There has been ignited on this website a small but interesting conversation about the Conversations with God messages and about me, personally, vis-à-vis those messages. In short: Am I treating them as ‘gospel,’ and do I, at some level, wish them to be considered a new religion?

Comments like (and I am paraphrasing here), “Neale quotes CWG as if he were quoting scripture”…..and…..”The last thing we need is a new religion”….and….“Neale speaks of the ‘CWG cosmology,’ and that can be a dangerous trend”…..etc….lead me to believe that perhaps it would be a good time for me to enter this conversation personally.

Let me begin by announcing that I feel very safe in saying that anyone who knows me personally is very clear that I do not consider CWG a new religion, nor would I want it treated as such. Indeed, just the opposite is true. I am hoping that Conversations with God will lead every person back to their own highest indwelling truth.

That does not mean that I do not think CWG has any theological value. Quite to the contrary, I think it may be among the most value contributions to the study of God that has come along in a very, very long time. And I think that what CWG invites us to consider about God could change the world for the better if it opened individuals to aspects of themselves wherein which was found resonance with its messages.

To unravel that rather clunky sentence, I am saying that I believe if the world lived according to, and functionally embraced the messages of, Conversations with God, our planet would be a better place. But to be fair, that is not saying much. Almost anything would be better than the way we are living now.

Nothing on this planet is working. Read that n-o-t-h-i-n-g.

None of the systems we have put into place to create a better life for us all on this planet have produced the outcome for which they were designed.

It’s worse than that. They’ve actually produced exactly the opposite.

Our political systems — created to produce safety and security for the world’s people – have produced nothing but disagreement and disarray.

Our economic systems — created to produce opportunity and sufficiency for all — have produced increasing poverty and massive economic inequality, with 85 of the world’s richest people holding more wealth than 3.5 billion…that’s half the planet’s population…combined.

Our ecological systems — created to help us produce a sustainable lifestyle — have been abused so much that they are now generating environmental disasters right and left.

Our educational systems — created to lift higher and higher the knowledge base of the planet’s population — have produced a drop in global awareness and sensitivity that each year sinks our intellectual common denominator lower and lower. We can’t even remember our own telephone numbers anymore.

Our health care systems — created in hopes of producing a good and long life for an increasingly higher percentage of people — are doing little to eliminate inequality of access to modern medicines and health care services, thus actually providing top level medical services each year to a lower and lower percentage.

Our social systems — created to produce the joy of community and harmony among a divergent population — more and more generate and even encourage discordance, disparity, prejudice, and despair…to say nothing of rampant injustice.

And, most sadly dysfunctional of all, our spiritual systems — created to produce a greater closeness to God, and so, to each other — have produced bitter righteousness, shocking intolerance, widespread anger, deep-seated hatred, and self-justified violence.

What gives here? What’s going on with the human race that it cannot see itself even as it looks at itself? Where is humanity’s blind spot?

Might it be time to ask: “Could there be something we don’t fully understand here about God and about Life, the understanding of which would change everything?”

I lifted the above paragraphs straight out of God’s Message to the World: You’ve got me all wrong. I think they speak directly to the issue now facing humanity, and many of us in our individual lives.

But is Conversations with God “The Answer” (capital T, capital A)? No. Nor does it claim to be. In fact, just the opposite. The dialogue says over and over again that it is not The Answer, but rather, an invitation to ask The Question. And the Question is?

Well, I’ve just stated it above. Here it is again: “Is it possible that there is something we don’t fully understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which would change everything?”

The CWG goes on to offer some ideas about what we humans might not fully understand; some suggestions on some different ways that we might hold our experience of God and of each other and of life itself—its purpose, its function, its very reason for being, and our reason, as humans, for being.

Do I, as an individual, really believe these messages came to me directly from God? Yes. Without equivocation I believe and state that they did—and do (messages from the place of highest wisdom within us continue to come to me every day). Do I believe that I am the only one receiving such messages—or one of the very few? No. I believe that God is talking to all of us, all of the time. I believe the question is not, to whom does God talk? The question is, who listens?

Do I believe that because I experience the messages to have come directly from God that they must and should be treated like holy scripture? And that they must and should be heeded in every way? No. Indeed, the messages themselves (I observe again) say just the opposite, declaring: “Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.”

Am I prone to quoting Conversations with God all over the place, on every topic and subject? Do I say over and over again, in my writing and in my public speaking, things like: “As Conversations with God says….”, and “As CWG tells us…”, and “According to Conversations with God, “ etc., etc.?

Yes. I plead guilty.

Why do I do this if I don’t want its messages and words treated as “scripture,” and don’t hold them that way in my own mind? Because I want the ideas to be considered seriously, to be heard over and over again, to be treated not as “scripture,” but as a place from which to open meaningful discussion and deep exploration. Because I want people everywhere to know what these books are saying, so that people everywhere can decide and declare whether they agree with them, or parts of them, or whether they do not, and thus renew and ignite the living of their lives in a particular way—a way that reflects their own highest thoughts on all the topics that matter dearly to the human soul.

I am grateful to Morton, who has posted here, because he has responded to the CWG books exactly as I had hoped everyone would: with a sure and certain return to, a getting in touch with, their own highest truth, their own deepest conviction, their own absolute determination to live and breathe and have their being in their most loving beliefs about themselves and about the God of Love who is the source of this world. Thank you, Morton, for displaying the courage to speak your mind. So long as we can agree that we disagree peacefully, we have found a way of being which everyone’s understanding of God can accommodate.

It is okay with me if people become disturbed with or about what I have written if they experience it placing themselves in touch with their own highest convictions. Is returning us to ourselves not the true purpose of every form of art? And is not literature that explores the nature of God exactly this?

Is not literature that arouses our senses and engages our mind—even as and if we disagree with it—part of what a true renaissance is all about? I think it’s time for a spiritual renaissance on our planet. Indeed, I think that’s the only thing that will save it. And for me, personally, I know that is the only thing that will make my own life meaningful.

I seek and wish to connect with my own highest thoughts about Life, about God, about who we are, about our right and best relationship with each other, and about how we can live and love and laugh together as I believe we were meant to—and not spend our days and times simply and urgently trying to figure out how to survive…with some of us (far too many of us) actually killing each other in order to meet what we perceive to be our own needs, or as a means of expressing our own deepest truth.

There is so much more I have to say about all of this. Anyone care to engage?

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about a question that doesn’t seem to want to leave my mind: What would it take for the people of the world to simply get along?

Is that too much to ask? Is that too much to expect from an “enlightened” species?

Wait a minute. Forget about “getting along.” What (if anything) could cause a species of sentient beings who could not “get along” to just stop killing each other? What (if anything) could convince us that… 

…getting our way through the use of force is not only not civilized—it’s not even beneficial to those who get their way? Inevitably, the violence they used to the their way falls back on them. It is inevitable.

Is our particular species truly so unevolved among all the life forms in the Universe that it still finds it utterly impossible to create a way to resolve differences without barbaric cruelty—even after thousands of years of trying?

Is it possible that there is something we simply don’t understand about Life, and God, and Who We Are—the understanding of which would change everything?

How long are we willing as a species to allow our utter dysfunction to go on? Or to try to resolve it in the same way we have done in the past? How many times are we going to do the same thing over and over again, expecting to get a different result?

Isn’t that the classic definition of insanity?

Conversations with God proposes an answer to all of the above questions. And this is what the Evolution Revolution is all about. Please help us to get to 5,000 participants around the world. Please share news of what you and I are doing here with everyone in your address book and everyone on your Facebook page.

Can you do that? Are you brave enough to do that? Will you come out of the woodwork, out from behind the closet door, and ask at least one other person to join you in this worldwide endeavor?

Please?

Because if not now, when? And if not you, who?

And if you don’t know what the Evolution Revolution is all about, it’s about Awakening Day, on March 12, 2015. You can go here to learn all about that. I trust that, if you want to keep the conversation about how we can change our lives and change the world, that you will choose to do so. I hope that you will choose to learn all about what I and my friends from around the world are doing at www.EvolutionRevolution.net.

“Love means not having to say you’re sorry,” Erich Segal famously wrote as a piece of dialogue in his wonderful book Love Story over 25 years ago.  Today, I would like to amend that.  I want to say…

“Love means not having to say you’re bad.”

I was musing about this earlier this morning with my wonderful wife, Em.  “You know what I think love is?” I asked.  “What?” she smiled.  “I think love is a willingness to always return your Beloved to the highest ideas about themselves that they’ve ever had.”

Em smiled again.

“I think this is what God does for us,” I went on.  ”I think God’s ‘job’ is to return us every day to the highest idea we’ve ever had about ourselves.  I think God sees us the way we see us in our highest version.  I think God says to us, ‘Yes, yes, that is Who You are.  Stay with that!  Stick with that!  Don’t give that up!  And don’t ever let anyone tell you anything different about yourself.”

I think that when we do this for our Beloved, and our Beloved does this for us, we have a match made in Heaven.

But what happens in so many relationships is this:  We meet someone to whom we are attracted, and we fall in love.  We then see them in all their wonderful ways, virtually without fault or foible.  If we are lucky, they fall in love with us, too.  And they see us in the same way: virtually without stain or soil.  If we are really lucky, we become Life Partners.

Then the Moment-to-Moment sets in.

In the Moment-to-Moment, and over a period of time, our Beloved begins to see things in us that were not immediately apparent to them — or that were apparent, but that they easily and graciously ignored.  In addition, some things that they could never have seen, because they were not close enough, now become visible.  The Moment-to-Moment reveals things about us that the Now-and-Then does not.

So now here we are, standing, literally, naked, confronted by the reality that we have some “stuff” going on that our Beloved hadn’t seen or anticipated; that we, ourselves, had almost forgotten about in the heady days of being loved so unconditionally by another.

Yet now we have to face the facts:  we are not so special as we thought ourselves to be; we are not so wonderful as we imagined ourselves to be, or experienced ourselves to be, in the warm glow of our Beloved’s early and limited perception.  We conclude, sadly, that it’s true.  Our own worst thought about ourself is true.

We should have known better…

We should have known better than to believe that we were what we allowed ourselves to think ourselves to be after being merely glanced, through the Early Eyes of the Newly Loving.

Unless…unless…

(To be continued…)

I think our Time of Decision is at hand. As a species, I mean. Our Time of Decision is at hand. We need to decide Who We Are and Who We Choose to Be.

Are we a species that kills 2,000 of our fellow members by driving them out of their village in Nigeria and mowing them down with machine guns as they run for their lives because we want to assert our presence and our influence in the country?

Are we a species that ignores that this is happening, because it happened in a so-called “third world country,” and “these things happen there all the time”…?

Are we a species that beheads our fellow members and then posts this atrocious act on the Internet, because we disagree with people on religious or political grounds — or simply because we captured them being in the wrong place and the wrong time, perhaps as reporters who were merely journaling what was going on?

Are we a species that does nothing about this, because we can’t seem to find a way to stop it?

Are we a species headed for a Clash of Civilizations, with large or prosperous nations acting as if they are always “right” because they have the “might”, and small groups of people using violence and terrorism as what they have determined to be their only means of giving themselves a voice?

Are we a species that is content to have 1% of the people own or control more wealth and resources than 50% of the planet’s inhabitants — while 2.6 billion people do not even have indoor sanitation, and 1.5 billion are to this day without electricity?

Are we a species that watches over 650 of its children die every hour of starvation, and still insists that while we can send a man to the moon, there is nothing we can do about this tragedy that occurs every sixty minutes?

Who are we? And who do we choose to be?

That is what the Evolution Revolution — a global outreach of the Spiritual Activism art of Humanity’s Team which I have joined people around the world in collaboratively creating —  is all about. It is all about starting this discussion, in earnest. It is about igniting this exploration. It is about empowering our species to change, if it truly chooses to.

And let us make no mistake about it, this is a spiritual decision, not a political decision. Politics are nothing more than one’s spirituality, demonstrated. It doesn’t feel to me that we can any longer afford to stand aside from our world, watching it disintegrate right in front of us, while we engage in our own private, personal spiritual development practices. All of us BEING in the world, and ACTING in the world, as Who We Really Are is the biggest spiritual practice of all…unless I have badly misunderstood something.

So please don’t see the Evolution Revolution as a political movement. It’s a great deal more than that. We seek to evolve the species to a new level of understanding and experiencing our true identity and our fundamental reason for being in physical form on this Earth. That is why we are distributing, on March 12, a document headlined “1,000 Words That Would Change the World.” It is a spiritual declaration, not a political one.

We have set a goal of 5,000 participants in the Evolution Revolution from around the world by Feb 12 (we’re at just over 1,700 now), and as close to 10,000 as we can get to by Awakening Day on March 12, 2015. We will join us? Will you stand with us? All we are asking you to do on March 12 is place a piece of paper where it will be seen. Will you do that with us?

To become engaged in this planetary event, simply go to www.EvolutionRevolution.net

And so we begin a new year. A new beginning of a new cycle in the new business of creating a new way to be human.

This needs to be, truly, a New Beginning. We can scarcely afford to continue the way we have been on this planet. Just about everyone knows that. The question is, what way shall be the new way? Or have we decided that the New Way needs to be the Old Way?

In America a new Congress takes over this month — a Congress, just having been elected, with a heavily Republican (read that: conservative) majority. In Syria and Iraq the self-labeled Islamic State has taken over the major cities of Raqqa, Deir Ezzor and Mosul, and much of the land mass in between, imposing its interpretation of strict Islamic (read that: conservative) law. In eastern portions of Ukraine, a large portion of the local population apparently loyal to Russia — which has already taken complete control of the Crimean Peninsula, which Ukraine says is its territory — agitates to stop Ukraine’s apparently imminent move to membership in the more politically liberal NATO Alliance and retain the country’s more historic (read that: conservative) ties with Russia.

Everywhere we turn we see the same strain and struggle: the push-pull between liberal and conservative agendas and values, with conservatives in many places apparently winning the moment — either by utilizing physical force, or by the force of their ideas.

Does this seem like a time of New Beginnings birthing a New Tomorrow, or a time of Old Hanging-On’s, seeking an entrenchment in Yesterday? And this question, in turn, invites an examination and an honest exploration of the Question Behind the Question: How have Yesterday’s Values been working?

Well, um…not very well, thank you. I make the point in my latest book that none of the systems we have put into place to create a better life for all of us on this planet have produced the outcome for which they were designed.

It’s worse than that. They’ve actually produced exactly the opposite.

Our political systems — created to produce safety and security for the world’s people – have produced nothing but disagreement and disarray.

Our economic systems — created to produce opportunity and sufficiency for all — have produced increasing poverty and massive economic inequality, with 85 of the world’s richest people holding more wealth than 3.5 billion…that’s half the planet’s population…combined.

Our ecological systems — created to help us produce a sustainable lifestyle — have been abused so much that they are now generating environmental disasters right and left.

Our educational systems — created to lift higher and higher the knowledge base of the planet’s population — have produced a drop in global awareness and sensitivity that each year sinks our intellectual common denominator lower and lower. We can’t even remember our own telephone numbers anymore.

Our health care systems — created in hopes of producing a good and long life for an increasingly higher percentage of people — are doing little to eliminate inequality of access to modern medicines and health care services, thus actually providing top level medical services each year to a lower and lower percentage.

Our social systems — created to produce the joy of community and harmony among a divergent population — more and more generate and even encourage discordance, disparity, prejudice, and despair…to say nothing of rampant injustice.

And, most devastating of all, our spiritual systems — created to produce a greater closeness to God, and so, to each other — have produced bitter righteousness, shocking intolerance, widespread anger, deep-seated hatred, and self-justified violence.

What gives here? What’s going on with the human race that it cannot see itself even as it looks at itself? Where is humanity’s blind spot?

Might it be time to ask: “Could there be something we don’t fully understand here about God and about Life, the understanding of which would change everything?”

Why we are so bent, in such large numbers, on returning to the Ways of the Past when we can see with the slightest glance that those methods, and the values which sponsored them, have produced nothing but failure after failure?

We are hell-bent on repeating our past for the simple reason that at least it’s familiar. Our fear of the Unknown is greater than our fear of repeating what we already know to be dysfunctional.

And so, those who would invite us to finally abandon our Old Values by putting their failures right in front of our face have forever been marginalized — and even demonized. And so we have ridiculed, ostracized, and even killed everyone and anyone who would dare tell us that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. We will not have anyone ripping us from our illusions about how wonderful our Old Values were and are.

So we killed Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and Harvey Milk and virtually every revolutionary who chided us and invited us to look at ourselves and to admit, finally, that what we were doing, and how we were living, was simply, by any reasonable set of moral values, not right.

Just as today we can see that it is not right that 842 million people (one in eight in the world) will not have enough to eat today. It is not right that over 650 children die of starvation every hour on this planet. It is not right that 20.9 million women and children are bought and sold into commercial sexual servitude every year.

It is not right that over three billion people live on less than $2.50 a day, or that billions have no access to health care. (Some 19,000 children die each day from preventable health issues, such as malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia.) It is not right that 1.7 billion people lack clean water, or that 2.6 billion live without basic sanitation, or that 1.6 billion people—a quarter of humanity—do not even have electricity.

That’s right. In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, 2.6 billion people live without toilets, and 1.6 billion without electricity. How is this possible?, you might ask. In the first quarter of the 21^st Century…in the beginning of what has been hailed as the New Millennium…how is this possible?

That is a very good question. It is an especially good question given that humanity imagines itself to be a “civilized” species. To the people in the above categories, the “civilization of Civilization” has not even begun.

Of course, we know from the messages in Conversations with God that there is no such thing as “right” and “wrong.” There is only “what works” and “what does not work,” given what it is that we are trying to do. So, by using the more commonly employed term “not right” in the above exploration, we are expressing the view that it is simply not working to continue living and operating under humanity’s Old Values if what we are trying to do is produce a better life for us all.

A planet where 5 percent of the population owns or controls 95 percent of the wealth and resources — and where most of that 5 percent think this is perfectly okay, even as unconscionable numbers languish in lack and suffering — would not seem to be a planet on which a great deal of humanitarian advancement has been achieved.

All of this is possible because of the collective values of those people who can do something about it. And where do those values come from? I suggest they derive in large part from the well-intentioned, but mistaken, Old Beliefs about Life and about God — and the Old Values that have sprung up because of them.

Clearly, somebody or something has to come along to challenge those Old Beliefs. Clearly, it is time for the Awakening of Humanity. Yet who will engage in, who will join in, that process? And why should anyone dare to do so?

The answer to the second question is this: There is a very good and very valuable and very powerful personal reason for joining in the movement to advance the evolution of our species. Such an activity produces the forward movement of each individual’s personal and spiritual evolution.

No one who seeks to assist in producing a greater experience of Life for another fails to create a greater experience of Life for themselves. This is true at every level: spiritual, physical, emotional, psychological. One produces the other, inevitably — and often it is unclear which comes first. More likely it is a circle, in which the effect of one action produces the effect of the other, and the effect of each generates the expression of both.

And so we encounter the beginning of a New Year…which we can each of us decide is the Time of New Beginnings for every one of us individually, and for all of us collectively. As always…the choice is ours.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of a five-part series by Conversations with God author Neale Donald Walsch on the role of today’s Cultural Creatives in the evolutionary process now unfolding on the Earth with increasing intensity.)

In the opening installment of this series of articles I made the observation that I could not remember a time during my half century of adulthood (and my 71 years altogether) when the average human being on this planet found herself or himself looking directly into the face of more stressful events, circumstances, and situations than those now presenting themselves daily around the world.

I posed the question: What is the spiritually evolved response to these kinds of circumstances? I talked of not only our daily bombardment with illustrations of the dark side of life at every turn, but, as well, the pressures building in just about every individual’s personal life. Family finances. Job losses. Forced relocations. Relationship challenges. Dementia tragedies.

I said that our initial spiritual response to all of this depends, it seems to me, on whether we choose to play our role consciously or unconsciously. That is, whether we choose to be active or passive in the creation of our tomorrows (both individually and collectively). And that choice appears to me to depend on how each of us sees the experience of Life itself; on what we imagine to be its origin, its purpose, its function, and its process. Let’s take a look at that here.

I have come to an awareness within myself that before any of us can consider that question, we must answer an altogether different question that we must ask of ourselves.

In my view, you cannot really explore or examine how you see the experience of Life itself until you explore and examine how you see yourself WITHIN that experience.

That is, Who are you? What is your real and true identity?

It seems to me that you have two choices when it comes to how you think of yourself.

Choice #1: You could conceive of yourself as a chemical creature, a “logical biological incident.” That is, the logical outcome of a biological process engaged in by two older biological processes called your mother and your father.

If you see yourself as a chemical creature, you would see yourself as having no more connection to the larger processes of life than any other chemical or biological life form.

Like all the others, you would be impacted by life, but could have very little impact on life. You certainly couldn’t create events, except in the most remote, indirect sense. You could create more life (all chemical creatures carry the biological capacity to recreate more of themselves), but you could not create what life does, or how it “shows up” in any given moment.

Further, as a chemical creature you would see yourself as having very limited ability to create an intentioned response to the events and conditions of life. You would see yourself as a creature of habit and instinct, with only those resources that your biology brings you.

You would see yourself as having more resources than a turtle, because your biology has gifted you with more. You would see yourself as having more resources than a butterfly, because your biology has gifted you with more.

You would see yourself as having more resources than an ape or a dolphin (but, in those cases, perhaps not all that many more), because your biology has gifted you with more. Yet that is all you would see yourself as having in terms of resources.

You would see yourself as having to deal with life day-by-day pretty much as it comes, with perhaps a tiny bit of what seems like “control” based on advance planning, etc., but you would know that at any minute anything could go wrong—and often does.

Choice #2: You could conceive of yourself as a spiritual being inhabiting a biological mass—what I call a “body.”

If you saw yourself as a spiritual being, you would see yourself as having powers and abilities far beyond those of a simple chemical creature; powers that transcend basic physicality and its laws.

You would understand that these powers and abilities give you collaborative control over the exterior elements of your individual and collective life and complete control over the interior elements—which means that you have total ability to create your own reality, because your reality has nothing to do with producing the exterior elements of your life and everything to do with how you respond to the elements that have been produced.

Also, as a spiritual being, you would know that you are here (on the earth, that is) for a spiritual reason. This is a highly focused purpose and has little to do directly with your occupation or career, your income or possessions or achievements or place in society, or any of the exterior conditions or circumstances of your life.

You would know that your purpose has to do with your interior life—and that how well you do in achieving your purpose may very often have an effect on your exterior life.

(For the interior life of each individual cumulatively produces the exterior life of the collective. That is, those people around you, and those people who are around those people who are around you. It is in this way that you, as a spiritual being, participate in the evolution of your species.)

So which of these two choices describes how you see and experience yourself?

In my third installment, I will share with you my own answer to this question, and we will look at the implications of your choice, and of the collective choices made by all of us, as they affect all of us. And make no mistake…they do.

It is very clear to me that the choice that you, individually, and all humans collectively, make bears directly on the initial question that started this whole inquiry: What is the most spiritually evolved response to all that is happening in our personal and collective lives during this unbelievable challenging time?

(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of a five-part series by Conversations with God author Neale Donald Walsch on the role of today’s Cultural Creatives in the evolutionary process now unfolding on the Earth with increasing intensity.)

I cannot remember a time during my half century of adulthood when the average human being on this planet found herself or himself looking directly into the face of more stressful events, circumstances, and situations than those now presenting themselves daily around the world.

In today’s 24-hour news cycle, hardly a moment goes by when something worrisome (if not something absolutely horrible) is not making a headline on the Internet’s news sources — which themselves have proliferated to the point where we almost can’t get away from incoming negative data if we wanted to.

In short, we are being bombarded with illustrations of the dark side of life at every turn. ISIS BEHEADINGS. RANDOM SHOOTINGS. EBOLA PANDEMIC. FERGUSON UNREST. UKRAINE CRISIS. GLOBAL WARMING. And all of this says nothing about the pressures building in just about every individual ’s personal life. Family finances. Job losses. Forced relocations. Relationship challenges. Dementia tragedies.

And we’re adding to that bombardment right here on this website, right now, through the simple act of noticing it. Which brings us to the point of this Internet story. What is the spiritually evolved response to this avalanche of stressful circumstances? If we wish to be “spiritually awakened,” should we simply ignore it? Is it the elevated way to “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil?” Should we “pay it no mind?” Give it no energy?

Is it best to just turn a blind eye to what’s happening around the world (sadly shrugging that we can’t do anything about it anyway), and to meet our personal challenges with a “tough it out” attitude that calls on us to summon inordinate courage and extraordinary stamina until the moment passes and we may mercifully be given a short break by Life before the next disaster or dilemma hits?

Should we not turn a blind eye, but look straight into the jaws of the lion and fearlessly embrace and exude all positive energies and outlooks? And should we take specific action?

This, of course, is not a new inquiry. Shakespeare put it this way, asking in the famous words of Hamlet “whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them”…?

What is the “nobler” thing to do? What is the role that is ours to play in the ongoing drama of life?

Much depends, it seems to me, on whether we choose to play our role consciously or unconsciously. That is, whether we choose to be active or passive in the creation of our tomorrows (both individually and collectively). And that choice appears to me to depend on how each of us sees the experience of Life itself; on what we imagine to be its origin, its purpose, its function, and its process.

We will discuss that first then, here, in the next entry of this series. As we await that entry, you may wish to enter the discussion in the Comment space just below. What do you think is the origin, purpose, function, and process of Life? That is, in your view how did we get here, why does our Life exist, what is its basic task, assignment, or role in the overall scheme of things in the Universe, and what are the mechanics, what is the procedure or methodology, by which that function is completed?

Most people on our planet, even in this, the latter part of the first quarter of the 21^st Century, have never thought about these things. At least, not in such specific terms. Not many (if any) political leaders are thinking in these terms. Not many (if any) religious leaders are thinking in these terms. Not many (if any) economic and industrial leaders are thinking in these terms. Not many (if any) educational leaders are thinking in these terms.

Yet it is in the answer to these questions that our best way to meet and beat the stress of our times — to say nothing of permanently and finally changing the conditions on the ground that produce the endless stress — may be revealed.

So…your answers are…?

Feel free to use the Comment areas below.

Has anybody noticed that a conservative political groundswell is sweeping the Earth? It is not just the mid-term elections in the United States that have reflected this. Everywhere we are seeing a hunger among humanity to return to more conservative values.

What human begins really want is a return to the world as we once knew it. A safer world. A kinder world. A more caring world. (Or at least it seemed so.)

Rabbi Michael Lerner, of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, is now making the point in his blogs, magazine articles, newspaper interviews and other writings, that until progressive and liberal leaders start talking about values, and not simply social programs, they are talking about nothing.

I agree with Rabbi Lerner when he observes that many spiritual progressives (perhaps most) are timid in the extreme about discussing the values from which the social programs they espouse arise.

(I would add that some of them may not even be sure about those values themselves.)

I have been saying for years that a spirituality without practical application is bankrupt, and political activity without spiritual activity is impossible, because the two are intrinsically tied. Indeed, at their core they are one and the same.

All politics are spiritual, because political activity is nothing more than a process by which we seek to put into practice “on the ground” what we hold in our hearts. It is humanity’s earnest attempt to translate its most sacred beliefs into behavior.

But beliefs about what? About the economy? About foreign affairs? About national spending priorities? No. Politics are about what we believe about ourselves. About who we are, and why we are here. About the God of our understanding, and the purpose of life.

Rabbi Lerner is right. The Republicans in the U.S. have been successful because they have been able to raise the discussion above the merely functional to the manifestly spiritual. Republican (that is to say, conservative) views are expressed in religious congregations across America. Yet there is more than one spiritual view of things, and failing to advance an alternate view is where progressives and liberals have failed–exactly as Rabbi Lerner says.

They have failed to powerfully articulate a spiritual worldview that captures the attention, if not to say the imagination, of the everyday person — who, I am convinced, is yearning for an alternate spiritual truth that could turn a world of nonsense into a world that makes sense.

When I say “alternate,” I mean a second option, a second understanding, a differing expression of our natural impulse toward The Divine that dramatically alters the focus of our energies and changes the course of our experience on Earth.

Our job as spiritual progressives is to advance that new worldview, that alternative idea of God and Humans, and of the relationship between the two.

Regarding the political challenge now facing not just the people who reside in the United States, but our species around the world, many people see Conservatism vs. Liberalism as a case of fundamental spiritual values vs runaway socialism, if not rampant hedonism. Liberals have not seriously or energetically advanced any spiritually-based alternative, any spiritual counteroffer, to the fundamentalist spiritual values of many Conservatives: belief in God (and God’s Law as they understand it), hard work, personal responsibility, and sharing/caring for others as a free-will gift, not as a socially or politically mandated obligation.

It’s hard to argue against that. On its surface, that feels like a perfectly acceptable and workable solution to humanity’s problems. Only when looking deeper at the whole relationship between God and Humanity (and therefore the relationship between humans and humans, humans and the Earth, humans and everything), and only when more comprehensively exploring the entire reason and purpose for the existence of Life itself, can a New View of Reality have the space to emerge.

It is the job of liberals and progressives to urge people everywhere to undertake that deeper look and that more comprehensive exploration of these larger questions—what I have called the Four Fundamental Questions of Life: Who am I? Where am I? Why am I where I am? What do I intend to do about that?

These are part of the Seven Simple Questions that I advanced in my book, The Storm Before the Calm. The other three are:

1. How is it possible that 7 billion members of a single species could all want the same thing—survival, safety, security, peace, prosperity, opportunity, happiness, and love—and be unable to produce it, even after thousands of years of trying?
2. Is it possible that there is something we don’t fully understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which would change everything?
3. Is it possible that there is something about ourselves and about who we are, the understanding of which would alter our lives forever for the better?

I have been offering in my writing for years that the challenge facing humanity is that most human beings keep trying to solve humanity’s problems at every level except the level at which the problems exist.

First we try to solve our problems as if they were political problems, because we are used to using political pressure on this planet to get people to do what they don’t want to do.

We hold discussions, we write laws, we pass legislation and adopt resolutions in every local, national, regional, and global language and assembly we can think of to try to solve the problem with words—but it does not work. Whatever short-term solutions we may create evaporate very quickly, and the problems reemerge. They will not go away.

So we say, “Okay, these are not political problems and they cannot be solved with political means. They are economic problems.” And because we are used to using economic power on this planet to get people to do what they don’t want to do, we then try to solve the problems as if they were economic problems.

We throw money at them, or withhold money from them (as in the form of sanctions), seeking to solve the problems with cash. But it does not work. Whatever short-term solutions we may create evaporate very quickly, the problems reemerge. They will not go away.

And so we say, “Okay, these are not economic problems, and they cannot be solved by economic means. They must be military problems.” And because we are used to using military might on this planet to get people to do what they don’t want to do, we then try to solve the problems as if they were military problems.

We throw bullets at them and drop bombs on them, seeking to solve the problems with weapons. But it does not work. Whatever short-term solutions we may create evaporate very quickly, and the problems reemerge. They will not go away. And so, having run out of solutions, we declare: “These are not easy problems. No one expected that they could be fixed overnight. This is going to be a long, hard slog. Many lives will be lost in trying to solve these problems. But we are not going to give up. We are going to solve these problems if it kills us.” And we don’t even see the irony in our own statements.

After a while, however, even primitive beings of very little consciousness become tired of the killing and the dying of their own sons and daughters in battle and their own women and children and elderly in the line of fire. And so, after enough killing has been done with no solution in sight, they say it is time to call a truce and hold peace talks. And the cycle begins again…

We are back to the bargaining table, and back to politicking as a solution. And peace talks often include discussion of reparations and economic recovery. And so, we are back to money as a solution. And when these solutions fail to work in the long run, we are back to bombs again.

And on and on and on it goes, and on and on and on it has gone throughout human history. Only the names of the players have changed, but the game has not.

Only primitive cultures and primitive beings do this. We have all heard the definition of insanity. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting to get a different result.

We can’t seem to change our ways, however, because we are very used to trying to force solutions in our world. Yet solutions that are forced are never solutions at all. They are simply postponements.

The great tragedy and the great sadness of humanity is that we are forever willing to settle for postponements in place of solutions.

Only primitive cultures and primitive beings do that. Highly evolved beings would never, ever settle for a ten-thousand-year postponement in solving their biggest problems. Here on this planet we’ve never really faced the largest problem of humanity head on. We refuse to. We pretend we don’t even know what it is. And so we do our endless dance all around it. And we continue, century after century, to try to solve the world’s problem at every level except the level at which the problem exists.

So now let’s just say it plainly. The problem facing humanity today is not a political problem, it is not an economic problem, and it is certainly not a military problem. The problem facing humanity today is a spiritual problem, and it can only be solved by spiritual means.

The problem is rooted in our most fundamental beliefs about life, about each other, and about the Essence or Energy that some of us call God.

Put simply, the problem is that we believe in Separation. We believe that all things are separate from other things, that all people are separate from other people, and that all humans are separate from God.

This is, and has been for millennia, our Cultural Story. It is a Story of Separation.

Our opportunity on the Earth today is to jointly author a brand new story about who we are and how it is with us. And most important, how it’s going to be.

We are invited to declare, at long last, as a single voice, the truth of our being: We are all One. And with that declaration as the foundation of our New Cultural Story, we can bring an end at last to Separation Theology.

Separation Theology is a theology that insists that we are “over here” and God is “over there.” Its doctrine tells us that God separated us from God as punishment for our sins, and that our job now is to get back to God, which is possible only if God will allow it, which God will do only if we obey God’s commands, follow God’s laws, and submit to God’s will. In short, we must do what God wants.

This Separation Theology has produced a Separation Cosmology (that is, a way of looking at all of life on this planet that includes separation as its basic principle), which, in turn, has produced a Separation Psychology (that is, a psychological way of looking at things, of holding life, that rests on a foundation of separation), which, in turn, has produced a Separation Sociology (that is, a way of socializing with each other that encourages us to act as separate beings serving our own separate interests), which, in the end, has produced a Separation Pathology (that is, pathological behaviors of self-destruction, producing suffering, conflict, violence, and death by our own hands).

Only when our Separation Theology is replaced by a Unity Theology will our pathology be healed. We must come to understand that all of life is One.

This is our first step. It is the jumping off point. It is the beginning of the end of how things now are. It is the start of a new creation, of a new tomorrow. It is our only viable New Cultural Story.

We must announce and declare that Oneness is not a characteristic of Life, Life is a characteristic of Oneness.

Life is the expression of Oneness Itself. God is the expressionof Life Itself. God and Life are One. And we are all a part of Life. We do not and cannot stand outside of it. Therefore we are a part of God. It is a circle. It cannot be broken.

What does all of this have to do with liberals and progressives?Well, if we believe that humanity can and must change its Cultural story, from one of Separation to one of Oneness, we will do what we can to place this new Cultural Story on the ground.

First, we can make a firm commitment this day to demonstrate Oneness in every moment, by the way we move through Life.

We can choose to show that we are One with everyone and everything, just by the way we think and speak and act . . . this very day.

If we are consciously aware of what we are thinking, saying, and doing, we will relate to other people…the other person in our life, the other people in our family, the others everywhere on this planet…in a different way today, seeing them, experiencing them, as part of ourselves.

Now one might say, “That’s all very nice, but what difference will it make? It’s not going to change anything in Ukraine today.” And that could be right. In the immediate sense, that could be correct. But imagine what would happen in the long run if everyone reading these words today chose to act in every moment as if We Are All One.

Each of us is going to touch other people before this week is out. And they, in turn, will touch other people. And those people will touch others.

Do we think this means nothing? This is how the world works. This is how politics work. This is how societies work. This is how religions work.

We have more power than we know. If we begin moving through the world a certain way today, the world could begin to change tomorrow.

The readership of this online newspaper could start a snowball rolling downhill. Yes it could. Believe it or not.

And then there is prayer. This, too, as we know . . . is very powerful. And so we can pray every day that the world will at last come to its senses, stop all this nonsense, and see . . . and live . . . the truth of our being.

And we can bring other people to this awareness. We can write Letters to the Editor, send messages to our society’s leaders, and, on a more personal level, we can read the book The Storm Before the Calm, published in full right here on this website.

It lays out a powerful course of action that we can take right now to assist us all in re-writing our Cultural Story.

Then we can join the Evolution Revolution and begin, in our own living room, a grass roots movement designed to change the world.

To learn more about this, return to this newspaper’s Front Page and click on the Blue Box in the right hand column.

So there is something we can do — about our life, and about our world. Things do not have to be the way they seem inevitably to be.

     It’s not a small thing to be wrong about God.  And if nearly everyone on the planet is wrong about God, it’s really not a small thing.

     If nearly everyone on the planet has mistaken notions about God, then nearly everything that everyone on the planet is doing will not work the way it was intended.

     This is because the basis of so much of what they’re doing is found in so many of their beliefs about God.

     Think not?

     Think again.

     Nearly all of civilization’s modern laws emerged from the early rules and laws of some faith tradition. Nearly all of humanity’s moral codes derive from the mandates of a religion. Nearly every political movement and economic theory is based on ideas of justice, right-and-wrong, and basic fairness first espoused by spiritual teachers.

     Even those who don’t believe in God are impacted and guided by many of the fundamental principles placed into the Cultural Story by those who do.

     And a striking number of the personal decisions made by billions of individuals across the globe are made within the context of what they believe to be the purpose of life, what they believe happens when this life is over, what they believe about God, and about what God wants.

     So it’s not a small thing to be wrong about God.

     Proposition: Not one of the systems we have put into place to make life better on this planet is working.

     Wait. It’s worse.

     Not only have the systems we have put into place failed to produce the outcomes for which they were intended—they are actually producing exactly the opposite.

     I have made this point before, in a number of books I have written. I believe it is worth repeating, with emphasis.

     Our political systems are actually increasing disagreement and disarray. Our economic systems are actually increasing poverty and the gulf between the rich and the poor. Our ecological systems are actually increasing environmental degradation.

     Our health care systems are actually increasing inequality of access to modern medicines and health care services. Our educational systems are actually increasing the knowledge gap. Our social systems are actually increasing disparity, disharmony, and injustice.

     And, perhaps saddest of all, our spiritual systems are actually increasingrighteousness, intolerance, anger, hatred, violence, and war.

     If the improvement of human life upon the earth were a laboratory experiment, it would have long ago been considered an abject failure.

     Indeed, an appalling disaster.

     Not everyone agrees. There are those who believe that humanity is evolving to higher and higher levels of sophistication and achievement, producing a better and better quality of life for all the members of our species.

     It is possible that they would not, however, be among the 842 million people (one in eight in the world) who do not have enough to eat. It is certain that they would not be the parents of the over 650 children who die of starvation every hour.

     They would presumably not be among the 20.9 million women and children who are bought and sold into commercial sexual servitude every year.

     They would also, one imagines, not be among the over three billion people who live on less than $2.50 a day, or the billions who have no access to health care. (Some 19,000 children die each day from preventable health issues, such as malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia.)

     They would probably also not be among the 1.7 billion people who lack clean water, or the 2.6 billion without basic sanitation, or the 1.6 billion people—a quarter of humanity—who live without electricity.

     That’s right. In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, 2.6 billion people live without toilets, and 1.6 billion without electricity.

     How is this possible?, you might ask. And that is a very good question.

     It is an especially good question given that humanity imagines itself to be a “civilized” species. To the people in the above categories, the “civilization of Civilization” has not even begun.

     A planet where 5 percent of the population owns or controls 95 percent of the wealth and resources—and where most of that 5 percent think this is perfectly okay, even as unconscionable numbers languish in lack and suffering—would not seem to be a planet on which a great deal of humanitarian advancement has been achieved.

     All of this is possible because of the collective values of those people who can do something about it. And where do those values come from? I suggest they derive in large part from the well-intentioned, but mistaken, beliefs about God held by many human beings—including those who do not believe in God at all.

     Does anybody care that our species has been such a failure—or why?

     Does anybody imagine it has not been?

     Does anybody want to know how this whole situation can be turned around in the blink of an eye?

     Does anyone want to know how his or her own personal life can be changed for the better with the embracing of a single idea?

     Do you? Do you want to know?

(If you do, you may wish to read more from GOD’S MESSAGE TO THE WORLD: You’ve Got Me All Wrong. The above narrative forms the first chapter of that book, released Oct 23. To read four more sample chapters, go here. )