The Global Conversation

Author: Neale Donald Walsch

  • Handling life’s problems
    with sweet subtlety

    I have come across a wonderful book that is ten years old, but whose subject—and treatment of it—is as fresh as this morning’s first breeze.

    Awake Mind, Open Heart, by Cynthia Kneen, is a review of the basic points of Buddhist and Shambhala teachings and philosophy, offering a remarkably insightful explanation and right-there-in-front-of-your-face usage of a structure of reasoning called threefold logic.

    This analytical tool, as Cynthia tells us, can be extremely powerful in approaching everyday problems, challenges, and circumstances. It can, as the book’s Introduction declares, “help you in conducting your work, talking to your kids, thinking through what’s puzzling you, negotiating with your car mechanic, or anything.”

    Within the text itself this logic form is utilized to explore a wide range of topics, including how to “settle down” with yourself, how to summon courage for your daily encounter with life, discovering greater wisdom, attaining dignity, seeing the world as friend, and what being a genuine leader is all about.

    I was particularly struck by a chapter titled A Joyful and Sad Heart, which, as it turns out, makes virtually the same point that is found in my own book, Happier Than God—that “happiness and sadness are not mutually exclusive.”

    The chapter describes “the unique experience of joy and sadness combined”—out of which arises “a pragmatic tenderness to appreciate and be sympathetic to your situation,” and to be “the basic goodness” in the particular situation that you are now facing…whatever it might be. It is sort of an Eastern version of Byron Katie’s central idea of “loving what is.”

    By means of illustration, the author tells of the word “hello,” and how it also means “goodbye.” Because everything is impermanent and nothing lasts, the author says we should really say “goodbye” when first shaking hands with someone. In this we see and feel both joy and sadness in the same moment. “Hello/goodbye, and I hope Hello again” is what might actually be said upon meeting someone, the book suggests. This is just one of many, many sweetly subtle treatments of life’s complexities.

    Cynthia Kneen (pronounced “neen”) is a senior student of Chogyam Trungpa who has taught meditation programs for more than 25 years. She is also a practicing management consultant who lives in Boulder, Colorado. Her book, published in 2002, is a testament to the power of courage and dignity in everyday life, and as exciting a read today as I’m sure it was ten years ago when first released.

    Highly recommended for its soft, gentle, almost sneak-up-on-you approach to some of life’s most challenging moments.

    From Marlow & Company, ISBN 1-56924-551-7

    (If there is a book, movie, music CD, etc. that you would like to recommend to our worldwide audience, please submit it to our Managing Editor, Lisa McCormack, for possible publication in this space. Not all submissions can be published, due to the number of submissions and sometimes because of other content considerations, but all are encouraged. Send submissions to Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com. Please label the topic: “Review”)

  • DEBATE WINNER DECLARED!

    A clear cut winner in the first Presidential Debate has been declared. It was neither Republican Mitt Romney nor Democrat Barack Obama.

    It was the American people.

    For the first time in 18 months of back-and-forth statements and claims, both candidates for the highest public office in the United States appeared on the same platform to explain directly to the American people their proposals and ideas for how they would run the country should they be the country’s president in 2013.

    The nation has waited for a very long time to hear from these gentlemen on topics ranging from taxes to the role of government, from health care to the U.S. economy. And while the format of two minutes to respond to complex questions continues to leave much to be desired (people have been complaining about such an abbreviated format election after election), moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS gave both candidates as much leeway as the rules would allow to state their case and make their point.

    People—especially those who call themselves “undecided”—thus had a real opportunity to hear more of what Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney had to say in direct interface with each other on the major points of domestic policy than they ever had before. They could “feel into” these leaders and get a real sense of who they believe is best qualified to lead their nation in the years just ahead.

    The wonder of the debate is that it could happen at all. The New Spirituality as articulated in the Conversations with God series of books says that the political process is a nation’s spirituality demonstrated. If this is true, and if the word “spirituality” can be understood to mean a person’s and a nation’s highest core values, then the United States has again demonstrated that its highest core value is in harmony with the highest value of The New Spirituality…which is freedom.

    High school political science students know that in still too many countries around the world such a level of freedom—the ability of a nation to present to its people opposing candidates for the country’s highest office and to let the people decide who they wish to elect—is unheard of. Yet if a nation’s people cannot select their leaders, how can the values they hold closest to them ever be reflected in their nation’s politics and policies?

    Now there are those who will say that the American political system is distorted, warped, and subject to every kind of abuse. And there seems little question that it is, for sure, in need of major reform, particularly as it relates to money flow, a badly outdated electoral college process which continues to be used to determine the winner of the most important election every four years, an organizing structure which continues to stubbornly be limited largely to a two-party system, etc. Still, and with these badly needed reforms notwithstanding, we saw in the debates something that would be completely out of the question in places such as Syria, where people feel they must take up arms in the street in order to participate at any level in the political process.

    Whatever the challenges, limitations, distortions and abuses of the system, at the end of the day people in the U.S.—and now, thankfully, more and more nations around the world—are able to declare with their votes the leader of their choice. The system is not perfect (indeed, it is far from it), but it is closer than any other process so far devised to empowering the highest spiritual values of a nation.

    If you have a Top of the Page Story that you would like to submit, send it to Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com
    Stories in this space seek to relate an event in the news of the day to The New Spirituality.
    Not all material submitted is accepted for publication, but we appreciate each submission.

     

  • There’s nothing you have to do

    Question to Neale: Conversations with God says, “There’s nothing you have to do.” What does this mean? If this is telling us what I think it is, why bother working for a better world? Why bother even being a “nice person”? And if, as you say in What God Wants, the truth is that God wants nothing at all, why not just break all the rules, live a completely hedonistic life, and let the devil take the hindmost? This whole message leaves me frustrated. – AG, Minneapolis, Minn.

    Dear AG: You ask a good question. Yet the statement, “There’s nothing you have to do” should bring you the greatest joy, and not a moment of frustration, because it is God’s greatest gift: Freedom. The statement does not mean there is nothing you will do in your life, it means that there nothing you have to do. In other words, nothing that you are required to do.

    God does not require us to do certain things, or to avoid doing certain things, in order to “get into heaven.” That notion reflects an elementary (perhaps even a primitive) understanding of God and Life.

    The God of Ultimate Reality requires, commands, and demands nothing. Why would God, when God is and has everything? What God desires is simply to experience Godself in all its glory. So God created Physical Life as an out-picturing, or expression, of Itself, giving Itself total Free Will to manifest Itself in any way that any of its countless aspects might choose to, using a simple formula: the higher and grander the choice, the higher and grander the experience.

    The opportunity, then, that is placed before Human Beings (who are one out-picturing of God) is to express ourselves in each golden moment of Now in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are. The greater our vision, the grander our possibilities, to which there no limits.

    Thus, the only reason to do or not do anything is not to “please God” or to avoid “displeasing God,” but rather, to express God and to experience God in the next grandest way possible, given the level of Consciousness of each manifestation of Divine Energy that exists in the Physical Realm.

    The answer to the question, “Why bother?” is, therefore: We do, or not do, a thing in order to express and experience, and thus to know and fulfill, Who We Choose to Be.

    Or, as CWG says; “Every act is an act of Self-Definition.”

    Put simply, humanity is in the process of re-creating itself in every moment. Anthropologists might call this process “evolution.” It is the process by which all living things evolve. The reason for doing any particular thing, then, is to evolve—and to demonstrate and experience the level to which one has evolved.

    We can help each other in this process. Indeed, that is what all Great Teachers have done from the beginning of time.

    And now, we are coming to see that we are all  “teachers,” in that humans have developed the technology for everyone now to see each other fully, openly, transparently. By using platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and, for that matter, the Internet as a whole—including this Internet Newspaper, The Global Conversation—we place ourselves (perhaps unwittingly) in the space of Teacher. That is, we are teaching others whether we know it or not.

    Other people are watching us. How are we living our lives? How we are using these technologies? Are we using Facebook, Twitter, etc., to tell each other what we had for breakfast, and how frustrated we are that we missed our hairdressing appointment? Or are we using these technologies to share with each other what we have learned and what we have chosen to demonstrate regarding what it means to live our lives as human expressions of the Divine?

    What are you using your life for? And how would you choose to behave and experience your humanity if you felt that you didn’t have to do anything in particular to pass God’s “judgment”? Now that is true freedom. And that is what is meant by on Earth, as it is in Heaven.

    Can we create heaven on earth right now? Yes. Are we doing so? No. We are creating a hell on earth. And that, quite remarkably, is our own collective decision.

    It doesn’t have to be this way. You can choose differently, right now, this day, in your life. And if everyone did this, we could and would change the world.

    May God’s blessings flow to you, and through to, to everyone whose life you  touch, both now and even forevermore.

    — Neale Donald Walsch

  • CAN WE EVER GET THE POISON
    OUT OF POLITICS?

    Some people are saying it’s the most vitriolic, attack-oriented, negativity-based political season they can ever remember.

    The American presidential election, with its concurrent races for the country’s Senate and House of Representatives, has turned into a cesspool. Most (but not all) Americans are saddened by this, and wonder: “What has happened to a political process that we were once able to celebrate, and were proud to place before the world as a model for the entire planet?”

    More important, perhaps, than what has happened or how, is what, if anything, can be done to save the situation. And not just to save one country’s interior decision-making process, but to save all of humanity from itself—for our entire species, from one corner of the globe to another, has failed to find a way to disagree agreeably.

    And a poisoned political system is just one manifestation of that. At least (so far) people are not killing each other en masse in the U.S. to get their point across or their grievances heard. The same can’t be said in some other parts of the world, where there is no room—none whatsoever—for dissent of any kind, to say nothing of vitriolic denunciation of those who are or would be leaders.

    What, then, could be the answer? Is there any antidote to humanity’s poisonous ways?

    Yes. It is a New Spirituality that informs our politics. That is, a new set of sacred understandings that we hold about ourselves and about the purpose of life. And, of course, about God.

    “Spirituality” is just a long six-syllable utterance for a two-syllable word: beliefs. Our highest and most sacred beliefs form the basis of our most critical and self-creative behaviors, and of our politics. A politics that do not arise out of our most sacred beliefs are bankrupt. Yet if you most sacred beliefs are themselves incompletely informed, what then? What we need is a new set of beliefs about everything: who we are, why we are here, and the best way to accomplish that. Our present understands and beliefs about God, about Life, and about each other arise out of religious doctrines that are incomplete.

    Those beliefs hold that we human beings are separate from each other, and separate from God. We are not, those dogmas tell us, all The Same Thing. Yet the New Spirituality holds otherwise. “All things are One Thing,” it says. “There is only One Thing, and all things are part of the One Thing There Is.”

    One source of that New Spirituality, a series of books titled Conversations with God, has placed a remarkable “dare” in front of all the world’s leaders. In the dialogue which comprises the books (from which the above statement emerges), every global political figure, every planetary spiritual or religious leader, every world business or economic trendsetter, and especially every teacher or professor in every classroom, is challenged to place a simple, astonishing 15-word message before those who turn to them for guidance:

    We are all One. Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.

    Those are 15 words that would change the world. Conversations with God calls them The New Gospel. Can the Pope say them? Can the highest Ulama utter them? Can the chief Rabbi speak them? Will the Archbishop of Canterbury? Will any president, prime minister, senator, member of parliament, or candidate for any such office, make this declaration?

    How about you? Can you say them, in the midst of a disagreement you may be having with another?

    Until and unless we all can, we will never remove the poison from our politics. For our politics are our lives, narrowly defined by greatly magnified. Yet the antidote is there; a healing formula is available. It is not a “secret formula.” It is widely known and widely available to all of us. We can mix up a batch in a jiffy. All it takes is a blending of the Soul, the Heart, and the Mind.

    What could cause humanity to embrace this New Gospel? Do we have to be brought to our knees? Must we come right to the edge of our own extinction? Will we have to virtually self-destruct, as we are watching ourselves do in Syria and other places? Would even the threat of planetary (as opposed to regional) self-destruction be enough? Some people in America are asking that right now.

    We must get clear as to who has the answer—and it is neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. Romney.

    It is you.

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    (If you have an observation that you would like to offer specifically in the area of World News or Current Events from a New Spirituality point of view, we will be happy to consider it for publication here. This is your opportunity to Dialogue With The World on your ideas about what’s happening making headlines these days, within the context of The New Spirituality–and how you believe the second could one day affect the first. Please send submissions to Lisa McCormack, Managing Editor, at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com)