Author: Neale Donald Walsch

A gentleman has posted on the Neale Donald Walsch Facebook page a series of reactions to my last headline story at this online newspaper, and I should like to respond to him here.

I do so with eagerness and joy, because this is what The Global Conversation is all about. I believe it is conversations just such as these that can begin to generate a global movement toward changing many undesirable aspects of our global experience.

The gentleman posting on Facebook is named Martin Brower, and he writes:

“It’s hard to believe the junk you people believe, not a shred of proof, logic, reason, or accountability. It’s the hippie movement, ‘if it feels good just do it’. I would suggest reading some history. Society has been way worse sexually, violence was way worse, morality was way worse. There will always be a person that wakes up in pissed mood and is not mentally stable and no laws will stop it.”

To this I responded:
Right. Movies, video games, television has no effect on society whatsoever. That’s why sponsors may $5 million for a 60-second ad on the Super Bowl…because messages have no effect.

Right.

Mr. Brower then later posted:
“While it makes you and others feel good about shifting blame it resides in the consumer, stop driving your car, grow your own food, don’t use electricity, exercise and then you will sleep well.

“NOBODY has a gun to the head of anyone that smokes. Those companies would disappear as soon as their cash flow was gone if PEOPLE would stop buying them. McDonald’s would sell salads only if people wanted them. Until you start taking responsibility for your own actions you will always be in bondage.”

Here now is my further response to Mr. Brower:
My Dear Martin…Now you have echoed the whole point of the article I wrote. Yes, that is what I had hoped to convey. Of course it is not the “fault” of the tobacco companies, or the gun manufacturers, or the makers of violence-laden movies or video games. It is the mass public that consumes these products and the displays, in some sad cases, the behaviors they generate, and only when the mass public ceases to desire these products will the human species release itself from its bondage. Thank you for putting it more succinctly, and more verbally clear, than I managed to do.

Yet there seems to me to be no question that this is a circle. That is, one thing affects the other. And there also seems to me to be no question that, for instance, the creators of ugly, violent images influence the minds of millions of human beings — some of them, very young — and help to produce the mindset that generates a taste and a hunger for more of the same. And so the vicious circle completes itself.

Take smoking, for instance. This is as good an example as any. When smoking was high on humanity’s list of self-destructive behaviors, my observation was that television commercials played a major role in its increasing popularity. Messages like images of the “Marlboro Man” (who, ironically, died of cancer) made it seem manly and macho to smoke, and jingles such as “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should,” and Pall Mall’s famous tag line — “Wherever particular people congregate” — helped convince an addiction-prone public that smoking was a very cool thing to do. (There was even a brand of cigarettes called Kools!)

When smoking commercials were finally banned from U.S. television, and movie makers agreed to remove depictions of magnetically attractive, charismatic people lighting up and inhaling cigarette after cigarette on camera, smoking in the United States went down (speaking of statistics).

So there seems to me to be no question, Martin, that mass media affects mass tastes, mass desires, and mass hungers…and mass hungers and mass desires produce the incentive for the makers of products and services that feed those hungers to continue to do so — and to hope to increase them. It is, as I said, a vicious circle. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? That is an elegantly frustrating question. But there seems to be NO question that if you remove one, the other will disappear.

Yet so long as the makers of video games and the producers of movies and the creators of television programs (to use just a few of the examples cited in my article) refuse to accept responsibility for the role they are playing in keeping this circle intact — so long as they insist that THEIR activities are having no impact whatsoever on OURS, and that they play no role in CREATING our tastes and desires, as opposed to simply serving them — the chicken will produce the egg, which will produce the chicken, which will produce the egg, and the collaboration will continue.

I think the point of my article, Martin, was to describe the collaboration. And then to arouse sufficient awakening to cause sufficient interest in creating sufficient backlash to generate sufficient desire to pop the bubble of our illusion that one thing has nothing to do with the other.

I have enjoyed our discussion on this, Martin, and I thank you for your very articulate observation, as noted above.

Perhaps together we can cause an awakening — or (to speak more accurately), add energy to one that is already occurring.

Sending best thoughts…Neale.

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AND ON THAT THOUGHT…Allow me to switch now to an exchange I’ve had right here in the Comments Section on this page with a Global Conversation reader who posts as “Mewabe.”

Mewabe was responding to an earlier entry from reader Christopher Toft, who wrote: “I have been flirting with the Humanity’s team website, trying to wrap my head around the concept. It’s weirdly confusing to me. I feel like ‘How can we have a humanity’s team?’ what does this mean? I don’t understand the idea. The idea feels fuzzy to me, difficult to comprehend. I expect it to be an evangelical organization, trying to ‘convert’ people to ‘Nealism’ and of course it’s not. It something more complex and integral (To borrow Ken Wilber’s phrase) than that, that I don’t understand yet.”

Mewabe replied, in part:
“I do not believe that there is one solution, one magic formula, one person who has it all figured out…I think change will take teamwork, and many different approaches, all complementary.

“I have never been ‘converted’ to anything…because I know who I am. I resonate with bits and pieces of things here and there, but cannot ever espouse another person’s worldview as if it was my own, because it is not and cannot be. This is why I have a natural resistance to all religions, all ideologies, all spiritual movements and all forms of group thinking, because I have and always had my own thoughts.”

Now, here is my entry in that portion of the ongoing discussion here…
My sweet friend, Mewabe…There seems to me to be just the slightest contradiction in terms in what I see you so eloquently expressing. On the one hand you say: “I know nothing about Humanity’s Team, but I focus my efforts elsewhere. At any rate, I do not believe that there is one solution, one magic formula, one person who has it all figured out…”, then you add…”I have a natural resistance to all religions, all ideologies, all spiritual movements and all forms of group thinking, because I have and always had my own thoughts.”

Then, on the other hand you say: “I think change will take teamwork, and many different approaches, all complementary.”

This seems to be exactly the opposite energy of your statements just above. For how is “teamwork” possible if nobody joins the team? How will “many different approaches, all complementary” be created, much less undertaken, if every human being resists “all ideologies, all spiritual movements and all forms of group thinking”?

Doesn’t a football team gather in a huddle to engage in “group thinking” to determine what the next play should be? Hasn’t all truly forward-movement-generating human activity been the result of some sort of human collaboration, not unlike the Evolution Revolution invited and suggested by Humanity’s Team?

If we resist the exhortations of others to join together in spiritually revolutionary movements — and do so on principle because it feels that resistance to such collaboration is resistance to GroupThink — do we not in the same stroke eliminate any possibility of overcoming and changing what humanity’s unconscious collaboration has already produced?

Is Conscious Collaboration not far more beneficial than Unconscious Collaboration? If the fulfillment of our highest human desires is our highest human goal, does not a Collective Effort to achieve a Collective Goal better generate that Collective Experience?

The point I was hoping to make in my article above is that right now, humanity’s Collective Experience is not being driven by humanity’s Collective Goal, but rather, by the Collective Goal of smaller sub-sections of humanity which, while working assiduously to produce particular outcomes, is denying any role in creating them.

Lovingly submitted to our Collective here, for discussion…

And so now we have 20 students randomly stabbed in the chest, back, and abdomen in a blood bath at a high school outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at the hands of a sophomore boy who is in police custody, being questioned, at this writing.

Where are we going in our society? What is happening to the Body Human? Did this kind of thing occur with this kind of frequency during my youth? No. Plain and simply…No.

The makers of increasingly violent video games played by millions of children around the world for the past two decades continue to deny, to this day, that those graphic depictions of fictional violence have anything to do with the sudden and shocking increase in actual violence in our youth.

The makers of increasingly violent motion pictures watched by millions of people around the world for the past two decades continue, to this day, to deny that those graphic depictions of fictional violence have anything to do with the sudden and shocking increase in actual violence in our society.

The makers of increasingly violent television programs watched by millions of people around the world for the past two decades continue, to this day, to deny that those graphic depictions of fictional violence have anything to do with the sudden and shocking increase in actual violence all over this planet.

Nobody has anything to do with anything.

The makers of laws guaranteeing free and easy access to assault weapons, and the manufacturers of those weapons, have nothing to do with the shocking number of killings by guns in the U.S.

Nothing.

The purveyors of porn and the providers of easy access to it now on the Internet, together with the creators of the increasingly raw and explicit sexual content in all forms of our entertainments — from television to music to films to videos to comic books, for heaven sake — have nothing to do with the sex-run-wild environment of our society today, in which the beauty and the wonder and the sacred intimacy of physical love has been reduced to a primitive act of self-gratification, and crimes of sexual violence are on the increase everywhere.

Nothing.

The producers of genetically modified crops and the manufacturers of chemical after chemical after chemical and the makers of cigarettes, cigars, and pipe tobacco have nothing to do with the through-the-sky statistics of cancer and Alzheimer’s and birth defects and the slow but sure degradation of the collective Body Human.

Nothing.

The proponents of fracking and the extractors of more and more oil and the clearers of entire old growth forests and the releasers of pollutants into the air and into the waters and into the earth itself have nothing to do with the warming of our globe, the obvious and undeniable changes in our weather patterns and the once slow and the now rapid despoiling of our environment.

Nothing.

The lawmakers behind the unending machinations and stalemates and spying and erosion of personal rights coming out of Washington and many other seats of power around the world have nothing to do with humanity’s growing frustration with and lack of trust in its ability to even govern itself.

Nothing.

The powers behind a global economic model that allows 5% of the world’s people to hold or control 95% of the world’s wealth and resources have nothing to do with the widening hopelessness, despair, and suffering of the world’s teeming masses, nor their increasing restlessness, anger, and violence.

Nothing.

Nobody has anything to do with anything.

Oh, and one more thing. Lest we forget. Let us be clear that the preachers and speakers of the ever more strident claims of our species’ incredibly intolerant religions have nothing to do with the numbers of people killed or maimed in the name of God under the banner of protecting God’s “honor,” expanding God’s kingdom, or demonstrating God’s authority.

Nothing.

We have decided that we live in a world where nobody has anything to do with anything.

And most human beings are, apparently, content to leave it at that. After all, they can do nothing about any of this. So what can be expected of them…?

Right.

Nothing.

Our purpose, our mission on the Earth right now is very clear. Our opportunity, our invitation, our challenge is to change the world’s mind about God.

To do this, we must first ask ourselves, and then ask the world, a profound question: Is it true that God threw us out of the Kingdom of Heaven, that we are born in sin, and that God will now not let us back into heaven unless we follow certain rules, the obedience to which is the only path allowing us to return?

Is it true, furthermore, that if we do not follow these rules we will not only be denied re-entry into heaven, but will be condemned to unimaginable and everlasting torture in hell?

Is this the God of our understanding? Does it matter?

Yes, it does. Because humanity’s belief in a violent, angry, and vindictive God justifies humanity’s embracing of — and approval of — violent, angry, and vindictive behaviors with each other. So long as we believe that judgment, violence, condemnation and killing are the Ways of God (the Bible tells us that over a million people were killed at the hand or the command of God), we will believe and behave as if judgment, violence, condemnation and killing are appropriate Ways of Humans.

We have based our behaviors on what we understand to be God’s behaviors. That is why God’s Message to the World is so very important at this moment in the evolution of our species.

“Okay, you claim to have talked directly with God, so tell us . . .what is God’s message to the world?”

The speaker was the world-famous host of one of America’s most popular national television morning shows, and he was asking me to answer the biggest question of all time.

“Can you bring it down to a sentence or two?” he added. “We have about thirty seconds.”

My mind raced. How could I say something in thirty seconds that would capture the essence of what Deity wants the world to know? Then, in one quick flash, I heard God’s answer in my head.

I blinked and made an announcement that surprised even me. “Actually, I can bring it down to five words.”

The host raised his eyebrows, showing a nanosecond of disbelief, then deadpanned to the camera: “All right then. Ladies and gentlemen, from a man who says he communes with The Divine, here is God’s message to the world . . . in five words.”

I knew that millions were watching in households around the globe. This was my chance to bring God’s most important communication to more people than I ever imagined I would, or could, in my lifetime. Looking straight into the lens I repeated the words I had just been given to say.

“You’ve got me all wrong.”

If that is true, it re-opens for all of humanity every question, every discussion, we have ever had about the Divine. It my answer is inaccurate, there is nothing further to discuss. The discussion is closed.

This is how most of the religious world would have it. The discussion is closed. God has spoken to us, we are told by virtually every one of the world’s major religions. And God has since stopped talking to us. There have been no further, no new, revelations.

This leaves us lingering for centuries — nay, millennia — with what God is reported to have said to us, which can now never, ever be explored or explained, and certainly never expanded. No one has the right to expand on What God Said. Anyone who does so will be condemned as a blasphemer, an apostate, a heretic.

Yet on page 3 of the 3,000-page dialogue known as Conversations with God this statement appears: “I talk to everyone. All the Time. The question is not to whom do I talk, but who listens?”

Our opportunity now on this Earth is decide whether there could be a shred of truth in that statement. As I said, our invitation is to Change the World’s Mind About God.  I believe this is the mission on which God has invited all of us to embark. It is work that will require great courage and deep conviction, for it contradicts every word of every religion in every culture and tradition on the Earth.

We are not children of a lesser God, who would judge us, punish us, and condemn us to everlasting damnation if we do not come to God through the right doorway, on the one and only pathway, by means of a singular means of salvation. Indeed, “salvation” itself is not even necessary, for God did not throw us out of the Kingdom of Heaven, then setting rules for our return.

The Good News is that we were not “born in original sin,” and we do not have to somehow earn our way back into God’s good graces so that we can go home. We are home right now, everlastingly in the arms of our loving creator, eternally embraced by Divinity, and imbued with It both now and even forevermore.

We are, indeed, “about God’s work.”

We have a chance, in this golden age of instant global communication, to launch a Civil Rights Movement for the Soul, freeing humanity at last from the oppression of its belief in a violent, angry, and vindictive God, and ending forever our telling and re-telling of the ancient and wholly inaccurate story of Separation.

We have been telling each other a story — and passing it on from generation to generation — that God is “up there” and we are “down here”, and never the ‘twain shall meet until Judgment Day, when we will be tried, judged, and convicted or acquitted…and if convicted, condemned and sent to everlasting torture as our punishment, that has produced our Separation Theology.

This in itself might be harmless enough, but the problem is that our Separation Theology produces a Separation Cosmology. That is, a way of looking at all of life that says that everything is separate from everything else.

And a Separation Cosmology produces a Separation Psychology. That is, a psychological viewpoint that says that I am over here and you are over there. And a Separation Psychology produces a Separation Sociology. That is, a way of socializing with each other that encourages the entire human society to act as separate entities serving their own separate interests.

And a Separation Sociology produces a Separation Pathology. That is, pathological behaviors of self-destruction, engaged in individually and collectively, and producing suffering, conflict, violence, and death by our own hands—as evidenced everywhere on our planet throughout human history.

Have we had enough now? Are we ready now to admit and to acknowledge that there may be something we do not fully understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which could change everything?

Are we ready now to, each of us, become messengers of a New Spirituality? Do we have the courage? Do we have the commitment? Do we even have an interest in doing so?

 

If so, how might we accomplish this? How can we change the world’s mind about God?

The people of the Crimean Peninsula have spoken, in an election that the world must assume was largely untainted by coercion or ballot-box stuffing or other corruptions. The result was never in doubt in any event, as more than 60% of the residents of Crimea are Russian speakers and are deeply embedded in the Russian culture. That majority wants to be part of Russia. It never favored being separated from Russia in the first place.

So the people of the Crimean Peninsula have spoken, voting overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and become an independent republic, the government of which, all the voters knew, will immediately request membership in the Russian Federation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin made an astonishing statement of agreement with them on Tuesday when, if an NBC News report  by Albina Kovalyova is correct, he said that Crimea was “stolen” from Russia when it was handed to Ukraine in the first place, half a century ago.

The NBC News report said that Putin, addressing a joint session of the Russian parliament, “described the 1954 allocation of Crimea to Ukraine by then Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev as a mistake and said that the wishes of the local people had been ignored.”

The NBC report goes on to quote Putin as saying that Russia was going through a difficult period at that time, and that “the people of Crimea were not asked about anything. It was hard to imagine then that Russia and Ukraine would be different countries. But it happened. The U.S.S.R. collapsed.”

The result of this was that “When Crimea became part of a different state, Russia felt it was stolen,” NBC quoted Putin as saying. “A million people went to bed in one country and woke up in another,” the report said he added.

The network said that Putin told the Russian parliament that Russia thought Ukraine would be a friendly neighbor, but that the situation “developed differently.”

On Tuesday Putin apparently went even further, describing Kiev, which is the capital of Ukraine, as “the mother of all Russian cities,” again according to yet another report from NBC News.

President Putin says he would think that Americans would understand and support the vote for independence by the people of Crimea, just as Americans support the whole idea of freedom of choice and independence, having declared its own independence from England many years ago.

Mr. Putin also said that he hoped that Germany and the rest of Europe would understand the desire of Russia to embrace Crimea again as a part of the Russian Federation, just as East and West Germany joined together once again a few years ago to form one nation — a move that, Putin said, Russia supported. He did not point out that this was even though Russia then “lost” East Germany as a satellite region under Russian control.

These words, reportedly from Putin as quoted by NBC News, are being placed here in order to put the entire Crimea/Ukraine situation in a new and larger context, allowing, perhaps, for a deeper understanding of why Russia is taking the position it is now taking regarding Crimea and Ukraine.

This does not make the Russian position “right” (nor does it make it “wrong”) — it simply makes it, perhaps, more understandable to people in the West.

All of which brings us to a remarkable idea placed in the Comments Section beneath the last headline story on this webpage, which also focused on the situation in Crimea, and invited readers to offer their suggestions on how to deal with the apparent impasse between Russia, Ukraine, the U.S., and Europe.

A reader named Cate Grieves wrote…

“If I was the President of the world, I would get all the Presidents together. They then sit around a large ROUND table. They would then have to stick a large white piece of paper to the front of their clothes. On this piece of paper would be their name — in LARGE black ink in capital letters. Then each person hands the person on their left, their name badge. They then put it on.