Category: Headline

It is wonderful that Love opens the door to changing the minds of people who once held firm views of absolute intolerance. Love changes everything — even ideas on what we think God says, commands, and requires. And that is a very, very good thing. If only that love could extend beyond a person’s own family…

The latest high-profile person to demonstrate the power of Love to move people away from intolerance is Ohio Senator Rob Portman, who made a stunning announcement a few days ago  that he was reversing his longtime position opposing gay marriage, and was now totally supportive of it.

Mr. Portman is known as a conservative Republican, and when he was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives he co-sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act, which became law. The legislation defines marriage as being between a man and a woman.

That was in 1996. But two years ago Senator Portman’s son, Will, told Mr. Portman and his wife, Jane, that he was gay. Mr. Portman said this past week that after thinking about it deeply, he could no longer oppose same-sex marriage. He opposition had its foundation in his Christian faith tradition, the senator said, and he wrestled with that, seeking to reconcile his new view with that of his church. Then he apparently decided to set particular religious beliefs about homosexuality aside. And why? Because of love.

“Ultimately, it came down to the Bible’s overarching themes of love and compassion, and my belief that we are all children of God,” he said.

Learning that his son was gay allowed him to “think about this issue from a new perspective, and that’s as a dad who loves his son a lot and wants him to have the same opportunities that his brother and sister have,” Portman is quoted as saying in an interview in The Columbus Dispatch. You can find that news report here. Senator Portman also voted in 1999 against allowing gay couples in Washington, D.C., to adopt children.

The Senator last week went so far as to write and have published an opinion piece in the Dispatch (found here) in which he says that he has “come to believe that if two people are prepared to make a lifetime commitment to love and care for each other in good times and in bad, the government shouldn’t deny them the opportunity to get married.”

Admitting that this is not how he has always felt, he explains that “something happened that led me to think through my position in a much deeper way.” That something, of course, was learning of Will Portman’s sexual orientation. The senator said that his son told him that he did not experience homosexuality as a choice, but that it was just part of who he is.

Virtually every gay person in the world has been saying that for hundreds of years — but that has not stopped religious and political conservatives from opposing, if not condemning, homosexuality and gay marriage. Many religious conservatives frequently quote a Bible verse which they claim declares that homosexuality is an “abomination.”

Mr. Portman does not hold this view. Neither does former Vice President Dick Cheney, another staunchly conservative Republican, who also approves of same-gender marriage — and for the same reason as Senator Portman: Mr. Cheney also has a child, in this case a daughter, who is gay, and who is now married to her gay partner of many years.

This brings me to a single question: Might it ever be possible for religious and/or political conservatives to come around to a view that supports, rather than opposes, gay marriage even if those conservatives do not discover they have children who are gay?

The Prime Minister of England, David Cameron, has said that he supports gay marriage precisely because he is a conservative, since conservatives belief in individual freedom above all else. Such a position could only be taken, however, by a government and in a country where religious views of what God wants do not dictate political and legislative agendas.

Will the U.S. ever get to that place? Let that be our question for the day.

The question that must be asked in the aftermath of the latest incident revolving around Pakistan’s blasphemy law is: Why are no Muslim spiritual leaders speaking out against the violence that Muslim mobs perpetrate under cover of the law?

Indeed, why are no Muslim spiritual leaders speaking out against the law itself?

Another question that must be asked: How can merely an accusation of speaking in disrespect of the Prophet Muhammad or of Islam be enough for police to place official charges against a person?

The filing of such charges requires police to then arrest the accused, who must await trial in jail. Some people so accused have been killed in jail by religious zealots who have somehow reached them, or in the premises of the court, according to reports coming out of Pakistan.

The present situation again got out of hand March 9 when 3,000 rioters burned out virtually the entire Christian neighborhood of Joseph Colony in Lahore, Pakistan. The small enclave contained about 200 homes, 178 of which were destroyed by fire, according to a report in the New York Times.

The Times story said that the incident grew out of a simple allegation by a local Muslim barber that his friend, a Christian sanitation worker, had spoken disrespectfully about the Prophet Muhammad. Yet such an allegation is anything but simple in Pakistan.

There are those who reportedly observed the two men who say that they were indeed friends, that they had become inebriated together a few evenings before the charges were filed, during which time of drinking they had argued. The next day, the Muslim made the accusation.

According to press reports, there are those who say that the accusation is false, and has simply been used as a form of pay back for the argument. People in Pakistan know that accusations of violating the country’s blasphemy law can spell big trouble, ruining the accused’s life, if not ending it. (In Pakistan, insulting the Prophet Muhammad or the religion of Islam is a capital offense. There are at least 16 people on death row for blasphemy and another 20 are serving life sentences, the organization Human Rights Watch says.)

After making the blasphemy accusation, the barber then reportedly called friends and members of his community and told them about the alleged disrespectful comments, and those people, in turn, became agitated and went to the local police, demanding action.

According to media reports originating in Lahore, the police felt pressured to file a case against the sanitation worker, who was immediately arrested. As word spread of the arrest and the filing of charges, 3,000 rioters on March 9 descended upon the Christian community of Joseph Colony where the sanitation worker lived, burned his house, and set fire to nearly every other home in the village as well.

At this writing, not a single major Muslim spiritual leader — in Pakistan or anywhere else — has openly condemned the violence, much less the law under which the sanitation worker was charged. It is perhaps understandable why.

“Two prominent politicians were assassinated in 2011 for urging reform of the law. The killer of one of the politicians was hailed as a hero, and lawyers at his legal appearances showered him with rose petals,” a report by the Associated Press authored by Zaheer Babar and Rebecca Santana on March 9 said.

Still, if the role of the clergy of any religion is to lead the way to righteous action, moral thinking, and appropriate behavior, how can the increasingly vitriolic responses of thousands to a law that itself would seem by most standards to violate every norm of human rights be ignored, with Islam’s spiritual leadership utterly silent?

Even more to the point, how can any people, using their spirituality as their reasoning, justify perpetrations of violence? People have done so, of course, for centuries—as the Christian crusades evidenced, and as other religious brutality, savagery, and barbarity by people of many varying beliefs in a loving God has sadly demonstrated.

Now, for the record, I think Islam is a great and wonderful religion. It brings humanity magnificent wisdom and insight, as does Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and the world’s other great religions. So the observation above is not a commentary on the religion of Islam itself, but on some of the clergy and people who practice it. And saying that the same can be said of the people and clergy of other religions does not invalidate the points made here.

I would absolutely agree if someone said, “What about the spiritual leadership of other countries and other religions?” Indeed, where is it? What the world needs now is a massive revival of spiritual leadership. And, indeed, a whole new Spiritual Story to tell humanity. A story of a God who would knows only love, and never punishes or condemns anyone.

It has been said that no one does anything inappropriate, given their model of the world. Is it time to change humanity’s model of the world? Have we had enough now of our ideas of a God who demands and commands violence and killing in the name of religious “honor”?

Television news network CNN is reporting that North Korea has threatened to “nullify the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War.” North and South Korea have technically been at war since 1953, the news network report said. “The 1950-53 civil war ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty,” the report went on.

Why is North Korea being so bellicose? The following article contains more background on this question than many people may feel interested enough to read, but for those who choose to spare a few moments, there is an opportunity to come to a larger understanding of just what is happening in our world — and to explore this secondary question: Is there any way that The New Spirituality, and the messages in Conversations with God, could be applied in this situation to bring an end, at last, to humanity’s apparently insatiable need to bring itself to the brink of hostility, and, if nuclear weapons are used, straight into Mutually Assured Destruction?

IN-DEPTH NEWS ANALYSIS

So let’s look at what is going on here. South Korea’s Yonhap news agency says that North Korea cites “U.S.-led international moves to impose new sanctions against it over its recent nuclear test,” according to the CNN report.

North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test on Feb. 12. That test met with widespread international condemnation from the global community of nations, which has desperately been attempting to limit the spread of nuclear weapons for decades, using a combination of cajoling, pleading, negotiation, threats of economic sanctions, and sanctions themselves.

North Korea insists that it has the same right as any other nation which has already conducted its nuclear tests and developed its nuclear weaponry, to do the same thing — and that no one is going to stop it.

In order to try to stop it, many of the world’s nations — including, notably, North Korea’s own military ally in the Korean War, China — have condemned North Korea’s position, saying the proliferation of nuclear weapons must end, not continue, and certainly not be expanded, if humanity is to have a safer world — to say nothing of a world that even survives.

North Korea has indicated since the Feb 12 test that this latest nuclear blast was “more powerful than its two previous detonations” in 2006 and 2009, and that it used “a smaller, lighter device, suggesting advances in its weapons program,” the CNN report said. (The full report may be found here: http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/05/world/asia/north-korea-armistice-threat/index.html?hpt=hp_t2)

The United Nations Security Council has since met “to consider a proposed resolution to authorize more sanctions against North Korea,” CNN’s news report continued.

And so, the back and forth sallies continue and the sabre rattling goes on, leaving millions around the globe wondering: What will it take to bring peace to this world at last? Others ask: What does North Korea want that it feels it can’t get any other way? Is there nothing that can bring an end to all this?

The difficulty increases exponentially when nations can’t even sit down and talk about these questions. Just to keep so-called Six Party Talks going has been a major (and failed) ordeal. As Wikipedia reports:

“The six-party talks aim to find a peaceful resolution to the security concerns as a result of the North Korean nuclear weapons program. There has been a series of meetings with six participating states: South Korea, North Korea, China, United States, Russia, and Japan. These talks were a result of North Korea withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 2003.

“Apparent gains following the fourth and fifth rounds were reversed by outside events. Five rounds of talks from 2003 to 2007 produced little net progress until the third phase of the fifth round of talks, when North Korea agreed to shut down its nuclear facilities in exchange for fuel aid and steps towards the normalization of relations with the United States and Japan.

“Responding angrily to the United Nations Security Council‘s Presidential Statementissued on April 13, 2009 that condemned the North Korean failed satellite launch, the DPRK declared on April 14, 2009 that it would pull out of Six Party Talks and that it would resume its nuclear enrichment program in order to boost its nuclear deterrent.North Korea has also expelled all nuclear inspectors from the country…However, it pledged a no-first-strike policy and to nuclear disarmament only when there is worldwide elimination of such nuclear weapons.”

There is more. Wikipedia reports that “Cheonan-Ham, a South Korean patrol vessel with 104 people aboard, sank after an unexplained explosion tore through its hull while conducting a normal mission in the vicinity of Baengnyeong Island at 09:22 p.m. on March 26, 2010. An investigation conducted by an international team of experts from South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Sweden concluded that Cheonan was sunk by a torpedo launched by a North Korean Yeono class miniature submarine.This incident caused rising tension and antagonism between North and South Korea.

“On November 23, 2010, North Korea shelled South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island. Two South Korean soldiers were killed and a dozen injured after North Korea fired dozens of artillery shells onto a South Korean island setting more than 60 houses ablaze and sending civilians fleeing in terror. These two incidents stood in the way of holding Six Party Talks during this period.

“On 29 February 2012, the United States and North Korea announced a ‘leap day’ agreement that the U.S. would provide substantial food aid in return for the North agreeing to a moratorium on uranium enrichment and missile testing and a return of IAEA inspectors to Yongbyon, leading to a resumption of the six-party talks. On 16 March 2012, North Korea announced it was planning to launch a satellite to commemorate the late founder Kim il-Sung‘s 100th birthday, drawing condemnation by the other five participants in the Six-Party Talks, casting doubt on the “leap day” agreement.

“On 6 April 2012, North Korea’s rocket (satellite) launch failed to enter into orbit, and was declared a failure by the United States and South Korea. In addition, the launch was described as a provocative test of missile technology, and the United States subsequently announced the suspension of food aid to North Korea.”

And that’s roughly where things stood until the latest North Korean underground nuclear blast on Feb. 12. So why is North Korea insisting on being so bellicose?

First, a bit more background, again from Wikipedia: The Korean peninsula was governed by the Korean Empire from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, until it was annexed by the Empire of Japan in 1910. After the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, Japanese rule ceased. The Korean peninsula was divided into two occupied zones in 1945, with the northern half of the peninsula occupied by the Soviet Union and the southern half by the United States. A United Nations–supervised election held in 1948 led to the creation of separate Korean governments for the two occupation zones: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north, and the Republic of Korea in the south. North Korea and South Korea each claimed sovereignty over the entire Korean peninsula, which led to the start of the Korean War in 1950. An armistice in 1953 committed both to a cease-fire, but the two countries remain officially at war because a formal peace treaty was never signed.Both states were accepted into the United Nations in 1991.

North Korea is a single-party state under a united front led by the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP).The country’s government follows the Juche ideology of self-reliance, initiated by the country’s first President, Kim Il-sung. After his death, Kim Il-sung was declared the country’s Eternal President. Juche became the official state ideology, replacing Marxism–Leninism, when the country adopted a new constitution in 1972.With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, North Korea lost a major trading partner and strategic ally. Combined with a series of natural disasters, this led to the North Korean famine, which lasted from 1994 to 1998 and killed an estimated 240,000 to 1,000,000 people.North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il adopted Songun, or “military-first” policy in order to strengthen the country and its government.In 2009, references to Communism were systematically removed from the country’s constitution and legal documents altogether.

North Korea has been described as a totalitarian, Stalinist dictatorshipwith an elaborate cult of personality around the Kim family and one of the lowest-ranking human rights records of any country.As a result of its isolation and authoritarian rule, it has sometimes been labelled the “Hermit kingdom“,a name once given to its predecessor, the Korean Empire. In 2011 North Korea had the lowest Democracy Index of any nation on Earth. North Korea is one of the world’s most militarized countries, with a total of 9,495,000 active, reserve, and paramilitary personnel. Its active duty army of 1.21 million is the 4th largest in the world, after China, the U.S., and India.It is a nuclear-weapons state and has an active space program.

That’s the end of the Wikipedia entry. Here is the entry reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-party_talks

Now, as to my personal analysis…

I have visited the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, and worked with others, including friends in South Korea, to lessen tensions between the two nations. With Dr. Ilchi Lee — a South Korean author and the founder of a variety of mind-body training methods, including Dahnhak, Dahn Yoga, Respiration, Brain Education, and DahnMuDo — I jointly formed the New Millennium Peace Foundation, and we each made a significant financial contribution to creating a major peace initiative, with a public event in South Korea a number of years ago, at which former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore was the keynote speaker.

Dr. Lee and I wondered if there was any way that a new spiritual and philosophical foundation for not only the Korean Peninsula, but the world entire, might produce an environment in which North and South Korea (and all the world’s people) might be ultimately united. I wonder that still today, and so does Dr. Lee.

From the North Korean point of view it would seem that (and this is just my analysis) it has wanted from the very end of the Korean conflict (the state of war itself, as we have earlier explained, has never ended, but the active, ongoing military conflict has) to be recognized as an equal among nations, having the same status and the same rights as other nation states. While it has been admitted to the United Nations, it has never really gained this respect and full recognition from the United States (whose soldiers fought side-by-side with South Korean soldiers to prevent the complete takeover of Korea by the northern communists), and it not forgotten that it was thwarted in its attempt to claim the entire Korean Peninsula as its own in the early Fifties.

Now, in the second decade of the 21^st Century, it continues to insist on parity with other nations, and that it why it has said that it will embrace complete nuclear disarmament only when every other nation does. Of course, those nations holding an arsenal of nuclear weapons (chief among them the U.S. and Russia) have no intention of completely disarming themselves, saying that their nuclear weapons capabilities are used as deterrents.

North Korea says it is developing its nuclear weaponry for the same reason, as a deterrent to what it claims to be belligerence toward it by the United States. It likewise feels it has a right to launch satellites and to test missiles that have the capability of carrying nuclear warheads.

There are observers who have said that North Korea’s divergence of the biggest share of its resources to its military build up has been at the expense of its people, huge numbers of whom live in abject poverty. My own analysis of this is that, having eschewed communism, the North Korean government was found a way to serve two ends simultaneously: (a) increase its military might (including nuclear and missile capabilities); and (b) provide income for millions of its people (as noted above, it has the fourth largest army in the entire world, and a total of 9,495,000 active, reserve, and paramilitary personnel) without seeming to be providing them direct government assistance and violating the formal North Korean philosophy of self-sufficiency.

In other words, not all that much different from the Works Progress Administration created in the United States in 1938 (renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration; WPA). This was the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, employing millions of unemployed people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects,including the construction of public buildings and roads. In much smaller but more famous projects the WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects. The only difference between this and North Korea’s undertakings is that North Korea has used its government to employ people only in fields associated with the military, but the concept is the same: use the government to provide employment for the masses of unemployed by serving the needs of the nation as the government defines them.

The question I am considering today from a spiritual point of view: What understanding or message of The New Spirituality as exemplified in the Conversations with God dialogues could have any effect whatsoever on such seemingly intractable situations?

I think of two off the top of my head. One is so hugely general that it does not seem as though it could be immediately applied, barring an absolute miracle in terms of a change of thinking by all the players in the game. The other is so specific that it could open the door to instant healing of the rifts that cause the divisions analyzed in the many paragraphs above.

The first message of CWG that I wish we could overlay on the entire global circumstance of this day (not just the Korean situation) is the statement: We are all one. The embracing of this spiritual truth as a functioning physical expression would produce a radically new and different geopolitical reality overnight. Short of an invasion by creatures from outer space, however, I am not sure what could produce such an instant transformation in humanity’s thinking about itself.

No, this is a long-term shift in self-conceptualization, and can best be achieved by educating the next generation through the presenting to our children of a New Cultural Story about humanity. This is the work now being done by The School of the New Spirituality, whose CWGforParents team is creating a 52-week School-in-a-Box program, giving parents around the world the tools with which to share the most important concept of Conversations with God with their offspring — including, of course, the concept that We Are All One.

The second approach emerging from The New Spirituality could, on the other hand, produce surprising and even strikingly rapid results. It is the asking of a single, simple question — but with the pure and honest intention to listen to the answer, and then to actually do something about it.

I would be asking North Korea, “What hurts you so bad that you feel you have to be able to hurt others in order to heal it?” North Korea says it wants economic sanctions lifted. The U.S. and other countries say, “Only if you stop escalating the arms race by continuing your development of nuclear weapons capability.” Some have alleged that North Korea in the past has said, “We will,” and certain sanctions have been lifted, only to result in North Korea moving ahead in a clandestine way to continue to develop its nuclear capability. In other words, the allegation goes, North Korea can’t be trusted to keep its word.

Publicly, North Korea says it will discontinue nuclear military development “only if the U.S. and the other nations completely disassemble and dismantle your own nuclear weapons capability.” The U.S. and other nations say, “This is our deterrent to global war. We can’t and won’t do that.” And there it is.

Unless it’s not. Unless the U.S. and other nations did, in fact, ever enter into a Global Disarmament Accord. The chances of that happening seem to most observers to be virtually nil. But we will talk more about this in our next post, as we address a larger question about our world: Can The New Spirituality change anything at all?

For now, your input and comments about the current events on the Korean Peninsula, and possible solutions, are invited below.

— NDW

Is there a role in the world of politics and economics and social movements for spiritual messengers? If so, what should that role be?

National Public Radio has just reported on a Muslim cleric — described as a “slight 61-year-old”— who has been, in the words of the NPR report, “shaking up the political scene.”

“Dr. Tahir-ul-Qadri returned to his home country late last year, after spending eight years in Canada. Since coming back, he has ignited a disgruntled electorate,” the report said. Qadri claims that “Pakistan’s oppressed and destitute are with him in his fight against inequality and corruption. His speech touches a nerve for many in the crowd,” NPR said.

In an interview with NPR, Qadri said he wants to enlighten people about their democratic rights. This brought up a question that I have been looking at for many years. As the author of a series of books revolving around what I report to have been conversations with God, what role, if any, is it appropriate to play in the global economic, political, or social arena? For that matter, what role should any spiritual messenger have in these areas of human activity and communal life?

“I am trying to create an awareness of the true concept of democracy, an awareness of human rights, real human rights,” Qadri says in the NPR report. “People here are treated like goats. They don’t have any concept of democracy.” The NPR report goes on to say that “Qadri is taking on Pakistan’s government, saying it has failed to curb militancy or improve the economy. He’s also demanding electoral reforms to prevent corrupt politicians from holding office.”

“I am fighting just to make the electoral and democratic process transparent, free of corrupt practices,” he says.

Well, that is exactly what Conversations with God calls for — not just in politics, but in every area of life: complete transparency. Yet it is the role of spiritual messengers to issue a call for social, economic, and political change? I face this question every time I so much as utter one word about humanity’s political process. “I wish you would just stick to spiritual stuff, and leave politics alone,” people write. “You should not be expressing a political point of view,” others admonish.

I notice that now even the motives of Qadri, a Muslim cleric, are being questioned. In the NPR report a man named Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general and political commentator, is quoted as saying that Qadri’s message may be good, but he questions the messenger. Masood calls Qadri a demagogue.

“He actually wants to be in the center stage. He wants power, he wants to be in prominence all the time,” the NPR report quoted Masood as saying.

(The full NPR report can be found here: http://www.npr.org/2013/02/20/172416876/controversial-cleric-stirs-protests-upon-return-to-pakistan)

I do not know enough about Mr. Qadri to offer an observation on his motives or his person, but I find it interesting that even in a culture where the Islamic faith is highly honored and Muslim clerics are revered, if you say something that rouses people against the prevailing power structure, you had better be ready to be marginalized — or worse — spiritual messenger or not. Mr. Qadri’s public speeches are made from a bullet-proof enclosure.

So…what is the role of spirituality in day-to-day life “on the ground”? Conversations with God says that the political views of a person or a society are a demonstration of that person’s and that society’s spiritual values. If that is true, does this mean that there is a rightful place in the day-to-day “real world” for spiritual messengers who are addressing political and social issues, as I did in my last entry here? And if so, what would that place be?

In the present case, should Mr. Qadri quiet down, or speak even louder?

Has humanity lost True North on its moral compass?

The whole idea of  “wrong doing” is part of humanity’s cosmology of life. We really do think that there is such a thing as Right and Wrong. After all, God has told us so. Our religions have told us so. Our parents have told us so. Our culture has told us so. Our societies around the world have made it clear that some things are Right and some things are Wrong.

Yet now here comes a new theology arising out of the Conversations with God series of books which tells us, in one of its most provocative statements, that “there is no such thing as Right and Wrong.” And the Mind begs to know, how can this be true? Are we to simply abandon all of the understandings that all of humanity holds all of the time?

No, my own Mind said, when I first heard this: Surely Right and Wrong must exist at some level. Surely there must be some guidepost, some yardstick, some standard or criterion with which we can measure or determine whether particular choices and behaviors are appropriate or inappropriate, are good or bad, are best taken or best ignored.

A remarkable post here a while ago from a reader named Carol Bass has ignited this series of articles about the state of humanity’s spirituality today.

In this series, I am attempting to respond directly to what Carol had to say in a striking entry that, to me, seemed to perfectly frame the way so many people are holding their reality today. I believe that Carol’s comments deserve serious and complete responses. So Carol, here we go again…as we continue to look deeply at the observations you offered.

In my last entry here in reply to you, I quoted your comment that…

“It seems that so many have turned their back on what is right and what is wrong. The ten commandments according to the bible have become just another thing to cast off as just someone’s religious beliefs but not necessarily truth.”

The human race seems to agree, Carol. People have stuck to their guns about this—and I mean that quite literally—for many, many years. We are absolutely certain that there is such a thing as Right and Wrong, and we are absolutely sure that we are right about that.

The difficulty and the problem has been that our ideas of Right and Wrong change from time to time, from place to place, and from culture to culture. The result: what one person or culture says is Right, another person or culture says is Wrong. And this is the source of more than a small or trivial amount of the conflict and violence, killing and war that we have seen on the planet—much of it, ironically, in God’s name.

This article is Part V of an ongoing series:
LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR TOMORROW

Not only can we not seem to be able to agree on what is Right and Wrong, we can’t even agree to disagree about this. We don’t seem capable of observing our differences and calling them simply that. We apparently feel the need to make each other wrong for holding views different from ours.

We can’t even agree to openly explore the topics on which our beliefs diverge, with all possibilities on the table, with compromises at least considered. No, there can be no compromises when we are right. One does not compromise one’s principles, one does not bargain with the devil—and we have already demonized each other, not just each other’s views, so there you have it. We are left with our disagreements and our absolute inability to overcome them.

Worse yet, we are left with our righteousness about them. We imagine we are so right about what is Right and Wrong that we are willing to belittle others, to criticize others, to persecute others, to judge and punish others, to attack others and even to kill others—all of which we would consider Wrong if others did it to us. The interesting thing about Right is that it is always on our side.

The problem here, of course, is with the model of the world. CWG famously made the statement that “no one does anything inappropriate, given their model of the world.” It is this model that tells us that things are morally right and morally wrong—and, billions believe, that it is God who has said so. If God says that something is Right or Wrong, who are we to contradict that, or even to question it?

So our model of the world leaves no room for discussion, no room for debate, no room for exploration of any possibility other than what we have been told and commanded by the God of our understanding.

There would be no problem with this if we could be certain that our understanding of what God has said is Right and Wrong is “right.” But what if it’s “wrong”? Or, at least, incomplete?

Even casual observation informs us, Carol, that,with regard to What God Said about what’s Right and what’s Wrong, we can’t get things straight on this planet from one culture to the next, or even from one moment in history to the next. What, then, to do? How to resolve this problem?

The answer is to build a new model of the world, based on a new understanding, brought to us by Tomorrow’s God. And that new understanding is that there is no such thing as Right and Wrong, there is only What Works and What Does Not Work, given what it is we are trying to do.

Dare we? Dare we use this New Model as a universal device for determining our actions, for making our choices, for taking particular decisions?

I want to explore more of what Carol Bass had to say in her post, and will do so in our next entry here, as The Carol Bass Dialogue continues…

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Much of the commentary in the column above comes from What God Said, the latest book from Neale Donald Walsch, to be published by Penguin Putnam in October.)

Has humanity lost its sense of values? Are we heading off the high cliff of “Relativism”? That, as some of you surely know, is a dirty among among Absolutionists. And the world these days does indeed seem to have divided it into two camps: Absolutionists and Relativists.

Yet that is only the way it seems. In actuality there is a third camp, the Dichotomists. These are people who embrace the notion that two apparently opposing “truths” can exist simultaneously in the same space. They call this a “Divine Dichotomy.”

Dichotomists do not see things in Black and White, but in shades of both. They do not see polar opposites, but a continuum. Where others see a straight line with each end representing This or That, they see a circle where This and That is “neither here nor there.”

I bring all of this up now because we are engaged here in the Carol Bass Dialogues. This is a series of interactions with a wonderful lady who contributed to the Comment Section in this space a while ago, offering an observation that was marvelously authentic and totally transparent — and that I thought offered a wonderful window onto how many, many people around the world are thinking today. I knew that I wanted to respond to it immediately, and it is from that impulse that the Carol Bass Dialogues have ensued.

In her note posted here, Carol said, among other things…

“It seems that so many have turned their back on what is right and what is wrong. The ten commandments according to the bible have become just another thing to cast off as just someone’s religious beliefs but not necessarily truth.”

In my last entry here I responded: “Well, Carol, as you may know, Conversations with God says there is no such thing as ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ It also says there’s no such thing as the Ten Commandments. Wow. What do you think of that? What if that were true? How can that be true? What implication does that have for society?”

And then I asked: Is Carol right? Is it this kind of tossing away of our fundamental beliefs that is adding to the problem—if not causing it? Today, my answer: No. Indeed, I believe we must “toss away” our fundamental beliefs if they have been discovered to be simply inaccurate, and thus, no longer serve us.

The classic example of this is the refusal of doctors to wash their hands with an antiseptic solution before delivering babies. They believed that such an idea was nonsense — and they were absolutely sure about that.

It was in the 1847 that Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, working at the Vienna General Hospital’s maternity clinic on a 3-year contract from 1846-1849, made a remarkable observation: At least one way that medicine was being practiced was actually killing people.

In Vienna, as elsewhere in European and North American hospitals, puerperal fever (or childbed fever) was rampant, sometimes climbing to 40 percent of admitted patients. Dr. Semmelweis was disturbed by these mortality rates, and eventually developed a theory of infection, in which he suggested that decaying matter on the hands of doctors, who had recently conducted autopsies, was brought into contact with the genitals of birth-giving women during the medical examinations at the maternity clinic. He proposed a radical hand washing theory using chlorinated lime, now a known disinfectant.

Having the courage to explore his idea—which was radical in that moment—Dr. Semmelweis found that its application reduced the incidence of fatal childbed fever tenfold in maternity institutions.

It didn’t matter.

That’s right. That’s what I said. All the evidence didn’t matter. Dr. Semmelweis’ thoughts ran contrary to key beliefs and practices of his time (the germ theory of infection had not yet been developed), and so his ideas were rejected and ridiculed.

Worse, in what was very unusual, his contract at the hospital was not renewed, effectively expelling him from the medical community in Vienna. He died an outcast in a mental institution in 1865.

It was not until the 20^th Century that his ideas were accepted, with untold numbers of babies’ lives having died for no reason in the interim, because doctors — who, of all people, should have known better, looking at the evidence — simply and stubbornly refused to accept this “new idea.”

This article is Part IV of an ongoing series:
LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR TOMORROW

Dr. Semmelweis was what I call an Idea Hero — and we need more Idea Heroes right now, at this present moment in human history. For we have reached ChoicePoint in our evolutionary process once again. Do we stick with the ideas and beliefs of the past (for no reason other than that we have always believed them), or dare we embrace the new ideas and the new constructs and the new thoughts of the future (for the reason that they are clearly and obviously more beneficial)?

When I was told in Conversations with God that there were no such things as the Ten Commandments, I was shocked. How could that be? I wondered. Had God himself not given us these laws and ordinances? And where would humanity be without a set of sacred rules upon which to base all other human laws by which it governs itself?

Of course, I asked God these questions, and the answers I received made it apparent that God had no problem with the content of the Ten Commandments either. It was the concept that was faulty.

It had already been made clear to me that God and we are One. This was the very first announcement in the CWG dialogue, appearing on pg. 5 of 3,000 pages of interaction. So I had already been given the groundwork for what God had to say about those ten statements he gave to Moses, and I suppose I should have guessed exactly what that might be.

“Who would I command? Myself?”, God asked. “And why would such commandments be required? Whatever I want, is. N’est ce pas? How is it therefore necessary to command anyone?

“And, if I did issue commandments, would they not be automatically kept? How could I wish something to be ‘so’ so badly that I would command it—and then sit by and watch it not be so? What kind of a king would do that? What kind of a ruler?”
God explained that he was neither a king nor a ruler, but The Creator.

“I have created you—blessed you—in the image and likeness of Me,” she said. “And I have made certain promises and commitments to you.”

It was explained that Moses went to the mountaintop with an urgent plea. He begged God to give him something he could tell his people that would assure them they were on the right path.

God must have felt, “Fair enough. Good question,” because he essentially said to Moses, “I will tell you, in plain language, how it will be with you when you become as one with Me.” Here are, God explained, some Divine Covenants: “You shall know that you have taken the path to God, and you shall know that you have found God, for there will be these signs, these indications, these changes in you.” And then he listed them.

(This entire exchange may be found on pg. 37 of CWG-Book 1.)

You shall know that you’re on a good path, God said, because when you are walking a path to God there are things that you shall and shall not do automatically. But this list, God said in CWG, were never meant to be commandments.

“For who shall I command? And who shall I punish should My commandments not be kept? There is only Me.”

I understood the logic of this completely, but I have to say that I felt that the bulk of humanity might feel little lost without those guidelines—call them commandments, call them commitments, call them whatever you wish.

I wondered if the new theology of Conversations with God would give us anything to replace them, any kind of touchstones or guidelines, criteria or even suggestions that might help us find our way through the thicket of Life on Earth.

It did. And we will look at all of this in the weeks ahead, beginning with our exploration of one of the most important messages of CWG: “There is no such thing as Right and Wrong.”

How can such a thing be “true”? And what is “truth,” anyway?

More to come as The Conversation of the Century continues here.

People all over the planet are now reexamining themselves. As the New Year has begun they are looking at themselves as individuals and deciding what changes they wish to make, and they are looking at their entire culture, the groups to which they belong, and the whole global society—and in this process they are re-thinking what it means to be human.

Do humans really need to control, and use up, the largest portion of the world’s resources, while exerting the largest level of control over the world’s nations and their people, in order to create “the land of the free and the home of the brave”? Is this what it means to be free and brave?

Do humans really need to kill each other by the thousands in violent revolutions in Syria and Libya and elsewhere on the globe throughout human history in order to create their lives the way they want to live them in nations ruled by strong-willed despots?

Do humans really need to degrade, abuse, attack and rape the females among them, at the rate of one every 22 minutes as reported in India, in order to misguidedly assert some horribly mistaken notion of male superiority?

And do we need to lie, cheat, steal, and murder on an individual basis in order to simply get what we want in life?

Do we know no better way to behave? What would it take for us to rid our species of these deplorable deportments? It’s all very well and good to say that, well, it’s only the minority among us who do these things, yet how do we explain that in the second half of the first quarter of the twenty-first century (not the third century, thank you, or the twelfth century) we are still behaving in such a primitive fashion?

Could it be—might it just be—that what we are showing ourselves and teaching our children about what it means to be human is totally opposite to what we say we want our species to be? That it is, in fact, morally corrupt and socially depraved?

It is all these things, of course, and that’s the problem. But the even bigger problem is that we can’t admit that this is the problem.

Hey, we’re doing nothing wrong here!, we tell ourselves. Sure we graphically depict violence and killing in our entertainments and games; sure we objectify women in everything from our advertisements to our religions in our culture; sure we emphasize that Might is Right and To The Victor Go The Spoils from board games to board rooms—but this has nothing to do with why rape and killing and ruthless, go-for-the-jugular competition is rampant on this planet! One thing has nothing to do with the other, and get that straight! The things we model have nothing to do with the things we do, and we’re sick and tired of hearing you wimpy liberals telling us that it’s all our Culture’s fault! We’re going to continue to sell cars with pictures of half-naked women, and to sell movies with pictures of people getting their heads blown off, and we want you to shut up about it!! There’s money to be made here!

This article is Part III of an ongoing series:
LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR TOMORROW

Now in the last installment of this series we began what I have called the Carol Bass Dialogues. This is a string of commentaries based on an entry made on January 3^rd by a lovely woman of that name. I picked Carol’s entry out of the dozens that were placed here because I found it wonderfully reflective of where so many people find themselves today.

Carol wrote about the challenges of moving into 2013, and of life in this post-modern world. She spoke about the fear she feels regarding the future, and about her lack of confidence as she looks ahead to Tomorrow.

“At my age to feel so much fear and uncertainty is not a good place to be,” she said. I’m not sure I agree about the Uncertainty part, Carol. I think that it is when human beings are certain about things that they become dangerous. Give me someone who is unsure rather than someone who is Dead Sure every time.

We do well to keep questioning ourselves, we do well to not have all the answers, because that keeps us searching for them. Or as Conversations with God says: “The question! The question! The answer to the question is in the question itself.”

The reason that humanity is in such a precarious place right now is precisely because we’re certain we’re doing everything right. Many people are, at least. The people in power are. They are sure that their economic system is the right way to do it. They are sure that their politics are right. They are sure that the increasing violence of society has nothing to with violence in movies, on television, and in video games. Kids understand, these are just games. People understand, it’s just a movie.

Riiight.

So you know what, Carol? I think it’s a good thing that more and more people now are uncertain about our future, and unsure of the way to build it. Uncertainty is the farthest edge of Creation. And if ever there was a time for our species to recreate itself anew, this is it. We can’t keep going on like this.

Carol Bass also said…
“It seems that so many have turned their back on what is right and what is wrong. The ten commandments according to the bible have become just another thing to cast off as just someone’s religious beliefs but not necessarily truth.”

Well, Carol, as you may know, Conversations with God says there is no such thing as “right” and “wrong.” It also says there’s no such thing as the Ten Commandments. Wow. What do you think of that? What if that were true? How can that be true? What implication does that have for society?

Is Carol right? Is it this kind of tossing away of our fundamental beliefs that is adding to the problem—if not causing it?

That’s next. We’ll look at that next.

Pass these articles around. Send the link to your friends. Talk about them on Facebook. Bring them up at the office. Let’s have The Conversation of the Century. We would do well to be talking about these things.

(A Note from the Global Conversation Project Team: If you join the Civil Rights Movement for the Soul and start a Conversation of the Century group in your home, Neale will personally join in the group’s explorations by live link on a regular basis. More on this as the series of articles here continues.)

People in every corner of the planet have begun a wide-ranging discussion that could have a real impact on their individual lives — and, indeed, on the life of the entire world — if they choose to let it.

That discussion revolves around a central question that focuses on the major issue of our time: What is the state of humanity’s spirituality? Is the portion of our sense of who and what we are that transcends physicality alive and healthy, vibrant, awake, and aware? Or is it dormant, inert, quiescent, barely alive within us?

That question was asked here, in this space on the Internet, in the first installment of a series of articles on the subject. If the response here, judging by the entries in the Comment Section, is any measure, many people are engaged in their spiritual experience, but some are not sure what spirituality is seeking to tell us, and others do not seem clear about how it can be used to change the world.

Then there are those who are very clear about both.

So the question of this second installment of our series is: what group do you fall into? And…does it matter?

The answer to the second question is yes. All change that occurs in people’s lives, and in the world at large, emerges from the deepest beliefs that drive the experience of human beings — and “beliefs” is just another word for “spirituality.”

The real question before humanity moving into 2013, then, becomes the critical question of all time: What are we going to believe?

With regard to God, with regard to Life and what it is and how it was designed to work and why it even exists…What are we going to believe?

This article is Part II of an ongoing series:
LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR TOMORROW

With regard to ourselves, and who we are, and what we are to each other…What are we going to believe?

Perhaps even more important…What are we going to invite humanity to believe? And can we — do we even want to — play a role in that?

I very much would like to hear your comments on that. And let me tell you why I ask. The comment posted beneath the first installment in this series from a wonderful and courageous woman named Carol Bass made it very clear to me what work lies ahead.

I have called Carol Bass courageous because she had the bravery to speak her heart here in this space, and by doing so she opened a window for all of us into the heart of humanity itself…because I believe that the experience of Carol Bass is a very close reflection of the experience of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people.

So thank you, Carol, for coming here and so honestly sharing your innermost thoughts with us. I hope it is okay with you if I dialogue with you here in the next several installments, because you have given me a wonderful opportunity to address the most sincere concerns of so many human beings…

May we begin here? You opened your commentary, Carol, with this statement:

“I don’t think I have ever had such a unsettled feeling about the future of humanity. At my age to feel so much fear and uncertainty is not a good place to be.”

I agree with you, Carol, on the fear part. To feel so much fear is not a good place to be. For one thing, it creates fear in even greater degree. Fear creates fear, love creates love, joy creates joy, anger creates anger…Life creates Life in the process of Life Itself. Life is a process through which Life gives birth to itself. This is not something that is widely understood — and that is one reason that the world is the way it is today, and that people’s individual lives are the way they are.

When people are encountering particularly difficult times, and are doing so on a continuing, ongoing, seemingly never-ending basis, I always invite them to look closely at what they are saying about Life, and how they are thinking about it.

This goes for me, too, Carol. I am right in there with everyone else. I do the same thing we all do: I create my future out of my thoughts about the present, and even sometimes out of my sadnesses and concerns about the past.

For me, this is one of Life’s biggest challenges. I’ve got to get out of my past, then move cleanly through my present, so that my future can continue to bring me what I truly wish to experience.

I have asked God to help me with this, and She is doing so. Among other things, He inspired me to write a remarkable book called The Storm Before the Calm. I called it “remarkable” even though it is my own book, because in a very real sense it is not. Once again, I was merely following the inspirations of my Soul, which, in turn, is listening very carefully to the Source of Wisdom and Clarity that most of us call God. That Source told me in The Storm Before the Calm that we are undergoing right now what is called The Overhaul of Humanity — and that, Carol, it is nothing to be afraid of.

An “overhaul” is merely the disassembling of something, and then the rebuilding of it with many new parts, so that it can work better. When people do this with their cars they say they are “overhauling the engine.” There’s no fear involved. It is simply a process to improve the way the machinery is working.

That is what is going on across our planet right now, Carol, and so, there is nothing to be fearful about. And this will be especially true if we each play our role in the Overhaul. That is, we can stand on the sidelines and watch it happening — in which case we will surely wonder where and how it will all end up, and that certainly could cause some worry — or we can stand in the middle of it and be At Cause in the matter, in which case we will feel a much greater sense of confidence in the outcome, because we are determined to play a hand in creating it.

Do you see the difference in positionality here, Carol? One is a place of impotence (“We can do nothing to control our lives!”) and the other is a place of power (“I am the creator of my own reality.”) Wow, what a contrast!

It is true, in the classic sense, that we can do nothing to control what is going on around us (except to the degree that we collaborate actively in the collective creation). But we can do something about our reality — and that is the key to everything.

We do not create our collective outer reality unilaterally, and this is something we need to understand. But we do create our inner reality (which is the only True Reality) of the outer conditions and circumstances which we encounter every day.

(This is now being discussed in great detail in the “Interpreting Conversations with God” column of this newspaper, now focusing on the messages of the book, When Everything Changes, Change Everything.)

We can overhaul our own lives in the same way that humanity as a whole is overhauling its global experience, and this is the process in which I am deeply engaged right now. It is the process to which Conversations with God invited us. CWG told me, clearly, that the purpose of life is to recreate ourselves anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are.

This is what we are doing now, Carol, individually and collectively — and perhaps more consciously and collaboratively than we ever have before. I have so much more to say on this subject, Carol, so I hope you will stay tuned here, and continue to join in the conversation.

Now, about the second half of your sentence, above, Carol…you said that “uncertainty” is not a good place to be. I respectfully and gently disagree, Carol…and I will tell you why in Part 3 of this series! I have to stop here for now, or this second installment will become encyclopedic in length!

Join me in this excursion, Carol, and I believe we can go together to a new place of peace, joy, comfort, and creation. And we can take many people along with us, yes?

Until next time…Love, Neale.