ADVANCE REVIEW: “This piece is the most comprehensive “look” at this subject I have ever encountered…extremely insightful…right on the money, so to speak…very poignant, very sincere. I suspect Neale has had another ‘Conversation with God’…thank you!”

— from the Comment Section beneath this column

I had this interesting insight this morning: We’re all walking around trying to keep each other happy. I mean, on this planet. That’s all we’re trying to do is keep each other happy, so that we can keep each other in our lives. It’s about trying as hard as we can to avoid rejection. We don’t ever want to be alone again. We never want to be rejected again, because we think that’s going to lead to our being alone again.

We were rejected once—at least, that’s what we were told has happened, when God kicked us out of the Garden of Eden—and we have felt the sting of that ever since, the loneliness of that, the utter desolation of that. I call it the “Desolation of Isolation,” and we struggle mightily to never experience that again, because there is nothing worse than feeling rejected, pushed out, left to our own devices.

This is a repeat of the birth experience, and that is an experience we have never forgotten. We remember it at a cellular level. We remember being pushed out, left there, on our own. We’ve never forgotten that, and we never want to experience it again.

So we spend or lives trying to please each other, trying not to get rejected, even in the smallest ways. Now, if it happens that in our life we have been rejected, or have been “pushed out” of someone’s life—of the life of someone we’ve dearly and deeply loved—no matter how hard we’ve tried to please them…there’s almost no repair for that. We can eventually get past it, but we can never get over it.

This is the answer to the question, “What hurts you so bad that you feel you have to hurt me in order to heal it?” It may not even be us who did the original rejecting of another. They may feel so hurt by the original rejection wherever it came from that they have become bitter and angry with life at every level.

They think, So this is what happens when you allow yourself to love somebody!, and that are determined never to become that vulnerable again.

And so they armor themselves. And in some cases they do more than armor themselves. They embody the notion of preemptive strike. They lash out at anyone who shows them kindness, admiration, or affection—and especially if anyone tries to show them love.

When I was a child there was a song I heard a lot on the radio, sung by a group named the Mills Brothers. I remember the lyrics to this day.

“You always hurt the one you love, the one you shouldn’t hurt at all. You always take the sweetest rose and crush it ‘til the pedals fall. You always break the kindest heart with a hasty word you can’t recall. So if I broke your heart last night it’s because I love you most of all.”

And it’s not always only about armor. With some people—people who have been severely or repeatedly damaged—it’s also at some level about revenge. It’s about getting back at the world for how the world has treated them. And this kind of “pay back” is indiscriminate. Everybody is in the line of fire.

Harsh remarks are made. Cruel judgments are made. Cutting comments are made. “Corrections” are offered in the most searing, blistering, belittling ways. Tones of voice and facial expressions are mocked, often right in front of the other person. And if the “target” of such verbal aggression offers the tiniest protest, or displays the smallest sign of being hurt, the aggressor says, “Oh, come on, can’t you even take a joke?”

If someone else other than the “target” calls the verbal aggressor out, asking why they would say such a thing, the aggressor inevitably responds, “Hey, I call ‘em as I see ‘em.”  And if some other person says, “But you don’t have to do that. If you have judgments about others, fine. We all do. But you can keep them to yourself. You don’t have to announce it in public,” the verbal aggressor will respond, “I’m just telling the truth that no one else will say. Someone has to.”

In this, they see themselves as the Hall Monitor. They’ve been assigned the task of keeping everyone obeying the rules—and they won’t give anyone a “pass.”  If they catch you in the slightest infraction, they’ll call you on it. And if you say, “Wow, you don’t let anyone get away with anything, do you…? You know, you don’t have to notice and announce every single thing that you have a judgment about,” their defense and response is: “I hold in a lot more than I let out.”

And so we see a person who feels incredibly and unbelievably superior to the world around them, and just about everyone in it. Their kindest act is to “hold in” 90% of their comments and judgments. What you’re seeing in only the tip of the iceberg.

Ouch. They must be hurting really, really bad to have such an inner experience of everything they look at in life—even those they love.

Now not every person has experienced the hurt of birth’s trauma in this way. And not every person—even those who have, like most of us, experienced some rejection in their life by someone they loved—retreats to such a place of Arm & Attack. But when you meet someone who has retreated to that place, you will know it. You will be able to spot it a mile away, because they will be caustic and mocking and sometimes even directly and harshly critical of every fault and foible of others—and maybe even of you—right in front of you.

And the question then becomes: How to deal with such a person? How to respond?

You don’t want to just turn away and allow the behavior to continue (particularly if it is directed toward you), because this creates a wholly dysfunctional relationship with the other: An Aggressor/Surrender relationship that simply teaches the aggressor that unkind words and unkind behavior is going to continue to be accepted by you. And acceptance, of course, is all that the other person ultimately wants. It is rejection that they fear! So they will continue to accept in themselves the very behavior that they see others accepting in them.

That is the supreme irony.

And so, my own personal recommendation is that we lovingly and caringly, compassionately and patiently—but very honestly and directly—communicate with the verbally aggressive person exactly how they are being experienced by you, and then let them know that every time they foist their verbal aggression on you in the future, you are going to call them on it.

And if they continue to verbally attack you or those you love when they are around you, you will simply no longer have them around you. You will leave the room when they enter, and if you can’t easily and graciously leave, you will simply not interact with them in any important or meaningful way beyond common courtesy.

Then, you will do this: When they ask you (as they surely will), “Why are you always so cold and distant with me? If you’ve got something ‘going on,’ why don’t you just come out and say it?”, you will gently respond, “I have said it, dear one, I have said it. You have simply not taken it in. So I will say it again…

“You are not safe. You are too often unkind, too often harsh and cruel and mocking of others, and sometimes even of me, and I therefore find it more pleasant to not interact closely with you. We can be friends. We can always be friendly. But if you want us to be good friends, friends who want to spend time with each other, friends who have each other’s back, who can’t wait for the next interaction with each other, you will have to change those behaviors with me. I have a little slogan that I share with my friends: DON’T ATTACK. HAVE MY BACK.”

Then your opportunity is, at first, to forgive the other person, knowing and seeing the level of pain they are in that is causing their verbally attacking behavior, then moving even past Forgiveness, right straight to Understanding. Conversations with God says that when Understanding arrives, Forgiveness leaves. That is, the need to forgive another for anything leaves us the moment that we understand how it is possible that they could have done such a thing. And that understanding arrives the moment that we see the same behavior in ourselves.

Through the years I have learned that there is nothing another has done to me that I have not done to someone else, in some form or another. This is a second way of saying, “I possess every fault I find in you. I have committed every offense that I see you committing.”

This is True Understanding. And it is revealed when an even deeper comprehension arises: Every act is an act of love.

This is important to hear, this is vital to grasp, if you ever want to move into real Mastery.

There is no emotion other than Love. Conversations with God famously said, “Love is all there is,” and this is true. Every other emotion, or action arising from it, is an expression of love. Fear is an expression of love. Anger is an expression of love. Hatred is an expression of love. And yes, even violence is an expression of love. All of these are expressions of love—distorted expressions, for sure (remember I said that), but expressions nonetheless of love, and of nothing else.

Let’s test the theory.

If you did not love something, you would not be in fear of losing it, or not having it, or not ever getting it. The thief steals something he loves because he fears not ever having it otherwise. Thus, thievery is a distorted act of love. A person becomes angry as an outcry of love that says, “I don’t want this! I want what I love!” Hatred is likewise an even more distorted expression of love. Consider this: If you loved nothing, you would hate nothing. There would be no reason to. And, at its ultimate level of distortion, violence is an expression of love for something. It is our awareness of this very truth that allows us to justify violence, and even killing—as we do on this planet every day.

Knowing that every act is an act of love—for the Self or for another person, experience, or object—greatly increases our chance of understanding other people and their actions. The challenge then becomes how to stay in understanding—or at least its forerunner, forgiveness—without moving into dysfunction.

In the case of the person who is continually verbally attacking, dysfunction is when you allow that person to verbally aggress upon you and seem to be okay with it when you’re not—all so as not to “rile” the other any further; so as not to offend the one who is offending you.,

This is the height of dysfunction, and it appears in more marriages and more relationships than you might ever imagine. It shows up in such close interactions particularly because all of us are suffering the pain of Original Rejection, and the love of something we can’t have that we dearly want: ultimately, the end of Separation forever.

Yet when we tell a verbally attacking person how you feel about their constant verbal aggressions, it will serve us to not be verbally aggressive with them, but rather, to heed the words of one of my own life’s spiritual masters, Francis Treon, who taught: “Speak your truth, but soothe your words with peace.”

These things I have experienced being shared with me this morning, by the Source of Wisdom within. I share them with you in the spirit of togetherness, as we walk side-by-side along this road that we call Life. I hope you will Share with me your own insights, below.

Hugs and love…neale.

(The above is from the new book What God Said, due out in September from Penguin Putnam, and is part of a continuing series of commentaries by Neale Donald Walsch on the Conversations with God material.)

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, in our next installment, you will be given Nine Changes That Could Change Everything.  This little list will alter all that appears in your reality.  Unless it does not.  The choice will be yours.  But it is a list that you may at least want to read.  You may at least want to find out what it’s all about.

I hope that you will make these Nine Changes as quickly as possible.  Not just because the changes in life that you are experiencing (that we all are experiencing) are not going to stop, but also because the pace of change is only going to increase.

Someone noted a few years ago that it was possible for my great-grandfather to live an entire lifetime without having anything come along that seriously challenged his world view, because very little happened that he heard about that altered his understanding of how things were.

My grandfather had a different experience.  He was able to live 30 or 40 years, but not much longer, before some new piece of information was unveiled that seriously confronted his notion of the world.  Perhaps half a dozen times during his life such a major event or development occurred that he heard about.

In my father’s day that window of change dropped to only 15 or 20 years.  That’s about as long as my dad could hold onto his ideas about life and how it works and what is true about everything.  Sooner or later something would happen to disrupt his whole mental construction and require him to alter his thoughts and concepts.

In my own life span that time has been reduced to just 5 to 8 years.

In the lifetime of my children it will be reduced to something like 2 years—and possibly less.  And in the lifetime of their children it could be reduced to 30 or 40 weeks.

This is no exaggeration.  You can see the trend.  Social scientists say that the rate of change is increasing exponentially.  In the time of my great-grandchildren the period of time between changes will be reduced to days.  And then, perhaps even hours.

In truth, we are already there—and have always been there.  For in actuality, nothing has ever remained the same for even a moment.  Everything is in motion, and if we define change as the altering of configurations, we see that change is the natural order of things.  So we’ve been living in a constant swirl of change from the beginning.

What is different now is the amount of time that it takes for us to notice the changes that are always occurring.  Our ability to communicate globally about everything within seconds is what has changed the way we experience change.  The speed of our communications is catching up with the speed of our alterations.  This condition in itself sponsors an increase in the rate of change.

Today our languages and expressions change overnight, our customs and styles change by the season, our beliefs and understandings and even some of our most deeply held convictions change not with, but within, each generation.

Because change is happening all around us and within us so rapidly, what is need now is a guidebook, an “operator’s manual” for human beings facing dramatically shifting life realities. That is what the columns here in the days and weeks ahead will provide. We will be publishing here a much needed explanation of the mental and spiritual basis of change—and specific instructions on how to use mental and spiritual tools to change the way change changes you.

What the Nine Changes empower us to do is not stop change (I hope I’ve already made the point that this is impossible) or even slow the rate of change, but rather, make a quantum leap in our approach to change, in our ways of dealing with it—and in our ways of creating it.

One final word.  The ideas here are based in ancient wisdom, modern science, everyday psychology, practical metaphysics, and contemporary spirituality.  The invitation  here presumes that Divinity exists, that life has a purpose, that human beings have a soul, that our body is something we have and not something we are, and that the mind is under our control at all times.

A rejection of any one of these notions removes the underpinning from much of what is going to be shared here.

This series of articles comes at just the right time for me. As you know from my last entry here, one of my best friends in the world, the administrator of the Conversations with God Foundation, celebrated her Continuation Day on January 4. This shift in her Life Expression was rapid and unexpected by all of us. Patty joined us for the first two days of our annual year-end spiritual renewal retreat and seemed just fine. She had been challenged by cancer for the past two years or so, but she seemed to be getting the better of it; she seemed on top of it, and moving forward.

A week later she had returned Home. I am so happy for her, but those of us here at the Foundation are dealing with Change in a Big Time Way. So you can see how and why this particular series of articles is timed perfectly, and is going to help all of us. God bless you, Patty. See you on the other side!

(Editor’s Note: The above article, and the series which is continuing in this space,  includes liberal portions of the CWG 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.)

The wonderful administrator of the CWG Foundation, and my dear, dear friend and worker in the vineyard for these past 18 years — Patty Hammett — celebrated her Continuation Day today, leaving her body just an hour and a half ago. Very few of you here knew her, but if you have been touched in any important or wonderful way by the Conversations with God material, you can thank Patty for having been a HUGE part of that in more ways than you will ever know. Thank you, my sweet friend. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest…

with love…Neale.

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.)

‘Twas the week before Christmas and all through the house people were wondering, how can a species of sentient beings do to each other what we have been doing?

It is not just the startling acts of one soul in a small Connecticut town that brings the question to mind. It is what is going on all over the world. The killing of thousands in Syria as revolutionaries fight their government. The strife in Egypt as citizens seek to gain more control over their country. The deep division in the United States as sharply divergent political views continue to shake a nation. The ongoing economic crises in Greece and Spain. Car bombs killing at least17 in Pakistan. Explosions killing 26 in Iraq. The list goes on and on.

The world is constantly rearranging itself, recreating itself anew. And Conversations with God tells us this is the fundamental process of Life Itself. Not violence and strife, necessarily, but change.

It is time for an investigation into how life works. I think we need to know exactly what is happening here — and, more important, find some tools to deal with it. Because I’ve got news: The changes in life are not going to stop.

So 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.

I wrote a whole book on this subject, and I’m going to explore what’s in that book here in the days and weeks ahead, because there could be no more perfect time. We are coming to the end of this monumental year of 2012 — said by some to be the end of an epoch, actually — and we are moving into a period in 2013 that is thought by many to be the beginning of a time of enormous coming changes on our planet…environmentally, socially, politically, economically, spiritually, and in just about every other way you can imagine.

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 you know what? Maybe even physically.

Here, in this column in the days and weeks ahead, you will be given Nine Changes That Can Change Everything. This little list will alter all that appears in your reality. Unless it does not. The choice will be yours. But it is a list that you may at least want to read. You may at least want to find out what it’s all about.

So return to this column often now as we liberally excerpt the book titled When Everything Changes, Change Everything, for it offers insights into how we can calmly and peacefully, safely and even joyfully negotiate the times ahead. And in the aftermath of events such as have just occurred in Newtown, Connecticut, I believe the whole human race could do with a little of that.

Your comments are invited, too, in the Comments Section below. Move with me through this material, and let us all know what you think. Because what you think and what I think and what we all think is what is going to be creating our Tomorrows.

Good to have you with us.

I feel that I would like to spend some time discussing Conversations with God within the context of the sad events in Newtown, Connecticut. Everything that I feel the impulse to share with you will cover a great deal of ground, and so, with your permission, I will place this material in several entries here, across a number of days.

Before getting into, in the days ahead, what CWG has to say about these kinds of events in our world, I want to share with you today some of the views of my friend Rabbi Michael Lerner. Michael, in his just-released newsletter, feels that we definitely need much more restrictive gun control laws in our world — but he says that will never be sufficient to put an end to the kinds of horrible things we witnessed at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday.

We will never see that kind of behavior disappear, Michael says, unless our entire global society undergoes “a fundamental transformation of consciousness.” I agree with him completely. And what could create such a shift of consciousness?

“We must create a track of education in every school and every grade level that teaches non-violence — both as a philosophy of life and as a practical way to live one’s life,” Michael says. Again, I could not agree more.

And just what would that look like? Well, says Michael, it would include non-violent communication, and it would teach children and teenagers and college students about…

A. How to value and care for everyone else on the planet  including their parents, teachers, neighbors, friends, and future lovers or partners

B. How to deal with depression, anger, feelings of alienation, powerlessness, stress, and isolation.

C. How to give support to those who are not functioning or are psychologically or spiritually impaired and how to find the correct help for people who need professional help

D. How to recognize and appreciate all the beauty and miraculous wonder of life itself, of the universe, and of human beings

E. How to appreciate and protect the planet from all those forces that are inadvertently destroying it

F. How to end poverty and share the resources of this planet with everyone equally in a planet-sustaining way

G. How to develop one’s own capacities as a spiritual, ethical, aesthetically and emotionally developed, mature and loving human being

We are working right now to create just such a curriculum at The School for the New Spirituality, with its CWG for Parents and its CWG for Kids programs (see www.cwgforparents.com)

But why can’t we get these kinds of common sense programs into our regular schools? Why does it require the creation of special educational programs such as the one mentioned above? Should not all schools everywhere be teaching this stuff?

Well, as Rabbi Lerner says, “The Conservatives are right (in saying) that human beings and not just guns are the problem, but then they never develop or support an educational system that will teach people the skills we all need.”

And, he says, “Liberals fear introducing ‘values’ into public education for fear that they’d be the ‘wrong’ values.”

Well, the rabbi goes on, “It’s time to stop that.” He declares that the moment has arrived for us to “fight for a values-oriented education, based on the values of love, caring, kindness, generosity, and protection of the earth.”

This is exactly what Conversations with God-Book 2 said 12 years ago when it called for an entirely new kind of education program, in which we teach our children concepts, not merely facts about our world. Concepts such as fairness, kindness, equality, and our oneness with all of life, and with God.

As Michael Lerner says: “Until that happens, Conservatives will always have a good case for devaluing public education, and for saying that only religion teaches values…and liberals will prove their case by not creating an educational system that teaches any value other than “making it” — or, in polite Obama talk, an ‘education that prepares our children to compete effectively in the global marketplace’ (which de facto means, learning how to advance oneself at the expense of everyone else, so that ‘you can be number one and make America number one’).”

The outspoken rabbi adds: “Well, guess what helps make you or others number one: violence and power over others. And that message gets reinforced over and over and over again by television shows about crime and the police, about wars and violence, but also by the society valuing and rewarding soldiers who go off to kill innocent people in foreign wars to protect imperial interests.

“So, it takes a whole society to create pathological killers out of human beings who are not born that way, and it will take a societal effort — plus individual efforts — to get these pathological messages out of our consciousness and replace them with loving and caring messages and worldviews.”

Rabbi Lerner concludes: “But we can do it, and that is precisely what our Network of Spiritual Progressives is all about (read our Spiritual Covenant with America at www.spiritualprogressives.org). Without this kind of change of consciousness, step one (banning guns) will be ineffective, and possibly dangerous.”

At the end of his newsletter Michael included a prayer from Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, Congregation Beth Israel, North Adams, Mass. One line of this prayer, in particular, struck me…

“We are Your hands: put us to work.
Ignite in us the unquenchable yearning
to reshape our world.”

What a wonderful combination of words, Rachel…

“The unquenchable yearning to reshape our world.”

Yes.

Yes, yes, and yes again. Ignite that in us, Dear God.

Well, the Civil Rights Movement for the Soul suggested on this Front Page a few days ago has already gotten underway. Many people who read about this spiritual project have already agreed to become part of the initiative. Those of you who have said “Yes!” to my invitation here will be hearing from me personally within the days ahead, with an invitation to become part of Humanity’s Team, the global spiritual activism organization that is sponsoring the project.

Many of you have joined the conversation about this initiative here, and the Comment String has been lively indeed. I should like to react to just a few of the posts that were made in that string now, and then, in future postings here,  move into a description of what becoming involved in this outreach could entail for you.

First, let me interact with some of you, one Comment at a time…

Kristen wrote: “The thought of a worldwide change is great, but I feel it would be more successful without CWG attached to it to include Jews, Muslims, Christians, Athiests etc, and if there was a clear point to include stopping suffering….”

I agree with you Kristen, in part. I absolutely agree that the Civil Rights Movement for the Soul — may we use the acronym CRMS here? — I absolutely agree that the CRMS should “include Jews, Muslims, Christians, Atheists, etc.”, and I am not sure if anything I have written or said anywhere would suggest or indicate that I do not. Nothing inherent in the CRMS eliminates participation by, or inclusion of, persons belonging to specific religious or cultural groupings.

Quite to the contrary, the movement 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? That is, are they producing the outcomes for which we had hoped — and for which they were intended?

I also agree, Kirsten, that within this global project there must be “a clear point to include stopping suffering….” That is why I wrote, and just released, The Only Thing That Matters, which offers a detailed description of how suffering can be vastly reduced, and ultimately removed, from one’s individual experience.

The passages and chapters in that new book about how to end one’s suffering as one moves through day-to-day encounters can change your life. They were intended to, so I hope that everyone here reads them. (The book, by the way, has been published, line by line, for free on my Facebook page, so that everyone can access it without needing to buy it. And Kirsten, if you want to avoid being “in debt” to me by reading it for free, you are welcome to “trade” me your dollars for my book, and then we will have what you feel is a fair exchange, with no subjugation intended or produced.)

Now…going forward…I do not agree, Kirsten, that the Civil Rights Movement for the Soul would be “more successful without CWG attached to it.” CWG is offering humanity a whole New Theology, based on new principles, new understandings, new beliefs, new choices, new ideas, new clarity, new definitions, and the new behaviors that would emerge from all of this. Chief among these new ideas, Kirsten, is the firm CWG statement that CWG, in itself, is not the answer.

Indeed, in Friendship with God the world was given A New Gospel. You have indicated that you have only looked at the CWG material in a cursory fashion. That could explain why you feel the CRMS would be better off without it. It is dangerous to criticize something of which we have deliberately caused ourselves to have limited knowledge. If one doesn’t choose to know about something in detail, that is one’s choice. But to then suggest that a spiritual/social movement would be better off without it seems ill-advised at best, since one admittedly doesn’t know what one is talking about.

In fact, in Friendship with God we are given a brand New Gospel to spread and share with the world. This gospel was referred to again in The New Revelations.  Let me quote that second book from the CWG cosmology here, Kirsten, in case, in your cursory look at the CWG material, you missed it.

EXCERPT…

NEALE: It is possible that the Word of God as put down by humans in their holy books has some errors in it? Is it possible that there is something we don’t know about God and about Life, the knowing of which could change everything?

If only there could be a New Gospel.

GOD: There can be. It was proposed before, in the book Friendship with God. Fifteen words that could change the world. A two-sentence gospel that would turn your planet on its ear.

NEALE: Yes, I remember now. Two sentences that would alter everything.

GOD: They are sentences that could not be uttered from many pulpits or lecterns, by many religious or political leaders. You can dare them to say it, but they will not. You can beg them to repeat it, but they must not. You can cry out for them to declare it, but they cannot.

NEALE: Why? Why can’t they say it?

GOD: Because to utter this New Gospel would be to invalidate everything they have taught you, everything of which they have sought to convince you, everything on which they base their actions.

NEALE: You’re right. It’s a New Gospel that could save the world, but the world cannot preach these two sentences. The world cannot proclaim them. They are too powerful. They are too disruptive.

Still, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are some brave religious and political leaders who might take up this proposed New Gospel and repeat it. Let’s proclaim it here!

“We Are All One.”

“Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.”

What a message that would be coming from the pulpits of the world! What a declaration that would be from the podiums of all nations!

How powerful those words would be uttered by the Pope, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the leading cleric in the Baptist Church, or the world’s Islamic voices, or the president of the Mormon Church, or the head of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod!

I invite them now—right here, right now—to say them, to declare this their truth, to include it in their next public sermon.

Imagine the Pope saying, “God loves all God’s children, and we are all one. There are many paths to God, and God denies no one who takes a path with humility and sincerity. Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.”

The world would shake. The foundations of all the world’s major religions—separation and betterness—would crumble!

I challenge every political party spokesman, every international chief of state, to place this in their party platforms and to announce this in their speeches.

Imagine the candidates in the next U.S. presidential election saying, “This is a complex time, and there are many approaches to the challenges we face us. I have my thoughts and my opponent has hers. My opponent is not a villain. She is not a bad person. She simply has ideas that are different from mine. Listen to our ideas carefully, and then see which one of us it is with whom you agree. But in the end, I want you all to know this: These are the United States, and we are all one. Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.”

The political process would never be the same. Gone would be the demonizing. Gone would be the character assassinations and the impugning of motives and the “make-wrongs” and the belittling. Standing in every election would be two candidates presumed to be good people whose aspirations are to serve the public interest, who admittedly are seeking power because there are things they would like to get done, and who simply disagree on how to do them.

GOD: That is a wonderful picture you paint. That is the picture of a transformed world.

NEALE: But no major political party leader could ever say that. No major religious leader could ever declare it. Their whole message, their very credibility, is based upon just the opposite premise. The whole structure of humanity is built upon the idea of separation and betterness.

GOD: That is the situation in your world, precisely. That is the point being made in this conversation.

There are many humans who cannot abide the thought of living with such new ideas, and so they die instead, clinging to the Fifth Fallacy About Life as their truth. They declare:

It is appropriate for human beings to resolve severe differences created by all their other fallacies by killing each other.

— END OF EXCERPT —

And so we see, Kirsten, that the very underpinning of the Conversations with God message is that the material itself is simply a starting point for larger discussion, for deeper exploration, for ongoing expansion of our ancient views about God, about Life, and about who we are in relationship to each other. And yes, CWG offers some ideas about that, some thoughts about that, some pretty firm recommendations about that. Yet it makes it clear that its ideas, thoughts, and recommendations are not to be embraced as “truth”…but merely as a beginning commentary, allowing each of us to find our own truth.

Throughout the CWG Commentaries the point is made that we should not, should never, allow CWG to become our “new bible,” our new inviolable dogma, but rather, should always and evermore self-reference, using our inner wisdom and inner guidance to lead us to our own inner truth. How can such a point of view be deleterious to a Civil Rights Movement for the Soul, Kirsten?

Your commentaries, ladies and gentlemen, are invited below…

Who and what is God?

The day has long past when we imagined that God is a huge man in the sky, sitting on a throne in robes with a long white beard. Today we know better that that, right?

Right?

So then, who and what IS ‘God’? Is there even such a thing? And if so, what is it? And what is its purpose for existence? And what does it want from us? What does it need humanity to be, do, or have?

All of these questions are answered in Conversations with God. Yet the answers are, for many (indeed, for most of the people on Earth who profess a belief in God) heretical.

The CWG message is considered blasphemy. Yet is it? George Bernard Shaw famously said, “All great truths begin as blasphemy.” Could this be the case with Conversations with God?

Setting aside these books for a moment, what are your answers to the questions above? Is there a ‘God’? If so, who and what is God? Why does God exist? What is God’s purpose? And, most important of all, what does God want? And why?

Let the discussion begin…

Is God a being to be “feared”?

The idea that it is good and wonderful and something to be admired to be “God fearing” has been put back into the public arena by a young television star who has taken to the Internet to urge his fans go stop watching the program that made them his fans to begin with.

Angus T. Jones has been playing the role of Jake Harper on the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men for ten years, and a few years ago (2010) became the highest paid child star in television, earning, at age 17, nearly $8 million in just two seasons. But earlier this year he acknowledged that he is these days experiencing some discomfort playing some of the story lines that were being written for his now older character on the show.

That discomfort apparently erupted full blown last week when Mr. Jones posted a video on YouTube saying that he no longer wanted to appear on the program, on which he has been a continuing character for a decade, declaring that the show conflicted with his religious views. Mr. Jones said he had just been baptized as a member of the Forerunner Christian Church.

In the video Mr. Jones went further. He asked his fans to stop watching Two and a Half Men and “filling your head with filth.” I have nothing to say about that. If Mr. Jones feels his own television program is “filth,” so be it.

(Mr. Jones has since released a statement in which he essentially says that he did not wish to personally insult or dishonor the show’s producer, director, cast, or crew with his remarks, all of whom he thanked for the opportunity and the help each have given him in show business — but he did not withdraw or disavow his assessment that show’s content was “filth.”)

What I would like to discuss here, however, is not the show’s content, but the content of Mr. Jones’ remarks about God. Mr. Jones has been quoted by news sources as saying on the YouTube video: “If I am doing any harm, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be contributing to the enemy’s plan…You cannot be a true God-fearing person and be on a television show like that. I know I can’t. I’m not OK with what I’m learning, what the bible says, and being on that television show.”

So since this now world-famous young actor (the show is syndicated in several countries) has placed before a planetary audience his idea of what it means to be “a true God-fearing person,” I would like to place for the planet my idea of whether God means for each of us to be a God-fearing person. I would like to explore this in the days ahead here, and take a really close look at exactly what God wants in this regard.

But first, let me ask you. People from all over the world read this online newspaper, and this column. I’d be curious to know: What is your truth, what is your awareness, what is your own personal experience and understanding around the question: Does God want us, need us, request us, command us, to fear God? What is your knowing around this? What would be God’s reason for it?

Please leave your Comment here, below. Then, in the days ahead, I’ll get into what I think about what God wants.

In the next several weeks here I am going to do something different in this column. I am going to present occasional excerpts from a transcript of a Conversations with God Spiritual Renewal Retreat that took place in October, 2012 in Medford, Oregon. I can think of no better way to give you an idea of one approach to interpreting the CWG material than by showing you how it is interpreted by me for participants in such an event.

Below, then, is an excerpt #1 from this CWG retreat, in which I welcome the participants into the room. It offers a wonderful invitation — not only to the people who were in that room, but to everyone who is gathered here, at this website.

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NEALE: Welcome to the space.  You’ve traveled so far to be here, not just in miles, but in years and moments.  Each of us journey along the highways of our life, and here we are in this perfect moment, perfectly situated, perfectly prepared, perfectly ready for perfection itself to visit our lives at last.

There is more going on here than meets the eye.  And by “here,” I don’t mean in this room.  I mean in life, for most people.  And every so often a chosen few — and it’s usually a handful really, a veritable handful of people — decide to gather together in one place to look at what’s going on, out of a thought that sometimes, once in a while, looking at it together with some others who are on the same journey can be more productive and bring us greater insights, in some cases bringing those insights to us faster and in a more impacting way, than if we continue traveling alone on our path.

So we find that from time to time it feels good to join together with others who are on the same journey, even if they may not define the journey or describe it in exactly the same way, but we know broadly in the largest sense that they’re on the same journey, this journey through life.  But the journey is more than the journey through life from birth to death, from my awareness.  A great more than that.  We’ll talk about all of that during this retreat.

Of course, people have historically gathered like this. We’ve gathered around campfires at the very beginning. Not just family and kin, but increasingly as our experience of life went on, others who we joined at the campfire, so that we might share experiences, so that we might say to each other: How has it been for you?  This is how it is for me.  What’s true for all of us?

We say this to each other in a struggle, a fight, to find common ground, and out of common ground, common understanding — because it is when we find common ground that we share a common experience which gives us a common understanding.

And that common understanding is what binds us together and allows us to move forward as a species, as a culture, and thus to know ourselves as a culture in a way that only the sharing of the individual members of that culture could possibly create.  So your story and mine are very important.

They are the keys that unlock the mystery of life itself.  The challenge is getting to know that story; your story and mine.  People interestingly enough don’t want to share their story often.  They think they’re either wasting the time of others, or perhaps they’re embarrassed about it or they don’t have all the answers yet, or they don’t want to look bad, or they’re too hurt by the story and it brings up too many damaging or hurtful memories.

For whatever the reason, we largely keep our story to ourselves, and perhaps we share it with one or twos others, maybe with our beloved other with whom we’re going through life,  a dear companion or partner or lover, and perhaps with a close friend as well.  But the number of people who know our story in many cases can be counted on one hand.

There was a wonderful movie a few years ago, Richard Gere was in it, called Shall We Dance?  And in the film, there was a wonderful scene.  I won’t bother going through the whole scenario with you, but there is a scene in the film where a woman is sitting at a table with a private detective, and she’s hired the private detective to follow her husband. She’s convinced he’s having an affair because he’s gone every Tuesday and Thursday night on a regular basis after work and he was always saying to her, “Well, I had to work late,” or whatever.  But she caught him at one point.  She called his office, he wasn’t there, and all of that.  So she thought, well, rather than confront him with what I don’t know about this, I’ll find out.

So she hired a private detective.  And he follows her husband.  Then he finally ‑‑ the scene in the movie is that she’s meeting him at a restaurant for lunch and he’s got the photographs of her husband going in and out of places.  He’s been trailing her husband for weeks.  He says, “I don’t know how to tell you this because your husband is not having an affair.  And I hate to ruin the surprise.”  She says. “What surprise?”  He says, “Well, he’s been taking dancing lessons. He wants to learn how to ballroom dance because you’ve always wanted him to be a ballroom dancer with you and he was clumsy and didn’t know how to do it. So for your 25th anniversary, he wanted to take to you a ballroom dancing competition and show you how you guys could win it.” It turns out that the wife was a very good dancer and she just needed a partner.

So he was gone every Tuesday and Thursday night for months to this dance class.  And the private detective has got pictures of him going in and out of the class and so forth.  Now, he says, you must let him have this surprise.  You can’t let him know that you know.  She said, of course not.

But I always remember the scene in the movie, not for that content so much, but for a single line in the picture that in a sense almost devastated me when I heard it, because it was so impactful.  She says to the private detective, you must have been hired on a hundred of these surveillance things by spouses who think their other is cheating on them.  He says, “Yeah, I have.  It kind of makes you cynical about marriage and the whole trip.”

This spurs her to say, “Why do you think people get married anyway?”  And the detective gives, well, you know, a variety of reasons.  “I’ve been looking at it for 25 years.  Sex, companionship, bring an end to loneliness, have a partner to carry the load.” He gives all the answers you would expect to hear.

She say, “I don’t think that’s the reason.”  He then asks, “What do you think the reason is?”  She replies, “I think people marry so that they can have a witnesses to their lives.”

That’s got to be one of the great movie lines of all time. The wife goes on, “People want, they need, someone who saw it all, the worst of it, the best of it, the highs and the lows, the struggles, the losses, and the victories.  Someone who saw it all happen to them, so that their experience doesn’t have to be questioned in their own mind…like, is any of this real?”

So I observe that people gather around and gather together in many of the  places where other people collect: Sunday services, Saturday events, Friday night gatherings at the temple or at the synagogue or at the church or in many other places…the corner tavern, and so forth…to see if there is some way they can share and create a common experience, and be witness to each other lives.

These moments are precious and few, representing a tiny percentage of the number of days and hours and minutes in your life, when you look at these moments on a percentage basis.  Most of the time we’re in our mind, and more or less by ourselves.

Don’t miss any opportunity, then, that you have created to explore together the common ground we all share; to witness each other lives.  Let us know your story.  Let us know about your ups and your downs, your challenges and your victories.