement released by Kelly’s group, Ordain Women, is quoted as saying that “judges within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) sent Kelly an email yesterday informing her that she has been ‘excommunicated for conduct contrary to the laws and order of the LDS Church’.”
Kelly, the ThinkProgress story said, “is reportedly no longer allowed to ‘take the sacrament, hold a Church calling, give a talk in Church, offer a public prayer in behalf of the class or congregation in a Church meeting, or vote in the sustaining of Church officers’.”
The international human rights lawyer said she was crying and sobbing so much that she “couldn’t really read all the words” of her excommunication notice. Kelly later told NBC News: “I guess I’m a delusional optimist, because to the end I thought they would do the right thing.”
Kelly is reported to have “gathered women by the hundreds to march up to the doors of a meeting of the all-male priesthood and demand entry (they were denied). Still, when her efforts were combined with what appeared to be concessions on the part of the church — including finally allowing a women to lead a prayer at one of their conferences — some concluded that the church might be shifting its traditionally hardline stance against women in church leadership,” the ThinkProgress story went on.
The Mormon Church, of course, famously excluded black men from the priesthood throughout its long history as well, until 1976, when its leader announced that he had received “a revelation” from God that black males were henceforth to be considered eligible for be priests.
No such revelation has been made by God regarding women, however, judging from the pronouncements of Mormon Church leaders on this subject.
Mormon church teaching states that men and women have been assigned different, distinct but complementary roles in human life. Women are to support the men who are in power, because “the Lord has put it that way,” the church says.
So there you have it. God—who apparently has a penis—requires all of his priests in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and the Roman Catholic Church as well) to also have a penis. Priests, and even bishops, in the Episcopal Church may, however have vaginas (but only as of a few years ago, when God apparently changed His mind with regard to certain, but to all, of his Christian denominations.)
Female rabbis are allowed in the Jewish religion, and female ulamas are allowed in the Islamic tradition, and female ministers are allowed in most other Christian denominations, such as the Lutheran Church or the Presbyterian Church. The Baptist church is not too fond of the idea, and God appears to be very strict when it comes to both the Mormon and the Catholic Church.
So how does this work? Does God give different directions to different religious denominations? Or are some denominations violating the Law of God by allowing some of their leaders to have vaginas? Or is it the other way around? Are some denominations violating the Law of God by requiring all priests to have penises?
What do you think God wants with regard to all of this?
Here we go again. Another revolution. Not to make light of the fighting and the killing in any way, but is this the Revolution du jour? Must our civilization endure this process over and over and over again?
The news now is of the insurrection in Iraq by revolutionaries among Islamic militant fighters. CNN reports that “vast swaths of northern Iraq, including the cities of Mosul and Tal Afar, have fallen as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, advances toward Baghdad. The ISIS militants want to establish a caliphate, or Islamic state, in the region, stretching from Iraq into northern Syria.”
What is going on here? I don’t mean, just in Iraq. I mean, on our planet. I mean, all over the place at one time or another, since the beginning of time.
The answer is found in the book The Storm Before the Calm, which can be found in its entirety on this website. That book tells us that a search on Wikipedia under the word “revolutions” brings up a virtually endless catalogue of uprisings.
It starts with the popular revolt in the Sumarian city of Lagash that deposed King Lugalanda and put the reformer Urukagina on the throne in 2380 B.C., and ends with the revolutions that overturned governments in the Arab world in 2011.
It encompasses, in between, hundreds of others, including the Fall of the Roman Empire, the First of the Wars of Scottish Independence, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the revolution in India, the Boer Revolt, revolutions all over South America, the European Revolutions of 1848, the revolutions in modern Hungary, in Yugoslavia, in Haiti, the dissolution of the Soviet Union by 1991, and…
…okay, just take my word for it. This is a tiny portion of a list that goes on and on and on…and ON. We’ve been “revolting” since the beginning of governance.
Will it ever end? Not until the human race launches The Last Revolution. What is needed to bring a stop to the killing and the fighting is not American intervention in Iraq (which some are now calling for), not more military might to oppose military might that seeks to overthrow military might; not more of the same to try to cure what it actually presents.
What is needed here is not a revolution on the ground, but a revolution in the mind. It is our thinking we must change—and it is my hope that, as a species we’re finally about to become clear about that.
In the past we kept trying to change conditions on the ground, when what we needed to change was the condition in our head. Even when we did manage to change conditions on the ground (once in a while, every so often, we found a band-aid that helped), the same old (age old) problems eventually re-emerged—because nothing had been altered in our mindset.
The solution is to change our beliefs, and not keep trying to change our behaviors. Beliefs create behaviors, so if our beliefs don’t change, our behaviors never will. In the short-term, maybe, but not in the long run.
As we moved into the New Millennium more than a decade ago, our species finally began to get that. More and more people began making a commitment to explore new ideas—ideas which might have been dismissed out of hand just a generation earlier—out of their clarity that humanity’s old ideas simply were no longer working. (It is arguable that they never worked.)
New choices seemed to be in order. Our prior decisions, based on old beliefs, had gotten us nowhere.
It is not a coincidence that all this is going on now, as we move into the second half of the first quarter of the 21st Century. This truly is The Storm Before The Calm. It was predicted, it was expected, and it is here. And…
…we are going to weather this storm, you and I. We’re going to give our children, and theirs, a wonderful world in which to live. We’re about to turn a page in human history.
If you’d like to know more, read The Storm Before the Calm right here on this website. I encourage you to. I invite you to. I dare you to.
Then join the Evolution Revolution by clicking on the Blue Box on the home page.
There is something you—we—can do. The question is not whether there is something we can do, the question is, will we do it…?
As part of your preparation to write this chapter, be sure to read, especially, the THIRD SAMPLE CHAPTER found here.
This is Chapter Seven of God’s Message to the World: You’ve Got Me All Wrong, the most powerful re-statement, in one book, of the 3,000 pages of the Conversations with God cosmology you will ever find. It is a book that is now re-igniting readers of CWG all over the world, getting them in touch once again with the most world-changing, life-impacting, mind-and-heart-expanding ideas about God and about Life placed before our species in many, many years.
You will not want to miss this book! And then, I hope you will choose to contribute your own “take” on the topic of Chapter 7 (the third one found in this sampling of chapters from the book) in the Comments section below.
I believe that it is humanity’s cultural story that is causing humanity’s cultural crisis. I am inviting you, here in this space, to engage in a conversation (we call it The Conversation of the Century) about what kind of new story we could be telling our children, and each other, about life on Earth in every one of its expressions.
Should we be telling them to fear God?
The invitation to write a New Cultural Story for our offspring was sent to humanity in the book The Storm Before the Calm, the first entry in the Conversations with Humanity Series. The book is published in full on this site.
Watch here to see what category of life expression we are currently exploring, then write your best idea about Humanity’s New Cultural Story as it concerns that particular area of life, co-authoring with us here on this website.
WHAT WE HOPE WILL HAPPEN HERE:
We hope that people from around the world will offer here their heartfelt thoughts about what our New Human Cultural Story might say, and how we might articulate it. Please limit each item to a single topic, and please sign your name, so that we know who wrote the entry. (We want to give credit where credit is due, and to encourage as many people as possible to contribute to this Co-Authorship.)
WHAT WE HOPE WILL NOT HAPPEN HERE:
We do not see this as a place for endless argumentation. We see it as a Gathering of Ideas, not a Back-and-Forth Debate. Statements of opinion about the entries are surely welcome, but ongoing and never-ending wrangling hoping to make a particular point will, we believe, only serve to inhibit the process of gathering as many ideas as possible. Our suggestion, then: Let this be a Brainstorming Session about what could be our Most Wonderful Tomorrow, where the general rule is: Every idea is welcome, and no one will be judged for their contribution.
Thanks for making your input here. One dream we have is to place a summary of the best of the proposals for Humanity’s New Cultural Story, as judged by our readers at the end of each year, before the world’s leaders in politics, economics, business & commerce, education, environment, and spirituality in a special online publication that we will invite them to read. So your contribution is important — and could help awaken a sleeping world.
Please make your entries below…and return often. Thank you.
If you are a regular visitor here you have no doubt noticed that The Global Conversation has changed its format. Eliminated from this page are the several individual columns that once appeared, thus creating a finer focus on the primary discussion that was the original intent of this website.
As you may know, this online newspaper is an outgrowth of the book The Storm Before the Calm. We very much hope to do two things here:
(1) Continue the explorations that began in that book (which exploration can be done in the Comment Section beneath the posting of that entire text, just below), and…
(2) Extend those explorations from there, looking in our headline stories at current news items, personal events in our day-to-day world, and the spiritual experiences of our readers as they encounter those events.
We want to see how the messages in all the Conversations with God books apply as a practical matter on-the-ground in a Mon-Fri, 9-5 world. We want to prod our readers by asking questions—and we want our readers to prod us by asking questions as well. We want to generate back-and-forth conversation about practical spirituality. And yes, we hope to ignite a global Evolution Revolution (see blue box at lower right).
As a perfect example of the kind of exchange we hope to generate, let us present in this first edition of our newly-designed newspaper a comment placed here very recently by a reader posting as “Blake.” Here is what he had to say…
Neale…You are frantically repeating yourself over what God wants. What’s up with that? Do you actually believe in that Revelation nonsense that was pounded in your head since you were a kid?
The world looks bad if your filters are set to only look at the bad. Set your filters to see love and then relax. If we fail again as a species, we will die and rise again as another life form.
All this save the world stuff isn’t getting you any brownie points with the religious peoples in the world. I learned that there are three ways to be touched by God. The first is religion, the second is spirituality and the third is connection; connection is the highest form of mastery.
Which are you Neale?
First let me say, my friend, that I am not trying to “earn any brownie points with the religious people in the world.” If I were, I would hardly have offered the world a book of my personal conversations with God.
Second, and most important, I want to respond to your suggestion to me. You have said: “Set your filters to see love and then relax.” My response is a series of questions: Is this what Moses did? Is this what Jesus did? Is this what Muhammad did?
As Mewabe pointed to in his own response to your posted Commnet, is this what you would have had Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. do? After all, he was a man of the cloth, a minister. What business did he have poking his nose into the politics of his day?
And what about Saint Elizabeth of Portugal? Was she “setting her filters to see love, and then relaxing” when twice in the 14th Century she placed herself in the middle of a battlefield between opposing armies, both times stopping a war and causing terms of peace to be arranged?
Is this the kind of “relaxing” you have in mind, Blake? Or is there a place in the lives of Spiritual Messengers to be spiritual activists such as those above? Can those with a deeply spiritual inclination see the perfection of all the conditions around them—as a perfect Contextual Field in which to seek to create the next highest version of Perfection, inviting everyone to a new level in the expression of Divinity?
It is true that, as you say, “The world looks bad if your filters are set to only look at the bad.” But what if you see a circumstance as neither “good” or “bad,” but simply “what is” — and then merely choose to change “what is” so that it more closely represents Who You Are now? Is that not the whole purpose of life, and the entire Agenda of the Soul? If not, what is?
If we pass by an alley in which we see a person being attacked and crying for help, should we simply walk on as we “set our filters to see love, and relax?”
What say ye, Blake?
In a statement of enormous clarity, God has revealed to humanity the cause of all of its dysfunction.
“All behaviors are created by beliefs,” God said in the book The New Revelations. Even “automatic reactions” are based on what you believe is occurring, is about to occur, or could occur, He said. All behaviors are sponsored by beliefs.
“You cannot make a long-term change in behaviors without addressing the beliefs that underlie them,” God said, and then repeated the statement, because the brevity of that statement belies its importance. You cannot make a long-term change in behaviors without addressing the beliefs that underlie them.
Then God offered a fascinating insight into world events in the 21st Century. “Those societies that are now causing, and that have historically caused, the most upheaval in your world are those societies that have focused on beliefs,” She said.
“Most humans try to change things by focusing on behaviors. They keep thinking they can make things better by doing something. So, everyone is running around trying to figure out what they can do. The focus is on doing something, rather than on believing something.
“But radical forces within your societies have always sought to change things by using the power of thought, not action, for they know that thought produces action. Get a person thinking a certain way and you can get a person to act a certain way. It is not easily done the other way around.”
God offered killing as an example. You can rarely get a person to go out and kill another person simply by telling him to do so, the Deity said. You have to give him a reason. And “reason” exists only in thought. And thought is always based in Belief. So, if you want to get one person to kill another, the fastest way to do that is to give him a belief that supports the action, and can sponsor it.
One such belief, God said, might be that killing is what God wants, that it is doing the Will of God, and that one will be rewarded in heaven for doing it.
“That could be a very powerful belief, a very powerful incentive. And so, while most of the world is seeking to bring about change by telling people what to DO, those who truly know how to motivate people are bringing about change by telling people what to believe. Do you get it?”
God’s statement concluded with this observation: “Your world is facing enormous problems right now, and you must solve the problems at the level of belief. You cannot solve the problems at the level of behavior. Seek to change beliefs, not behaviors. After you change a belief, the behavior will change by itself. You can take whatever action you want to take to alter someone else’s behavior or to stop it, but unless you alter the beliefs that produced such behavior, you will alter nothing and stop nothing.
I had the Holy Experience today. I had it this morning. I am still having it as I write this.
The experience feels interestingly like a new beginning. So many things are changing in our world, and so many things are presenting themselves for change in my life. I experienced this morning that I want to change how I am. I wish to become more loving, more patient, more compassionate, more giving.
Yes, much, much more giving.
This is wonderful, this feeling of being willing to change and to become a larger version of myself than I am experiencing today. It is part of the continuing adventure, of the never-ending process, that is the expansion of my humanity and the evolution of my human soul.
Just when I think “the game is over,” it never is! This is what is so extraordinary about Life. Even after what we imagine to be our death, life is not over. It never is and it never will be.
I don’t know why I am feeling all this right now, why I am knowing this as part of my experience today more than usual, but I am. It just feels like a new energy is coursing through me. And that feels good. I thank God for it. I thank God for letting me get up today with such revitalized energy, even at my age. I am not a young man any more, but my heart feels young as ever.
I think that part of what is behind all of this may have to do with the fact that I had a memory in my sleeping/waking moments this morning that I once spent the entire weekend going over the “script” of my life, and I was remembering that. And when I say I was going over the script of my life, I mean literally, not figuratively.
I had the screenwriter, the producer/director, and the director of photography of Conversations with God: The Movie at my house for the three days some years ago, going over the first draft of the script for the film. They were asking me to describe, in some cases moment-by-moment, many of my most meaningful life experiences—and that can throw one into deep introspection, as you might imagine. It is also something you do not forget, because it is very rare that a person sits down for three days and summarizes his entire life.
I haven’t lived my life the way I would have liked to. Some of the choices I have made have been very hurtful to others, and I deeply regret that. Yet I see now, whenever I review the entirety of my life, that certain things had to happen exactly as they have happened in order for me to be here now, just as I am—and for the others in my life to be where they are as well.
I know that sounds like the perfect self-absolving philosophy, a wonderful thought system that allows one to escape regretting one’s past—and even to, in some ways, justify that past.
I promise you, this idea brings none of those benefits. And least, not for me. I will always regret certain choices and actions in my past. And I can never justify those choices based upon a thought that things needed to happen exactly the way they happened. Nor could I possibly “justify” making those same kinds of choices and decisions today.
Yet regret is not guilt, and that is what is important here. “Guilt” is about feeling that I did something “wrong,” while “regret” is about feeling that what I did is not something I would do again. For it is as poet Maya Angelou has said: “When we know better, we do better.”
And what is it that I “know better” now? I know myself better. I know better Who I Am—and who, in the future, I choose to be. You see, there is one thing I did not understand back there. In my past, I did not understand what I was doing here. On the earth, I mean.
Then Conversations with God set me straight. It said, “Every act is an act of self-definition.” It made it clear to me that I was not my body and that I was not my mind, and that I was not even my soul, but rather, all three combined. And that the reason this Triune Being that I am came into the Realm of Physicality was so that I might both Know and Experience Who I Really Am.
Conversations with God taught me that God and I are One; that I am God, godding; that the purpose of my life is to recreate my Self anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever I held about Who I Am.
This is not a journey from nowhere to nowhere. This is a process. Life is a process. It is a process with purpose and meaning. It is a function of the Universe.
It is the Present Action of an Eternal Activity. I am not an infinitesimal spec of dust on the cosmic floor, unworthy to even be seen, much less celebrated. I am a big and important, and yes, an even glorious part of an Ever Ongoing Expression of Divinity.
Conversations with God also taught me that God forgives me completely and utterly for my “offenses” — which God sees as merely “mistakes,” “misunderstandings,” and simple “errors,” holding me in the cradle of Her love, embracing me in the warmth of His compassion and deep understanding, encouraging me now and giving me the strength to move forward with my purpose in this life: to know myself as Who I Really Am, and to experience that.
In this way, God experiences ITself…and it is the only way God can.
