Interpreting Conversations with God
So this is the Thanksgiving weekend holiday in the United States, and I hope that all people around the world stop for a moment and send thoughts of gratitude and love to our wonderful God for the breathtaking world that has been created by us for us. Then I hope that we will, each of us, renew our commitment to do whatever it takes to make this a better world.
I want to learn to share more. We all share, I know, and so do I…but I want to learn to share more. To share more of all the bounty with which I have been blessed. And I do not mean merely physical abundance. I do mean that, yes, but I also mean the love that resides deep inside of me, and all the gifts of the heart and soul that are mine to give.
I promise to bring forgiveness to my world, to bring compassion and understanding and a deeper caring and a higher love, to every moment.
I am clear that this must happen in the day-to-day of my experience. It takes place with every exchange I have with any other human being. It’s about how I talk, how I act. I want to be gentle, I want to be caring, I want to be accepting and tolerant and understanding and forgiving. Most of all, I want to be connected. I want to feel that I am genuinely a part of every other person, one with every other soul, and one with God.
The opportunity, the chance, to do this is what I am most grateful for today. The chance to be Who I Really Am is what I treasure in my life. Each morning is a Starting Over. Each day is a new day. Transformation begins with Forgiveness and Unconditional Love — for the Self, and for all others.
It’s the Self part that I have the most trouble with. I have done so many hurtful things in my life. I rationalize all this most of the time, telling myself that it is all part of being human. None of us is perfect, etc. But at some point I have to begin taking responsibility for my actions, so that the past does not repeat itself in the present.
So part of self forgiveness — and what makes it possible, I think — is self discipline and self awareness; a determination to become something Other than what I have been in the past.
I am grateful for this chance. Life is so incredibly wonderful. Each day it gives me a chance to recreate myself anew.
This is Thanksgiving weekend in my country, and at this time of year I want to express gratitude in advance for all the wonderful moments yet to come, for all the wonderful experiences yet to be created, and for all the wonderful expressions of Who I Really Am yet to be placed into the world.
Thank you, God. Thank you, Life. Thank you, every one of you, for being part of my world, and bringing me the daily opportunity to become a grander version of myself through my interaction with the wonder of you, and to work together with you to create a grander version of our world.
Among the most controversial statements in the Conversations with God books is the pronouncement Nobody does anything inappropriate, given their model of the world. The statement ranks right up there with other CWG messages such as “There is no such thing as Right and Wrong,” and…”There are no Victims and no Villains,” and….”Everything is perfect” in its unbelievability.
CWG is spiritually revolutionary, there is no question about that. Its statements challenge everything we have been taught and told since we were six years old. How can we hold these ideas within our operating guidelines and still function in our present-day world? That becomes the question for the day.
The statement says, essentially, that everybody is innocent. And it is true. Everybody is. People are just as innocent at 40 as they are at 4; at 30 as they are at 3; at 60 as they are at 6. We are all little children — and we are acting as little children, in case you haven’t noticed.
And, as little children (on the Timeline of the Universe) we can’t be expected to know all that we need to know to make decisions that are in our own best interest. We can’t even convince ourselves to stop smoking, for heaven sake, even when we know it is killing us. We can’t even convince ourselves to stop eating food that is not good for us, even though we know it is killing us. We can’t even stop ourselves from arguing with each other “to the death”…even though we know it is going to kill us.
What is the problem here? Is it that we are just plain stupid? Or unbelievably stubborn? Or astonishingly barbaric? Or is it that we just don’t understand something very important — the understanding of which would change everything?
I am going to suggest that it is the latter. I am going to suggest, as Conversations with God tells us, that we simply don’t know Who We Are. We are living a case of Mistaken Identity. And we don’t know what the purpose of Life is. Nor do we understand how it functions. We have no idea of our true relationship with each other, and with all of Life. And we certainly have no idea of who and what God is…and what God wants.
Our model of the world is extremely elementary. It is very, very incomplete. And, according to our model of the world, everyone IS acting appropriately. Or at least, certainly we are…
We are caught up in living into Fallacies about Life and about God, and these mistaken notions are what’s killing us. We think that we are being terrorized by others, and we are not. We are being terrorized by our own thoughts and our own ideas and our own beliefs about everything from where we are to why we are here to how we got here to what happens to us when we leave.
All of it. We hold terrifying ideas about all of it. No wonder we are living terrifying lives.
We will discuss, in this space, in the days ahead, what Conversations with God has to tell us about these things. And then we’ll invite all of you to do something with, and about, that.
Stay tuned.
Is there something sad about the following posted comment by a recent visitor here, or is it just me…?
My last entry in this space had to do with Who and What God Is…and following what I wrote, this observation was offered by a reader…
Comment by Buzz on November 1, 2012 at 11:49 am…
Subject matter like this is boring because everyone is in complete agreement.
So what I “get” from this is that unless I write something about which there is “disagreement,” what I am writing is “boring.” And the irony is that when I write something about which there is “disagreement” (such as my political stories in recent days), I get lambasted here and on Facebook (many fb followers read articles here and post their reactions there) for not sticking with my “mission” as a “spiritual teacher” and for “taking sides” on political or social issues.
What this comes down to is, “Heads you lose, tails you lose.” Of course, it is not really, in my mind, a game of “win or lose,” and I don’t hold it that way. I simply share what I feel within my authentic experience, and the “chips fall” where they may. But I do find it ironic nonetheless that whether I write things with which people are in agreement, or things with which people disagreement, I’m somehow “not doing it right.”
We’re an interesting species, are we not…?
And I personally find it a bit sad that because something I have written falls into the category of things with which people agree, it is labeled as “boring.” Which leads me to a question…
Is agreement boring?
Could this be the reason that human beings sometimes seem to actively seek disagreement and conflict? Yet isn’t “reaching agreement” supposedly the goal on important matters. Will it be “boring” if the Congress reaches agreement with President Obama on how to avoid the “fiscal cliff” that is now, with the election finally past us, the “talk of the town” on all the news shows and talk shows and in all the newspapers and news magazines this week?
I must say, I was just a bit surprised to see agreement about Who and What God Is described by an intelligent person as “boring.” How, if this is the way people think, are we ever to get excited about God, about Life, about The New Spirituality, and about a new way of being human? Only if we disagree about it? And how do we share with others that which is called “boring” and make it exciting, inspiring, and igniting?
Is Buzz’ reaction typical of the majority of humanity? What do you think? Does our species need to observe, if not produce, disagreement in order to retain interest in commentary, observations, and messages that we all might benefit from being shared?
What are your thoughts about that…?
Conversations with God was given to humanity to bring us answers to Life’s Great Questions. And the greatest of all our Great Questions has been, and continues to be: “Who and what is God?”
Most of us clearly understand that God is not a very large and handsome man in the sky, with a long white beard and a flowing robe, sitting on a golden throne in a bejeweled room, surrounded by wing flapping angels.
Yet while we are pretty clear about what God is not, we are not nearly as clear about what God is.
So let’s see what God has to say on the subject.
In Conversations with God, God made it clear that God is without form, gender, or substance in the way that we know it. God is, rather, that of which all things are made. The Essential Essence of which everything in existence is comprised. That essence contains Supreme Intelligence. And Total Awareness. And Absolute Power.
It is omnipresent and omniscient. It is everywhere because it is everything that exists in any place at all. It knows everything because without that which it knows, nothing that exists could come into being. It is the Source and the Substance at once; it is the Creator and Created.
It always was, is now, and always will be. It knows no beginning and no end. There is nothing that exists outside of it and there is nothing that exists inside of it without it. That is, simply put, there is nothing that is not God.
This Essential Essence uses Itself to recreate Itself, and calls upon Itself to empower Itself, to be Itself, all by Itself.
It needs nothing, requires nothing, demands nothing, punishes nothing. For what could It possibly need? What could It in any case require? Why would It demand anything? And who—pray tell, who in the world—would it command or punish?
That which has everything and is everything and wants and needs nothing holds only one desire: to express and to know Itself through the glorious experiencing of Itself…and to create this possibility.
That is the reason that life as we know it was created.
Every human being who has stepped into the living of this possibility has achieved all the things we as a sentient species say we want to achieve. And they have done so without hurting, without damaging, without killing. We say they have lived the lives of “saints.” Yet they have merely lived life as it was intended to be lived ‑‑ a way in which most human beings have adamantly refused to live, for the most ironic reason of all: We think it is too good to be true.
(Last of a 5-part series)
Someone (I forgot who it was, doggone it) mentioned on my Facebook page a few weeks ago that the notion of “hell” is mentioned 88 times in the bible: 64 times as the Hebrew word Sheol in the old testament, 11 times as Hades in the new testament, once as Tartarus, 12 times as Gehenna.
As we have been discussing here in the past several entries, Conversations with God tells us flatly that “hell” does not exist. There is simply no such place.
In the book HOME WITH GOD in a Life That Never Ends, I asked God what, if we believe that God will judge us and might condemn us to everlasting damnation, happens to us after we die. God replied…
Exactly what you expect. As soon as you move through stage one of death and realize that you are no longer living with a body, you will move into stage two and will experience yourself being judged, just exactly as you imagined that you would be, and the judgment will turn out just exactly as you imagined that it would.
If you died thinking that you deserve heaven, you will immediately experience that, and if you think that you deserve hell, you will immediately experience that.
Heaven will be exactly as you imagined it would be, as will hell. If you have no idea about the specifics of either, you will make them up right on the spot, Then, these places will be created for you that way, instantly.
You may remain in these experiences as long as you wish.
“Well, then, I can find myself in hell!” I said, and God replied:
Let us be clear. Hell does not exist. There simply is no such place. Therefore, there is no such place for you to go.
Now…can you create a personal “hell” for yourself if you choose to, or if you believe this is what you “deserve”? Yes. So you can send your self to “hell,” and that “hell” will turn out to be exactly as you imagine or feel a need for it to be—but you will not stay there for one moment longer than you choose to.
“Who would choose to stay there at all?”, I wondered. Said God:
You’d be surprised. A lot of people live within a belief system that says they are sinners and must be punished for their “offenses,” and so they will actually stay in their illusion of “hell”, thinking that this is what they deserve, that this is what they “have coming” to them, that this is what they have to do.
It will not matter, however, because they will not suffer at all. They will simply observe themselves from a detached distance and see what is going on—something like watching an instructional video.
“But if there is no suffering, what is going on?”, I wanted to know.
Suffering, but there will be none, God said.
I’m sorry?
What is going on is that they will appear to be suffering, but the part of them that is watching this will feel nothing. Not even sadness. They will simply be observing.
To use an analogy, it would be a bit like watching your child “play act” some little scene in your kitchen. The child appears to be “suffering,” holding her hand to her head or clutching her stomach, hoping that Mommy will let her stay home from school. Mommy understands perfectly that nothing is really happening. There is no suffering going on.
This is not an exact analogy, but it is close enough to get across the feeling.
So these observers would be watching themselves in this self-created “hell,” but they would know that it is not real. And when they have learned what they feel they need to learn (that is, reminded themselves of what they had forgotten), they will “release” themselves and go on to the third stage of death.
That third stage, God explained, is the complete merging with the Divine. And that is, ultimately, all that happens after what we call “death.” We ultimately merge with Divinity Itself, then to reemerge as an Individuation of the Divine, allowing ourselves to reenter the Realm of the Physical to afford ourselves yet another in an endless string of opportunities to express and experience Who We Really Are.
This is my understanding of what is true about “hell,” from my reading of the Conversations with God material. I hope it has served you for us to join in this exploration together.
(Neale Donald Walsch is the author of the Conversations with God series of books. His newest writing, The Only Thing That Matters, releases this week from Hay House. In it he describes how we can all experience our Divinity.)
(Part 4 of a 5-part series)
There is a very good reason why you cannot go to hell no matter what you do during your life here on earth. There is no such place.
We are invited by the Conversations with God writings to explore the possibility that God’s Kingdom is divided into three parts—what we might call the Realm of the Spiritual, the Realm of the Physical, and the Realm of Pure Being. Nowhere is there mentioned a place of eternal torment and damnation.
Of course, other spiritual writings do mention such a place, as we all know. So the question becomes: Which of Earth’s spiritual writings is accurate and true?
The difficulty with approaching such a question is that some religions claim that the question itself is a blasphemy. In some religious communities one can be sentenced to death for posing such an inquiry.
Some religions seek to make it very clear that the writings that support their spiritual understanding were “inspired by God,” and are therefore beyond question. They are to be taken as the Literal Word of God. No questions asked, no doubts permitted.
Yet if even one of the writers of the world’s many sacred scriptures got even one of the major principles upon which an entire religion is based wrong, or misinterpreted anything at all, the world could have been inadvertently misled for hundreds or thousands of years.
On the question of “hell” and “damnation,” Conversations with God tell us this is exactly what has occurred. God is the creator, the source, and the essence of Pure, Unconditional Love, and would never judge and then punish God’s own creations simply because—to use one striking example from ancient and contemporary religious doctrine—different people have come to God by different paths.
Does it really seem that a loving, caring, compassionate and all-wise God would say to a devote and loving, patient and kind, compassionate and generous, caring and forgiving person that because he or she did not belong to a particular religion that he or she was going straight to hell?
Please.
There is no such place as hell. It simply does not exist. There is, however, an “afterlife.” And in that Afterlife every sentient being will experience what is true: that every sentient being has been given Free Will.
It is how we have used that Free Will that has produced the Hell on Earth that so many human beings have experienced—and are continuing to experience on this very day. Yet in the moment that we leave this physical body and return to the Realm of the Spiritual, we will use that Free Will (which will still be ours, by the way) to express and experience our True Nature (which is Divinity) fully. Unless we don’t. If we want or feel the need to experience some sort of “hell”…if we feel we deserve it and ought to go there…we will. (Thus, the testimony of some people who have clinically died, come back to life, and sworn that there was a “hell” on “the other side.”)
Yet in the one-millionth of a nanosecond that we experienced what we, in our imagination, have thought “hell” to be, we would surely say, “I want out of here!”—and with that very thought we would free our Selves, as an experience and expression of Who We Really Are…and that will be “heaven.”
(A remarkable and detailed description of this entire process will be found in the book Home with God.)
Even more amazing, we have the opportunity to express and experience that True Identity right here on Earth. We don’t have to wait for the Afterlife. We can experience our Divinity right here, Right Now. Indeed, all of physical life was created as an opportunity for us to do so. It is what we decide and what we do, both individually and collectively, that determines whether we experience our Divinity.
(Neale Donald Walsch is the author of the Conversations with God series of books. His newest writing, The Only Thing That Matters, releases this week from Hay House. In it he describes how we can all experience our Divinity.)
(Part 3 of a 5-part series)
This is important. Please read…
If you think that you are going to be forgiven by God for anything you may have done “wrong,” you are mistaken. Conversations with God tells us that God will never forgive you.
Read that, never. As in, never ever. For anything.
It won’t matter how much you beg, it won’t matter how much you plead, it won’t matter how many times you fall on your knees begging for mercy. God will never forgive you for anything, ever.
If you are looking for forgiveness from God, you are looking in the wrong place.
Now there is a very good reason that God will never forgive you. God has nothing to forgive you for. You have never done anything in the entirety of your life that could displease God. You have never done anything that could anger God. You have never done anything that could damage or hurt God.
Do you believe in a Deity that would or could have any reason to be unhappy? Do you believe in a Deity that would or could have any reason to be angry? Do you truly imagine that the God of this Universe (which today’s science is now telling us is actually a universe of Universes…a Multiverse!) could actually be hurt or damaged in any way…much less by something that Little Old You have done?
Well, no, you might say, God doesn’t “punish” human beings because they have offended Him. God sits in judgment and punishes human beings because Perfect Justice demands it.
In some minds that makes sense, and helps people to reconcile a Totally Loving God with a Fearful Deity who would nevertheless condemn His children to eternal and unspeakable agony for their “offenses.” Yet Have you ever heard the phrase, “There ain’t no justice…”? Well, that’s how it is in Heaven. There’s just ain’t no justice. And the reason there is no “justice” is that the whole concept of Justice depends upon the existence of Right & Wrong. And there’s no such thing as Right and Wrong. That’s an abstraction, an hypothesis, constructed totally in the mind of Man. And it’s been twisted beyond recognition even in its imaginary form.
The reason there is no “justice” in Heaven is that in Heaven, everything is Perfect. As well, everything is Perfect “on Earth, as it is in Heaven.” For Earth is part of Heaven…and we just don’t know it.
You have never done anything that could cause God to punish you in the name of seeking “justice.” Do you seek “justice” in the case of an 18-month old baby who knocks over the 200-year-old vase that was the irreplaceable Family Heirloom? Do you punish her with everlasting separation from her Source of Life and Love?
Do you imagine that human beings are much more than 18-month-old babies in the Life of the Cosmos, and in the Mind of God? Is it your thought that God sees us as fully conscious, totally aware, completely knowledgeable, unlimitedly wise beings who are absolutely responsible for their every thought, word, and action in a Reality about which they know and understand Everything?
Do you conceive of human beings as being at the top of the Evolutionary Process that produces Sentient Beings in the Universe? Or is it possible that we have no idea what’s going on here, not the slightest conception of the Reality in which we find ourselves, and are just now truly birthing ourselves into the Cosmic Community of Sentient Beings?
If the second were true, is it your thought that a righteous and virtuous God would punish us with Everlasting Damnation and Eternal Torment in the Fires of Hell for having made what even we would call a simple childhood mistake if we were witness to a toddler “misbehaving”?
What kind of a “God” do you think we have, anyway…? Do you imagine that we truly are Children of a Lesser God?
(Neale Donald Walsch is the publisher of The Global Conversation internet newspaper and the author of the Conversations with God series of books. His latest book, The Only Thing That Matters, distributed by Hay House, is now available in print or audio form from Amazon.com by clicking here.)
(Part 2 of a 5-part series)
Conversations with God famously said that there is no such place as Hell. Could such a thing be true? According to the late Pope John Paul II, it is. His Holiness John Paul II told a papal audience on July 28, 1999 that there is no such place as Hell.
The pope said people must be very careful in interpreting the biblical descriptions of hell, which he said are symbolic and metaphorical. The “inextinguishable fire” and “the burning oven” which the Bible speaks of “indicate the complete frustration and vacuity of a life without God,” he said. In other words, Hell is a state of mind, or a state of being, not a physical or even metaphysical “place” to which people who are “bad” are sent by God.
And when this state of being is not something to which God sends souls, the Pope declared. Such a state is “self imposed,” the pontiff said. Surprising a worldwide audience, he announced that “Damnation cannot be attributed to an initiative of God, because in his merciful love he cannot want anything but the salvation of the beings he created.”
Eternal damnation “is not a punishment inflicted by God from outside,” the pope went on. “But man, called to respond freely to God, unfortunately can choose to refuse his love and pardon definitively, removing himself forever from joyful communion with God,” the pope said.
Then what is this doctrine of Hell, or Hades, or Damnation that so many religions on earth speak of? Is it real? To what does it refer? For it is not only Roman Catholics who speak of eternal damnation. This teaching, I want to repeat, is meant to “indicate the complete frustration and vacuity of a life without God,”John Paul declared. I agree with the holy man’s assessment that a life without God can sure seem like hell.
“More than a place, hell is the situation in which one finds himself after freely and definitively withdrawing from God, the source of life and joy,” the pope said.
Interestingly, in none of his remarks did this pontiff assert that any person who did not accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior would be seen by our Deity as “freely and definitively withdrawing from God.” This seemed to leave open the question of whether Muslims or Jews or Buddhists or members of any other religion or belief system can “get into Heaven.” The Pope also said nothing about a person’s behavior while on earth as prohibiting that person from not refusing God’s “love and pardon definitively,” and therefore not “removing himself forever from joyful communion with God.”
In other words, presumably a person could be “bad” while here on Earth and still “get into Heaven” by simply accepting “God’s love and pardon.”
The Pope also strayed from standard Christian theology (and several other major theologies as well) in another shocking way. If you ask any minister, any ulama, any priest whether there is any question that horribly bad people who are not contrite, never ask forgiveness, and remain ugly and cruel to the end, go to hell, they would say, “Well, of course they do! What do you think we’ve been trying to tell you???” But the Pope had a remarkably different response. Said he: Whether or not any human beings are in hell “remains a real possibility, but is not something we can know.”
Not something we can know??? Wow, what a major concession from the spiritual leader of a worldwide church with billions of members that has been teaching just the opposite–that we can be sure of this–for centuries.
In sharing his thoughts about all this in July, 1999, Pope John Paul II—then in failing health—seemed to be having final reflections on the matter of hell and damnation in the final months before his death. In those remarks to a weekly papal audience, his comments came remarkably close to mirroring some of the messages in Conversations with God, which also teaches that there is no such place as hell…and that deep unhappiness can result from a life (on Earth or in the hereafter) without God, but that a life lived within the embrace of God and inside the acceptance of God as a real and authentic Presence in the Universe and in one’s own experience can never produce unhappiness—no matter what such a life holds.
Yet there is one message from Conversations with God that the Pope did not mirror. The Pope did not say what CWG says unequivocally: God will never forgive anyone for anything.
And we will discuss that teaching in our next entry here.
(Neale Donald Walsch is the publisher of The Global Conversation internet newspaper and the author of the Conversations with God series of books. His latest book, The Only Thing That Matters, releases this week from Hay House and is now available in print or audio form from Amazon.com at this link:
http://astore.amazon.com/wwwnealedonal-20)
(Part 1 of a 5-part series)
Because Conversations with God says that “there’s no such thing as Right and Wrong,” people often ask me: “Is there no ‘justice’ in God’s Kingdom?” As I have understood the messages of CWG, the answer is “no.” Not the way we understand it.
Yet to fully answer this question we have to, first of all, define what we mean by “God’s Kingdom.” In the truest sense (which is the only sense in which I prefer to speak), everything in existence is God’s Kingdom—and that includes, of course, life on Earth. Which would mean that there is “no justice” on Earth.
There are many people who would agree with that. They would say that the “justice” we see meted out on Earth is all too often not real “justice” at all, but the result of a process that can be influenced (if not manipulated) by The System. No one would seriously argue, for instance, that on this planet the fabulously wealthy experience, on balance, a difference kind of justice than the terribly poor—to offer but one obvious example. And there are more.
Yet it is precisely those who yearn for justice on Earth, and cannot find it, who experience at least some small solace through knowing or thinking that there will be Justice in Heaven. It is very difficult to me to explain to them that there will be none. Not in the way that “justice” is understood on Earth. Not in any way, actually.
For “justice” to be part of the “system” of things in Heaven there would have to be some “laws” to be broken—and someone to be injured by the breaking of them. Neither exists in Paradise. Now there are those who say, “Yes, but both exist on Earth! The System of Justice in Heaven relates to the system of life on Earth, not life in Heaven. Life is Heaven is the reward for living righteously on Earth. And life in Hell is the punishment for not doing so. It’s the ‘payback’ for those who have caused others pain and suffering.”
But what, I would ask, of the person who has caused pain and suffering to no one at all? Will the person who was kind, caring, compassionate, understanding, generous, forgiving, and loving unfailingly with everyone automatically receive the reward of Heaven?
Not necessarily, some would say. Not unless that person believed in God in the “right” way. If he or she did not, then no amount of kindness or goodness, compassion or love that they displayed while here on Earth will matter one way or the other. They are still going to Hell, because they have offended God.
And so, some say, there is a System of Justice in Heaven that has nothing to do with whether one hurts or injures another on Earth. It has to do with whether one hurts or injures God, who lives in Heaven, but keeps tabs on what is happening on Earth and makes sure that “justice is served” one way or the other, now or after death.
Some say the amount of “punishment” that is meted out by God in Heaven depends on the severity of the “sins” one has committed on Earth. Small sins—something like spiritual misdemeanors—are punishable by a limited amount of suffering imposed by God, in a place that some call Purgatory. But Really Big Sins are punishable by everlasting damnation in Hell.
And some say that not believing in God in the Right Way is one of the Really Big Sins. In fact, some say, it is the Biggest.
One can commit no greater offense against God. Even a repentant murderer can get into heaven, clerics routinely tell prisoners on Death Row. But a repentant murderer who does not believe in God in the Right Way has no chance whatsoever. So this is the biggest offense.
This is how some religions have it structured; this is the doctrine some have taught. And we will talk more about all of this in Part 2 of this series, in the next entry here.
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
