The Global Conversation

Author: Neale Donald Walsch

  • What is your New Year’s Resolution? And, secondly, what is your wish for the New Year?

  • ON THE FACEBOOK PLATFORM of Neale Donald Walsch there is an excerpt-by-excerpt posting of The Only Thing That Matters, the newest book in the Conversations with God cosmology. Here is one of those entries…
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    An Enormous Power Has Been Placed in Your Hands

    Now you have one missing piece of the puzzle. Now you have one transformative tool. (You will be given others here as well.) It is a device with immense power—a simple device that can transform almost any moment, almost miraculously, almost immediately.

    But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s understand exactly what this tool is.

    Gratitude is not merely an emotion, it is a decision.

    So powerful is this decision that it becomes a definition and a declaration. It defines and declares your experience of Here and Now. And hence, your reality. Gratitude can be a simple emotional reaction, or it can be a magnificent spiritual creation. It is a simple reaction when your Mind is on Automatic. It is a magnificent creation when your Mind has merged with your Soul in making a combined choice about any Present Moment.

    In every Moment of your life your choice is always the same: to move into Reaction or Creation.

    (You might have a little fun noticing that “reaction” and “creation” are very close to being the same word. Only the C and the R need to be reversed. When you C what you have always been meant to C, then you R what you always R—and the course of your life is reversed.)
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    Visit this site: http://goo.gl/gFAsm to find out more.

    (NOTE from NDW SUPPORT: Neale considers THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS (released from Hay House) to be his most important book to emerge from God’s inspiration since “Conversations with God.” Neale’s dream is that everyone could read every word that’s in this text. He is therefore posting the entire book, line-by-line, here on Facebook, in daily excerpts. He hopes that you will find the book as beneficial as he has.)

  • There could hardly be
    a better time to have a
    Friendship with God

    NEALE: Many people think that God is their friend, but they don’t know how to use that friendship. They see it as a distant relationship, not a close one.

    GOD:  Many more people do not even think of Me as a friend at all. That’s the sad part of it. Many people think of Me as a parent, not a friend — and a harsh, cruel, demanding, angry parent at that. A Father who will tolerate absolutely no failure in certain areas — such as, for instance, how to worship Me.

    In the minds of these people, I not only demand your worship, I demand it in a specific way. It is not enough that you come to Me. You must come to Me by a particular path. Should you come to Me by another path — any other path — I will reject your love, ignore your entreaties, and, indeed, condemn you to hell.

    NEALE:  Even though my search for You was sincere, my intent pure, and my understandings the best I could reach.

     GOD: Even though. Yes, even though. In the minds of these people, I am a stringent parent who will accept nothing less than absolute correctness in your understandings of Who I Am.

    If you are not correct in the understandings at which you have arrived, I will punish you. You can be as pure in your intent as possible; you can be so filled with love for Me that you overflow.  I will cast you into the fires of hell nonetheless, and you will suffer there forever, if you come to Me with the wrong name on your lips, the wrong ideas in your head.

    NEALE: It is sad that so many people see You that way. This is not how a friend would behave at all.

    GOD: No, it is not. And so the very idea of having a friendship with God, the kind of relationship you have with your best friend, who will accept anything given in love, forgive everything done in error — that kind of friendship — is unfathomable to them.

    Then, among those who do see Me as their friend, you are right; most of them hold Me at a great distance. They do not have a working friendship with Me. It is, rather, a very distant relationship that they hope they can count on if they should ever have to. But it is not the day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute friendship that it could be.

    NEALE:  And You were starting to tell me what it would take to have that kind of friendship with You.

    GOD:  A change of mind and a change of heart. That is what it would take. A change of mind and a change of heart.

    And courage.

    NEALE: Courage?

    GOD: Yes. The courage to reject every notion, every idea, every teaching of a God who would reject you.

    This will take enormous bravery, because the world has contrived to fill your head with those notions, ideas and teachings. You will have to adopt a New Thought about all of this, a thought that runs counter to virtually everything you’ve ever been told or heard about Me.

    That’ll be tough. For some, that’ll be very tough. But it will be necessary, because you can’t have a friendship — not a real, not a close, not a working, give-and-take friendship — with someone you fear.

    NEALE: So a big part of forging a friendship with God is forgetting our “fearship” with God.

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    Editor’s Note: If you would like to COMMENT on the above excerpt, please scroll down to the end of the red ancillary copy that appears just below, which has been placed here for First Time Readers…

    If Conversations with God has touched your life in a positive way, you are one of millions of people around the world who have had such an experience. All of the readers of CWG have yearned to find a way to keep its healing messages alive in their life.

    One of the best ways to do that is to read and re-read the material over and over again — and we have made it convenient and easy for you to do so. Come here often and enjoy selected excerpts from the Conversations with God cosmology, changed on a regular basis, so you can “dip in” to the 3,000 pages of material quickly and easily. We hope you have enjoyed the excerpt above, from Friendship with God.

    Now, may we tell you about a very easy way that you can share these wonderful messages with others? Please keep reading…

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    About Book-On-A-Bench…

    If you believe that the messages in Conversations with God could inspire humanity to change its basic beliefs about God, about Life, and about Human Beings and their relationship to each other, leave those messages lying around.

    Simply “forget” or “misplace” a copy of Conversations with God on a bench somewhere. At a bus stop, or a train station, or an airport—or actually on the bus, train, or plane. At a hairstyling salon, a doctor’s office, a chiropractor’s office, a park bench, or even just a bench on the street. Just leave a book lying around.

    If everybody did this, the message of Conversations with God could “go viral” in a very short period of time.  So you are invited to participate in the Book-On-A-Bench program and spread ideas that could create a new cultural story far and wide.

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    ABOUT the author of Conversations with God…

    Neale Donald Walsch is a modern day spiritual messenger whose words continue to touch the world in profound ways. With an early interest in religion and a deeply felt connection to spirituality, Neale spent the majority of his life thriving professionally, yet searching for spiritual meaning before experiencing his now famous conversation with God. His Conversations with God series of books has been translated into 37 languages, touching millions and inspiring important changes in their day-to-day lives.

    Neale was born in Milwaukee to a Roman Catholic family that encouraged his quest for spiritual truth. Serving as his first spiritual mentor, Neale’s mother taught him not to be afraid of God, as she believed in having a personal relationship with the divine — and she taught Neale to do the same.

    A nontraditional believer, Neale’s mother hardly ever went to church, and when he asked her why, she told Neale: “I don’t have to go to church — God comes to me. He’s with me and around me wherever I am.” This notion of God at an early age would later move Neale to transcend traditional views of organized religion.

    By his late teens Neale’s involvement with spiritually-based teachings led him to begin dipping into a variety of spiritual texts, including the Bible, the Rig Veda, the Upanishads and Divine revelation according to Sri Ramakrishna. He noticed that when people became involved in organized religion they sometimes seemed less joyful and more angry, occasionally exhibiting behaviors of prejudice and separateness. Neale concluded that humanity’s collective experience of theology was not as positive as it was meant to be. It seemed to him that there was something missing in standard theological teachings; that they might contain very good lessons, he concluded, but that they might not be complete.

    After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, but academic life could not hold his interest and he dropped out of college after two years to follow an interest in radio broadcasting that eventually led to a full-time position at the age of 19 at a small radio station far from his Milwaukee home, in Annapolis, Maryland.

    Restless by nature and always seeking to expand his opportunities for self-expression, Neale in the years that followed became a radio station program director, a newspaper managing editor, public information officer for one of the nation’s largest public school systems, and, after moving to the West Coast, creator and owner of his own public relations and marketing firm. Moving from one career field to another, he could not seem to find occupational satisfaction, his relationship life was in constant turmoil, and his health was going rapidly downhill.

    He had relocated in Oregon as part of a change-of-scenery strategy to find his way, but Fate was to provide more than a change of location. It produced a change in his entire life. One day a car driven by an elderly gentleman made a left turn directly into his path. Neale emerged from the auto accident with a broken neck. He was lucky to escape with his life.

    Over a year of rehab threw him out of work. A failed marriage had already removed him from his home, and soon he couldn’t keep even the small apartment he’d rented. Within months he found himself on the street, homeless. It took him two weeks shy of a year to pull himself together and get back under shelter. He found a modest part-time job, once again in broadcasting, then worked his way into full time broadcasting, eventual landing a spot as a nationally syndicated radio talk show host.

    He had seen the bottom of life living outside, gathering beer and soft drink cans in a park to collect the return deposit, but now his life seemed to be on the mend. Yet, once more, Neale felt an emptiness inside that he could not define, and the daily difficulties that everyone faces continued.

    In 1992, following a period of deep despair, Neale awoke in the middle of a February night and wrote an anguished letter to God. “What does it take to make life work?” he angrily scratched across a yellow legal pad. “And what have I done to deserve a life of such continuing struggle?”

    What followed has been well chronicled and widely discussed around the world. Neale says his questioning letter received a Divine answer. He tells us that he heard a voice just over his right shoulder—soft and warm, kind and loving, as he describes it—that offered a reply. Awestruck and inspired, he quickly scribbled the response onto a yellow legal pad he’d found on a coffee table before him.

    More questions came, and as fast as they occurred to him, answers were given in the same gentle voice, which now seemed to have moved inside his head, but also seemed clearly beyond his normal thinking. Before he knew it, Neale found himself engaged in a two-way on-paper dialogue.

    He continued this first “conversation” for hours, and had many more in the weeks that followed, always awakening in the middle of the night and being drawn back to his legal pad. Neale’s handwritten notes would later become the best-selling Conversations with God books. He says the process was “exactly like taking dictation,” and that the dialogue that was created in this way was published without alteration or editing. He also says that God is talking to all of us, all the time, and that he has come to understand that this experience is not unusual, nor does it make him in any way a special person or a unique messenger.

    In addition to producing the With God series of books, Neale has published 18 other works, as well as many video and audio programs. Available throughout the world, seven of the Conversations with God books made the New York Times bestseller list, with Conversations with God: Book 1 occupying a place on that list for more than two-and-half years. Walsch’s books have sold more than 7.5 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 37 languages. Anecdotal evidence suggests that CWG is one of the most widely distributed hand-to-hand books ever published, with estimates that, on average, at least two people have read every copy purchased — meaning that something more than 15 million people worldwide have read the CWG messages.

    The With God series has redefined God and shifted spiritual paradigms around the globe. In order to deal with the enormous response to his writings, Neale has created several global outreach projects dedicated to inspiring the world to help itself move from violence to peace, from confusion to clarity, and from anger to love revolving around their core messages.

    The projects include: (1) the Conversations with God Foundation, an adult education outreach; (2) Humanity’s Team, a global spiritual activist outreach; (3) CWG for Parents, an outreach providing resources to those who wish to bring their children the messages of CWG; (4) the Changing Change Network, a CWG helping outreach to persons facing major life challenges; (5) The Global Conversation, an internet newspaper outreach relating the spiritual messages of CWG to the news of the day; and (6) CWG Connect, a multi-media communications outreach creating a worldwide CWG community featuring Video and Audio On-Demand services, together with ongoing personal interaction with the author of CWG. Access to all of these programs will be found at the gateway internet site: www.CWGPortal.com

    Neale’s work has taken him from the steps of Machu Picchu in Peru to the steps of the Shinto shrines of Japan, from Red Square in Moscow to St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City to Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

    Everywhere he has gone—from South Africa to Norway, Croatia to The Netherlands, the streets of Zurich to the streets of Seoul—Neale has found a hunger among the people to find a new way to live; a way to co-exist, at last, in peace and harmony, with a reverence for Life Itself in all its forms, and for each other. And he has sought to help them develop a new, expanded understanding of God, of life, and of themselves that allows them to create and experience this.

    Neale’s latest book, The Only Thing That Matters, was published in October, 2012. He lives in Ashland, Oregon and is married to the American poet Em Claire (www.emclairepoet.com).

  • If there was a way to make the Christmas Spirit last longer than just one blessed and relieving week, what, in your opinion, would that be?

  • Can we change the way Change changes us?

    Let’s have a conversation. Let’s have it be a conversation during which we will conduct an extraordinary investigation into how life works at the mental and spiritual level, out of which will emerge a surprising revelation about ways in which we can change our experience of change itself—which means, of course, our experience of life.

    All of life is nothing more than a process, and we call that process “change.”  The conversation we are about to have is designed to offer you a pathway to help and to peace if you are struggling right now with changes in your life.

    Are you going through massive changes right now? Or maybe just little ones? The truth is, there’s no such thing as a “little change,” in the sense of it being a change that doesn’t matter. All change in one’s life matters, because change is creation, and creation matters.

    So in this space over the weeks ahead, we are going to look at this experience of change — and at how it changes us. Is the way that Change changes us something that is within our control? Or are we consigned, after all is said and done, to do as Shakespeare put it: “Suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”?

    There could be no better time that right now to begin this discussion, as we make the change from 2012 to 2013 — and the bigger change from the Last Great Epoch to the Next Great Epoch, and a new 5,000+ year cycle as indicated by the Mayan calendar.

    We’ll get this exploration underway with this important observation: The changes in your life are not going to stop.

    If you’re thinking about riding things out for a while, waiting for things to settle down a bit, you may be in for a surprise.  There’s going to be no “settling down.” Things are going to be in a constant state of upheaval on this planet and in your own life for a good while now.  Actually… yes, well, I might as well tell you….actually, forever.

    Change is what is—and there is no way to change that.

    What can be changed is the way you deal with change, and the way you’re changed by change.

    That’s what the conversation in this corner is going to be all about.

    We are going to be talking here about how to deal with major change, not just minor change.  I mean change that emerges from collapse, calamity, and catastrophe—or at least what we label as these.

    So if your life is collapsing right now, if you’re in the midst of a calamity, if a catastrophe has occurred, what you’re going to find here could save your life.  I mean, emotionally.  But heck, you know what?  Maybe even physically.

    Here you will be given Nine Changes That Could Change Everything.  And that is where we will go in our next installment here. I hope you will plan to join us — and tell everyone you know about the exploration getting underway here. We’re going to fly into 2013 with some of the most important reading you could do.

    (Editor’s Note: The above article, and the series which follows, is based upon, and includes liberal portions of, the book When Everything Change, Change Everything, with additional observation and reflections from the author. Your commentary and input, as well as a description of your own personal experience, is invited below.)

     

  • BEYOND SURVIVAL

    That fabled year — 2012 — is behind us, with just a few hours of it left, and now comes the real task.

    The world was supposed to “end,” of course, on Dec. 21, but we notice that this did not happen. So now the question becomes, was the Mayan calendar indicating not the end of the world, but simply the end of an epoch, of a cycle? Of course it was. And the question now is: What happens Beyond Survival?

    Will life be any different? Will anything change at all? Do we even want or need anything to change in the way we “do life” on this planet? I can’t imagine that humanity is satisfied with the way things are. Surely there must be a desire, deep within the largest number of us, to seek a newer world, as Robert Kennedy challenged and invited us to do. All of which leads us to the thought:

    If we are going to make any kind of difference in our world in 2013 and beyond, we are going to have to do two things. (1) Enter the conversation about what needs to be accomplished and how to accomplish it; (2) Get about the business of creating change in the way we think, not in the things we do.

    There also needs to be a mechanism in place that make both the Proposing and the Implementation of change possible — and that, importantly, frames change within the only context that can give it impact, and make it last.

    That mechanism does exist. It is called Humanity’s Team. Its primary focus is spiritual, but in a practical way, with meaningful real-world application. And in days and weeks ahead, we will explore the opportunities that this global organization places before us for real and worthwhile action within an exciting context.

    That context is the Spiritual Aspect of our earthly experience. Human history has shown (not surprisingly) that any decision or choice made from a place that does not include (to say nothing of being totally outside of) the Spiritual Aspect of our lives will be either not implementable or not sustainable.

    In simple terms, if we don’t believe in it, we’re not going to do it. Belief is the bedrock of change. When we truly believe in something at the core of our being, embracing and implementing what we believe and turning into action becomes a fairly simple matter.

    And if our belief — the things we hold to be sacred and true — is foundationed in spirituality (that is, a sense of who and what we are that transcends what is physically or visibly apparent), that belief holds the highest place in our internal value system, history has also shown.

    THIS ARTICLE IS PART OF AN ONGOING SERIES:
    LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR TOMORROW

    So the question going into 2013 is: What is the state of humanity’s spirituality? Is the portion of our sense of who and what we are that transcends physicality alive and healthy, vibrant, awake, and aware? Or is it dormant, inert, quiescent, barely alive within us?

    Those of us who believe that Who We Are is more than simply a body, more than merely a chemical biological being, have much work to do if we wish to lay the groundwork for the building of a New Human in the days and weeks, months and years ahead. This is a first of a continuing series of articles on that subject. We invite you to join in commenting, or even writing a Guest Column of your own, as we march into 2013.

    The question again: Where is humanity with its spirituality? We have we been, where are we now, and where do we wish to go in our future?

    Is this an idle inquiry? We don’t think so. We think that it deserves humanity’s highest attention. We think it should be part of The Conversation of the Century.

  • WHAT IS CHRISTMAS ALL ABOUT?

    A few years ago I shared the following message at the annual Christmas Eve service that the Conversations with God Foundation has presented in Ashland, Oregon for the past 12 years…

    I couldn’t sleep last night. I was up from 2 until 6, having another one of my Conversations with God.

    “Tell me about Christmas,” I said. “What is it really all about?” And I heard, “What do you mean, what is it really all about? I’ve told you a million times what it’s all about.” So I said, “Tell me again. I think I may have missed it.”

    And suddenly my head was filled with a Christmas Carol – one of the happiest and most triumphant of all the melodies of Christmas. “Joy to the world,” the song began, “the Lord has come.” But I couldn’t get into it. I kept wondering, what is joyful about the coming of someone who is going to be a lord over us?

    God! I said…I don’t understand this! And God replied, “You’re right. You don’t.”

    Then God said, “But at least you’re asking a question. And that’s good. It’s really hard to understand something if you think there are no more questions to ask. You can’t be given an answer if you think you already have the only answer there is.”

    “Well, I don’t have the answer,” I admitted. “So what’s the answer?” And God said, “The answer is that the Lord….who has come….is not a lord over you, but in you.”

    These words came to me at 2:57 this morning, and I pondered them in my heart.

    “Then,” I ventured, “the Christmas season is not just a remembering of the birth of a Babe. This is also a celebration of the birth of the Christed one in all of us.”

    And God answered softly, “yes.”

    And then I wondered what all the songs, and all the messages, and all the feelings of Christmas would mean if I accepted this truth. If I really understood that the message of this season is not about one blesséd being, but about all beings, being blesséd.

    Not about someone else, but about us. About me. But oh my gosh, did that sound bad. I mean, it actually sounded like blasphemy. How could Christmas be about me? Of all the self-centered, ego-maniacal thoughts! This is about the coming of the Lord! This is about the Gift of the Magi!

    But, my heart insisted, what if the gift was me? And what if the Lord HAS come to be in me, not over me?

    I know that I can find a place for him over me, but can I find a place for him within me?

    And what would it mean for me to do that? What would it mean for me to be not only a person who has been blessed, but a person who is blesséd? And for me to think of you in the same way? What if I saw you as blesséd? Would I act differently toward you?

    I’d like to think I would. I’d like to think that I would be more kind to you. More gentle with my words, more caring with my actions, more compassionate in my thoughts, more honest in my dealings, more patient and generous and…and more aware of the wonder of you.

    And if I thought that I was a blesséd person, would I act differently toward me?

    I think I would. I think I’d be more kind to myself. More gentle with my words, more caring with my actions. I think I’d be more compassionate with myself, more patient and generous and…and more aware of the wonder of ME.

    But is it possible that we are all blesséd?

    This I asked in the middle of the night, and the answer came back, stunningly, simply: “Yes.”

    Soooo, I mused… this is the meaning of Christmas. That… that which is Christed is born in all of us. Lives in all of us. Is all of us. We simply do not remember this. And so, Christmas was created to remind us.

    Christmas, it turns out, is not about a particular religion, but about all religions. It is not about a particular person, but about all persons. It does not matter whether you are Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Jew, Baptist or Buddhist. Or none of the above.

    When you give birth to the lord within you, you give life to a wonder and a majesty and a wisdom and a love that can flow from you to all the world, and change the world forever.

    Isn’t this the Christmas Story?

    And when we live this story as our story, are our lives not renewed, with our separated selves made whole?

    Indeed. Our souls are stirred, our hearts are filled. And then it is we who bring…joy to the world.

    The gift of Christmas is us, fully expressed and fully realized. It is us — completely willing and totally ready — to love without condition, to give without restriction, to share without limitation, to create without fear, to celebrate ourselves without shame or embarrassment.

    It is us, choosing to forgive without hesitation, to help without being asked, to rush in where angels fear to tread. Indeed, to lead the way for angels.

    Ah, to lead the way for angels. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’ve come to the Earth. To be a herald!

    Hark! The herald, angels sing. Glory to the newborn king.

    At this moment we can give birth to the royalty within us…the royalty that we are in God’s eyes.

    You know, someone once said…if you saw you as God sees you, you would smile a lot. Well, this moment, this Christmas Moment, is a time for smiles. For in this moment, if we really try, we can almost see ourselves as God see us. We can feel it.

    You can feel it right now, in your heart. That feeling is called love. Your love for life, and all those you love in this life. And God’s love for you.

    The Magic of Christmas is that it gives us permission to take that feeling, to take that love, and share it with all those whose lives we touch.

    With friend, and with stranger. With those who agree with us, and with those who disagree. With those who look and act like us, and with those who do not.

    We are invited in this moment to feel this love, and to give it permanent place within our heart. To be the source of peace on Earth, and goodwill toward men and women everywhere.

    We are invited in this moment to walk the Earth not only as one who is blessed, but as one who is blesséd. Not only as the Lord of the manner, but in the manner of the Lord. For that is what we are. We are the lord of our inner kingdom, and thus, of the outer one as well. And when we understand that, everything changes. We begin to experience the world, and to affect the world, in a new way.

    That is the Christmas invitation. We are invited to begin that experience in this moment. On this, and on every, silent night. And if we do, we will make every one of them a holy night. And we will begin to create a world in which all is calm. All is bright.

    Joy to the world! The Lord has come. Let Earth receive her King. Let every heart…prepare him room. And heaven, and nature, sing!

     

    Merry Christmas, everyone. Happy, happy holidays!

  • COULD OUR THOUGHTS ABOUT GOD
    BE AN UNEXPECTED CAUSE OF OUR VIOLENCE?

    This is the last in a 4-part series of commentaries on the Connecticut events, and the larger implications of them.

    In Part III of this series, I called upon all of us to join together in launching what I have called a Civil Rights Movement for the Soul as an antidote to the slow poisoning of human society that has created the environment within which something as horrific as the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School could take place.

    As I have observed in the past, I believe we make a mistake if we view the Connecticut event as only and just the tragic playing out of the twisted thoughts of an unstable mind. It is that, for sure, but it is not only that.

    Many people seem to limit it to that. One comment entered by a reader of my blog on this topic at Huffington Post appeared to be typical of this group: “Wow! Talk about a writer being out of touch with reality. I can answer his question as to how the Newtown Massacre happened. A woman who had a mentally ill son that was obviously also out of touch with reality had weapons in her house that never should have been there.”

    But it is not — it just is not — as simple as that. That is the outcome, but more than one input produced that outcome.

    I believe the event at Sandy Hook Elementary School, as well as all the gun violence (and, for that matter, all the violence of any kind committed in this world) is the outgrowth of a society in which there has come to be an inordinate and consistent focus on, and portrayal of, Violence as Solution. This portrayal is seen in all the ways that we tell stories about our species to our species; in the myriad ways that we tell each other about each other.

    I know that many are beating this drum now, but I am not opposed to getting on a bandwagon simply because others are on it.  So I will agree with many others who say: it is true that everything from movies to television programs to pictured story books unfortunately called “comic” books (although there is nothing comical about them) to electronic video products for children regrettably called “games” (although killing others should never be thought of as a game) tell our culture about our culture in such a dramatic way that it cannot help but create more of that culture.

    We did not tell stories around our campfires in the earliest days of our existence simply as a means of entertainment. We told stories around the campfire as a means of informing ourselves about ourselves. Stories have a larger impact than passing time. They pass the baton to a new generation. To suggest that they have nothing to do with any of this is disingenuous at best.

    The complete desensitizing of human minds  — stable minds and unstable minds alike — produced by the unending onslaught of vivid, ugly, bloody, gory violence everywhere we look cannot help but produce a society in which the playing out of those storylines in minds that are not stable leads to the acting out of those stories in real life.

    And that, as much as the instability of one person’s mind, is what produces, ever more frequently, events of unimaginably tragic consequence such as the Sandy Hook shooting. Especially when one has easy access to assault weapons designed for rapid-fire killing.

    Now what I am going to say next may feel like a bit of a stretch, but follow me here for just a bit and see if in the end you can agree with me. I begin with a question.

    How do you think it has come to pass that we have found our way to a place where we find depictions of overt violence perfectly okay?

    I believe it is because we have equated Violence In The Name Of Justice with Righteousness under Moral Law.

    Movie audiences cheer when the Good Guys (the ones who have “Right” on their side) end the lives of the Bad Guys in the most graphic, revolting, violent ways. Video game players pump their fists in self-congratulations when the Good Guys (the ones who have “Right” on their side) blow the Bad Guys to pieces, literally — their body parts exploding all over the screen. Television viewers give higher and higher ratings to programs in which shooting and killing by the Good Guys (the ones who have “Right” on their side) bring an end to the lives of the Bad Guys in the most horrific ways.

    What is it within our culture that allows us to cheer violence — to actually crave it in the name of “justice” —  as we do, for instance, in countries (America perhaps most rampant among them) that continue to tolerate the Death Penalty?

    I believe these are all the behaviors that might be expected from a species that has been raised to believe that indescribable, horrific, and painful punishment is entirely appropriate as a response to what has been judged to be “bad.” Especially when this idea comes to us from the most authoritative source of which our human society has conceived: God.

    From the time of our youth we have been told of a God who judges, condemns, and punishes in the most gruesome, ghastly ways as payback for (or, if you wish a more gracious label, as the consequence of) the deeds of humans that God determines to be unacceptable.

    The Bible — to cite just one powerful cultural source of this Gory Story — tells us of over one million people who have been killed at the hand or the command of God. (You can take out a calculator and do the counting. It’s right there in black and white.) And if that isn’t evidence enough, notice that we have heard, over and over again: “Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the Lord.”

    This is the God in whom we believe.

    And even those who do not believe in this God at all live in a society in which the vast majority of people do — and have created a social milieu in which justifiable violence is reflected in both the entertainment industry and the justice system, to say nothing of international politics.

    It is this deeply engrained Cultural Story about God from which emerges our idea that violence is fine when it is used as payback on behalf of that which is Good. This is what has led us to a Content Code for our motion pictures in which depictions of graphic violence are totally and completely acceptable — while depictions of, say,  passionate or romantic sexual love are not.

    (Humans do not, you see, imagine or think of God as romantic and passionately sexual, but we do imagine and think of God as punishing and violently vengeful. Therefore, in our culture, publicly making war is more acceptable than publicly making love.)

    Small wonder, then, that unstable minds use violence of a means by which the perceived injustices in their own lives are paid back through vengeance.

    I believe that the next evolutionary edge for Earth’s people is the creation and the embracing of what I have called a Civil Rights Movement for the Soul, freeing humanity at last from the oppression of its belief in a violent, vengeful, and vindictive God.

    Humanity’s Team has created just such a movement. It focuses on the same thing that Martin Luther King Jr. sought to produce for blacks, that Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan sought to produce for women, and that Harvey Milk sought to produce for gays. In a word: freedom. Freedom from the impulse to use violence as our means of punishing what we perceive to be evil, even as we cite God as our moral authority for doing so.

    The Civil Rights Movement for the Soul specifically invites members of all religious, spiritual, political, economic, and cultural groups to join together, to dialogue together, to explore together, and to examine together, with sincerity and honesty, the question: Are our present beliefs about God and about Life working? Are they producing the outcomes for which we have yearned — and for which they were intended?

    Some of the activities we can pursue as part of the Civil Rights Movement for the Soul…

    1. Engage all levels of media — including Internet media and websites, as well as brick-and-mortar media…newspapers, magazines, television and radio programs and networks…and, of course, today’s pervasive social media (Facebook, My Space, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) — in platforming the driving message of The Civil Rights Movement for the Soul…which is that humanity now needs to be freed at last from the oppression of its belief in a violent, vengeful and vindictive God, and from its slavery to a dogma of separation from Divinity and punishment by Divinity that has divided the world for thousands of years.

    One idea is that we form a Special Project Team to be engaged in writing articles, news stories, press releases, and interviews and sending them to all media, challenging humanity to release our species from a global doctrine that creates separation and competition, and replace it with an ethos of unity and compassion.

    2. I would like, further, to encourage people all over the world to form Spiritual Discussion Groups, on-the-ground as well as on the Internet, inviting close examination in every community of the beliefs we have been holding about God, about Life, and about Each Other, and to honestly ask ourselves, “Have our beliefs been working? Are they producing the results for which we have yearned?”

    3. I would invite local HT groups to join in spiritual activism at the local level in other ways as well, in addition to regular weekly or bi-weekly meetings discussing and sharing the New Spirituality. These other ways could include sending Letters to the Editor of local and regional publications, posting the Five Steps to Peace (mentioned in Part I of this 4-part series of commentaries) on community bulletin boards, natural food co-op boards, new age bookstore notice boards, etc. throughout their region, all on a given day (Oneness Day?) around the world….so, suddenly, the Five Steps to Peace “show up” everywhere, simultaneously!

    4. Local Humanity’s Team Speakers Bureaus could be established, making persons available to give short talks before Kiwanis Clubs, Rotary Clubs, Lion’s Clubs, Exchange Clubs, etc. throughout the year (these clubs generally meet once a week and are always looking for speakers and topics to fill their calendar), as well as longer Thursday Night Lectures offered within the community, on the topic A Civil Rights Movement for the Soul.

    5. Bumper stickers could be made and distributed, saying:
    JOIN THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT FOR THE SOUL
    and
    ARE YOU A MEMBER OF HUMANITY’S TEAM?

    6. The Spiritual Activist Project of Humanity’s Team could send members every Saturday to local shopping centers, flea markets, sidewalk shows and galleries, etc. to hand out booklets titled: Humanity’s Team and the Civil Rights Movement for the Soul The booklets would alert people to the amazing opportunity now within the grasp of all of us to recreate ourselves anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are. It would talk about the Five Fallacies About God and the Five Fallacies About Life that stop us from doing that (also highlighted in Part I of this series of commentaries), and it would then list the Five Steps to Peace and invite people to embrace them — and to join and support Humanity’s Team in its work.

    There is much more that could be done as well, as the project team gets rolling and moves deeper into the year, leading up to Oneness Day 2013. These are just some beginning thoughts and some opening ideas.

    If you have an interest in joining the project team, simply write to me and tell me what you are moved to offer in terms of assistance. My address for this project is: neale.walsch@HumanitysTeam.org

    All of this is part of what I hope will be a constructive, healing response to the event in Newtown, Connecticut — and to violence all of the world. I send you all at this very special time of year my personal wishes for a special holiday season.

    Love and blessings…Neale.

  • The National Rifle Association has just held a press conference at which their top executive said that what American needs right now are more guns, not less, and called for armed guards at every school in the nation. Do you agree?

  • NRA SAYS THAT WHAT WE
    NEED ARE MORE GUNS

    This is the third in a 4-part series of commentaries on the Connecticut events, and the larger implications of them.

    In Part II of this series I made the statement that there is no end to life, and no revenge or punishment (Who would That Which Is punish? Itself? There is nothing else in existence but Itself). There is also no such thing as Right and Wrong, and for the same reason. That Which Is is always That Which Is, and there is nothing else except That Which Is. In other words, nothing stands outside of The All. Nothing stands outside of God.

    Because this is true, in Ultimate Reality the conditions of “rightness” and “wrongness” do not exist. There is only what works and what does not work, given what it is that any individual aspect of The One is trying to do. There is no judgment in this matter, there is only the individual assessment of every sentient being as to whether a particular activity, choice, decision, or behavior is producing what that sentient being (or species) intends, wishes and chooses to create.

    Applied to the event at Sandy Hook Elementary School — and the shooting events that have occurred since then (there have been 117 gun deaths in the week following the shooting in Connecticut, according to the Twitter feed @GunDeaths) — we see that our present social system is not working.

    Actually, nothing is working. Not one of our systems. Not our political systems, not our economic systems, not our ecological systems, not our educational systems, not our social systems, and not our spiritual systems. None of them have produced the outcomes for which we have been yearning. In fact, it’s worse. They have all produced exactly the opposite.

    This tells me that the problem in our world today is systemic. It has to do with more than simply our actions. The problem in the world today is not a behavioral problem, it’s a spiritual problem.

    One’s behavior and one’s spirituality are not the same thing, of course. The first — hopefully — springs from the second. So if we reflect deeply on the school shooting in Connecticut we see that there is something amiss here that has to do with much more than just the unstable, imbalanced mind of a single individual.

    After something as horrific as Sandy Hook, many (especially the NRA) want to say: “Terrible as it is, it is just the out-picturing of one twisted, distorted individual. There’s nothing you can do about that — expect maybe, arm everyone else in the country.”

    The National Rifle Association actually has just released a statement at a press conference in Washington saying that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” and calling for an armed guard to be stationed at every school in America. This, it says, is the solution to gun violence in schools.

    The NRA spokesperson said nothing about the solution to gun violence in America away from schools; about gun violence in general. It is too bad he did not, because, as reported by the Internet site Gawker, “While the NRA Was on TV Talking About the Need for More Guns Some Guy Was Walking Up and Down a Road in Pennsylvania Shooting People.”

    It’s true. According to a report in the Altoona Mirror: Four people are dead—including the shooter—and three state troopers were injured this morning in a shooting incident in Frankstown Township, Blair County District Attorney Richard Consiglio said. The gunman and two other men and a woman are all dead, Consiglio said.

    And so we are faced with the supreme irony: National Rifle Association CEO and executive VP Wayne LaPierre is telling us more guns are needed out there, not less, just moments after —  unbeknownst to him — more innocent people two states away were shot by a man running around with a gun.

    The challenge here: We just don’t get it. We just don’t get that the problem is not guns. And the problem is not violence. And the problem is not our mental health system. The problem is not a physical problem, it is a spiritual problem. It has to do with what we hold to be true, about ourselves and our world.

    Let me give you another example. The online news source Common Dreams reported on Dec. 21 that “We just passed the 333rd consecutive month of global temperatures above the 20th-century average. Climate scientists now say it’s growing worse faster than any of them predicted even a few years ago.”

    How is it possible that such a thing is occurring, and nobody in the corridors of real power on this planet is doing anything about it? Further, how is it possible that millions of regular people living their regular lives in the world are not making those in the corridors of power do something about it?

    Simple. The “regular people” are not yet affected by it. At least, not enough of them. It is projected that in 20-30 years half the world’s people will be suffering a water shortage. Then there will be some voices raised. Yet what good will that do? Voices are being raised right now about half the world’s people suffering a food shortage. Over 400 children die of starvation every day on Earth. Is the power elite doing anything about it?

    Does it matter that there was another killing of a group of innocent people just before that NRA press conference? Or that there have been 117 gun deaths across America since Sandy Hook? Will those in the corridors of power do anything about that?

    Not likely. Not unless and until there is a huge shift in our collective consciousness, a huge altering of our collective spiritual reality. Presently, most of the humans on Earth do not believe the first message of Conversations with God, a four-word announcement that, if embraced and placed into social, political, and economic policy, would change the world overnight. That message: We Are All One.

    If we implemented this policy this very day, much of what is predicted to become part of our dire future will never happen. If this idea were adopted and embraced as a functioning reality by humanity, much of what is going on right now would never occur again.

    But until enough people “get” that what is happening to anyone is happening to everyone, there will never be sufficient energy behind any effort to reform our way of being and our way of living on this planet such that Life Itself suddenly (and at last) begins to make sense.

    That’s why I founded Humanity’s Team, a global spiritual activist organization devoted to placing one message before the world — We Are All One — and producing one outcome in our collective experience: a life worthy of a highly evolved species.

    There is a way to bring an end to not just the violence in our schools, but the violence in our homes, on our streets, in our politics, the violence that we perpetrate through our global economics, and yes, the psychological, emotional, and even physical violence that too often emerge from those practicing our religions.

    We don’t even have to search for that way. We don’t even have to try to figure it out. One way, at least, has been given to us, articulated for us, spelled out as clearly as can be, in the Conversations with God series of books. This may not be the only way. It may not even be a better way. But it is one way that we know can be no worse than what we are doing now (to position it as safely as possible), and that certainly stands a chance of proving itself to be very effective at uplifting our collective life experience.

    It is important, I think, that we begin to at least open discussions about this. We need to have conversations ABOUT conversations WITH God. Each of us can engage in this process, creating a Civil Rights Movement for the Soul, freeing humanity at last from the oppression of its belief in a vengeful, violent, and vindictive God, and releasing our species from a global doctrine that creates separation and vicious competition, replacing it, finally, with an ethos of unity and cooperation, understanding and compassion, generosity and love.

    This is what it will take to shake the corridors of power. Words are more powerful than any weapon. It was Victor Hugo who famously said: All the armies of the world cannot stop an idea whose time has come. Let’s do what it will take. Join me in this project of Humanity’s Team. In the final installment of this series, I will explain more of what that could “look like.” Stay tuned.