Editorial
The last several installments in this headline series have outlined what we’ve all been taught about What God Wants. What was not said specifically was that the theology represented by these traditional teachings is a theology of separation. In this theology, humans are “down here” and God is “up there.”
Yet this is not simply a theological issue, because theology produces sociology. A theology of separation produces a sociology of separation. It is as simple as that.
That is exactly what has happened all over the earth. Humanity has created, and we now live in, a society of separation. Separation from God and separation from each other.
Now it’s true that in spite of our sociology of separation, we have had some remarkable achievements. Human beings can split the atom, create a cure for disease, send a man to the moon and crack the genetic code of life itself. Yet, sadly, many people—perhaps the largest number—cannot do the simplest thing.
Get along.
Why is this, do you imagine?
Think about this.
With all that humans have been taught through their myths, in their cultural stories, and by their religions—with all that humans have been told about God and about Life by their ancestors and their elders and their ministers and their priests and their rabbis and their mullahs—how is it that, in the collective experience of a huge portion of humanity, it hasn’t done any more good?
But it hasdone a lot of good, you may say. The world is a better place than it was before. People do not act as they did in primitive times. They live in peace in most places, and they are not violent.
No, they are not. Most people are not. We can agree on that. But can we agree on this? Collectively, humanity is unceasingly and increasingly violent with its own kind.
This Part VI in a extended series of headline articles in The Global Conversation.
Allowing people to go hungry is a form of violence.
Placing life-saving drugs and the finest medical care out of reach of millions is a form of violence.
Underpaying laborers while taking huge front office profits is a form of violence.
Mistreating, underpaying, denying promotions to, and mutilating females is a form of violence.
Racial prejudice is a form of violence.
Child abuse, child labor, child slavery, child prostitution, child trafficking, and child soldiering is a form of violence.
The death penalty is a form of violence.
Denying civil rights to people because of their sexual preference or their religion or their ethnicity is a form of violence.
Creating and maintaining a worldwide society in which exploitation, oppression, and injustice are commonplace is a form of violence.
Ignoring suffering is as much a form of violence as inducing it.
In 2004 humanity watched 50,000 people die and over 1.5 million forced from their homes during ethnic fighting in the Darfur region of Sudan. The world stalled and stumbled and did little or nothing for many months as this went on. That is the mark of an extraordinarily primitive society, too timid, too weak, too stultified, or, worse yet, too self-involved to be able to put a quick stop even to genocide.
Are you growing a little impatient with the narrative here? I don’t blame you. It’s tough to look at how things are, at how they really are, in our world. We’d like to stay on the sunny side of things. We’d like to keep thinking positively, keep feeling good about life. No one wants to look at the bad stuff.
But if we don’t spend at least a little bit of time looking at the bad stuff, how are we going to change it? Is the best way to change something to not acknowledge that it’s there?
I don’t think so. There’s a line in the wonderful Arthur Miller play Death of a Salesman in which Linda, the outraged wife of Willy Loman, cries out to her grown sons to notice the tragedy before them in the form of a father whose life is crumbling right in front of their eyes, and to notice what he has gone through in life, and what he has tried to give them. “Attention must be paid,” she says with shaking voice. “Attention must be paid.”
We need to pay attention to the fact that our way of life is dying. We need to notice what the world has gone through, and what it has tried to give us. And we need to notice what we are doing, collectively and individually, in that world.
Attention must be paid.
In our world today an estimated 250 million children are working. Of these, more than 50 million between the ages of 5 and 11 are engaged in intolerable forms of labor. (The Progress of Nations 2000, Copyright: The United Nations Children’s Fund, New York, 2000) Does anybody care?
At any one time more than 300,000 children under 18, girls and boys, are fighting as soldiers with government armed forces and armed opposition groups in more than 30 countries worldwide, according to the Global Report on Child Soldiers (2001) published by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers. While most child soldiers are aged between 15 and 18, the youngest age recorded in this report is seven.
For nearly two-thirds of the world’s people, life is a daily struggle. For half of that number, it’s a struggle for survival. Does anybody care?
Why do these conditions exist, do you think? Do you think it might have anything to do with the fact that we don’t see each other on this earth as members of the same family? Do you think it may be because we imagine that we are separate from each other?
For whatever the reason, the fact is that the world has not put into place a system for sharing the abundance of the earth that works for everyone, but only for those who meet certain criteria of skin color or gender or religion or ethnicity.
The U.N. reports that donor countries allocate an average of just one-quarter of one percent (0.25%) of their total gross national product to development assistance for poorer nations. Does anybody care?
And what is the stingiest developed nation in the world in terms of the proportion of total wealth that it donates? The United States, arguably, the world’s richestcountry. The richest is the stingiest.
Can this be possible? Yes. It’s possible and it’s true.
Now you might say, hey, wait a minute, the United States puts in more dollars than half of the other countries combined. And you’d be right. In actual dollars, you’re right. But the United States has more dollars than half the other countries combined. So, as a portion of what it has, the U.S. is the stingiest of all.
If you have ten dollars and you give your brother three because he is in trouble, and if your neighbor has fifty dollars and he gives his brother five, which one of you is more generous? Are you impressed by the fact that your neighbor gave more in actual numbers than you? Or are you mindful of the fact that he has five times as much as you, and therefore he could have given five times more? It might have been hoped that he would give in proportion to his wealth, don’t you think?
My own idea about this is echoed in the words of John F. Kennedy many years ago: “Of those to whom much is given, much is asked.”
But the U.S. is not alone in under prioritizing allocations for nations in need. All of the world’s richest countries in 2003 spent $60 billion to help the poorest countries address the problems of poverty, lack of education, and poor health. During the same period the spending of these richest countries for defense was $900 billion.
This led the president of the World Bank to suggest dryly that if the world simply reversed its priorities, the cost of defense would never have to exceed the smaller sum.
In a global society where the suffering of others really mattered—not just at the level of lip service, but at the level of doing something about it that actually changes things—such a reversal of priorities would be instant and automatic.
Because that shift in priorities has not taken place, violence of a more direct kind is becoming a way of life on the earth. More and more often these days, in more and more places, it takes the form of direct physical attacks by one person or group upon another.
The sign of a social order that is failing is that even among those people in the world whose lives are more comfortable and who are not overtly suffering, violence is on a dramatic upswing. When even those who should be contented are discontented, you know something’s wrong, you know you’re in trouble.
Violence is on an upswing not only on the streets of the Middle East, but on the streets of Europe; not only in the homes of the poor in Southeast Asia, but in the homes of the well to do in North America. That is why now in many countries metal detectors are found everywhere. At military installations and airports, where they might be expected, but also at places where they would once have been considered grotesquely out of place: shopping malls and hotels, department stores and nightclubs, and yes, even schools, churches, mosques, temples and synagogues.
That is why in London there are hidden cameras on the streets. It is said that the average person is photographed 300 times a day in London. In Chicago it has just been announced that hundreds of new street cameras are being installed throughout the city, adding to the thousands already there. All of this is for our protection, of course. It is about security. These cameras are programmed by computer to pick up any “unusual activity” and to send an alarm to police, fire, and other agencies, which will dispatch personnel at once.
Big Brother is watching you.
George Orwell gave that chilling description of everyday life on our planet in a book he wrote over 40 years ago. It took his nightmare world of 1984 twenty years longer than expected to be created, but created it has been, complete with Global Positioning Satellites that can pinpoint a person’s location within 50 feet, on-street surveillance cameras, government access to video rental and library withdrawal records and, in fact, scrutiny of virtually any kind of activity you undertake outside your home. Soon, there may be cameras in your home. Does anybody care?
All of this is necessary, we are told, because increasing numbers of people everywhere have become frustrated, angry, disaffected, unpredictable and more willing than ever to use violence.
Why is this, do you imagine?
Think about this.
And why have human theologies, to which humanity looks for the wisest answers to life’s most difficult questions, been unable to reverse this trend—to say nothing of heading it off in the first place?
The answer is that Separation Theology does not work. Yet people insist, to this moment, that it is What God Wants.
(Our exploration of this topic continues in Part VII of this extended series, coming very soon. Don’t miss a single entry. And if you wish to catch up on installments that you have missed, simply click on the word HEADLINE in the Categories list at right, then scroll down to find the column you wish to read.)
There is an idea that has been going around the so-called New Thought community over the past couple of decades that to speak of anything, thereby “giving energy to it,” only serves to “make it bigger.” Therefore, this idea goes, humans should never talk about or “focus on” anything that they believe is not okay in our society, because they are only “spreading negativity” and ensuring that those conditions remain even more firmly in place.
We should only give voice to that which we wish to see expanded in its manifestation and enlarged in our experience, this line of thinking asserts, using as its basis the oft declared New Age principle that “we create our own reality” with the power of our thoughts, words, and deeds.
It is time to debunk this notion once and for all. Holding this idea as sacred can, in fact, be dangerous, by allowing detrimental or damaging aspects of our collectively created life to continue — often by going unnoticed.
This business of never speaking a single word about what is simply not working in our collective experience is what I call a “New Age Bypass.” It is spiritual surgery that does not work, because it promotes a point of view that forever skirts the heart of the matter of what it means to be truly evolved and truly enlightened while being truly human.
If a train is clammoring down the tracks and someone in the car hears this as the family auto approaches a crossroad, is that person not to speak of what she knows is just around the bend, for fear of breaking the New Rule of not “spreading negativity”?
In other words, is simple observation of What Is So a “sign” that one is not among the Spiritually Advanced?
What is the purpose of the increased consciousness and awareness growing out of the spiritual expansion and evolution of humanity, if it cannot be used to apply spiritual wisdom to the challenges of that evolutionary process itself?
This newspaper has been criticized by some for publishing headline stories that in some cases describe what we believe to be less than desirable events or conditions in humanity’s present reality. We have been accused of “producing separation” and “creating more” of what we say we don’t want.
“Why don’t you just focus on what you do want?”, one reader recently wrote.
Yet if what we do want is to bring an end to some of the practices and behaviors of humanity, is never saying a word about those practices and behaviors the way to do it? Or is opening the door and throwing the light onto the darkness one way to change the darkness into light?
This does not mean there is no place for positive, affirmative thought, word, and action. But it does mean that observation is not judgment, and a description of circumstances or conditions is not guaranteed to enlarge them.
Life, says Conversations with God, proceeds out of our intentions for it. It is our intention that the Universe understands, and to which it responds.
So if our intention in observing that the train is coming is to avoid being hit, that observation does not increase the danger of our demise, but reduces it. If it is our intention in describing an undesirable condition or circumstance is to change it for the better, that description in and of itself does not change it for the worse.
Quite to the contrary. It makes it possible for us to make an improvement, to advance, thus to move forward in our evolution.
U.S. President Barack Obama’s State of the Union message, in our opinion, fell short in at least one area. The elected leader of one of the most powerful nations on Earth failed to give even passing mention to the cause of all of the difficulties and problems that he said he was committed to solving with or without Congress.
With an audience estimated at 30 million, the chief executive of the United States said not a word about what’s true in America — and, for that matter, around the world.
Even a casual observer can see that not a single one of the systems, institutions and devices that humanity has put into place to create a better life for all is functioning in a way that has generated this outcome.
It’s worse than that. They’ve actually generated exactly the opposite.
Our political systems — created to produce safety and security for the world’s people — have generated widespread disagreement and disarray.
Our economic systems — created to produce opportunity and sufficiency for all — have generated 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 to the point where they have generated environmental disasters right and left.
Our educational systems — created to lift higher and higher the knowledge base of the planet’s population — have generated such a drop in global awareness and sensitivity that each year our intellectual common denominator seems to sink lower and lower. We can’t even remember our own telephone numbers anymore, or how to spell equanimity, much less produce it.
Our health care systems — created in hopes of producing a good and long life for an increasingly higher percentage of people worldwide — have done little to eliminate global inequality of access to modern medicines and health care services, thus providing the highest level medical services each year to an insufficient and unsatisfactory percentage of the global population.
Our social systems — created to produce the joy of community and harmony among a divergent population –have generated (and in some cases even encouraged) discordance, disparity, prejudice, and despair.
And, most sadly dysfunctional of all, our spiritual systems — created to produce a greater closeness to God, and so, to each other — have generated 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 have to do with our understanding about God, and our relationship to God?
Yes, I’ve mentioned God here because, in my opinion, unless we change our minds about God — about who God is and what God wants and who we are in relationship to God and to each other — none of the problems that Mr. Obama mentioned in his January speech are going to be solved. They may perhaps — perhaps — be given a band-aid, but they will continue to plague humankind as they have for lo, these many years.
For a country that declares itself to be “one nation, under God,” the leaders in Washington, and local political leaders across the land are doing a remarkable job of ignoring the topic of God when considering how to meet our collective challenges. They appear to be trying to solve our problems at every level except the level at which those problems exist.
The problems facing us are not political problems, and they are not economic problems, and they are surely not military problems. The problems facing us are spiritual problems. They have to do with what we believe about ourselves, about our world, and about God.
Specifically, the vast majority of humans adhere to the belief that we are separate from God, and separate from each other. It is this idea of separation that is killing us.
As we said in our headline story here on January 15: Might this be a fine stretch of eternity during which to declare that there is clearly something we don’t fully understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which would change everything?
To put it more dramatically, is it possible that unless we enlarge and expand our primitive ideas about God and about Life in the decades just ahead, we may find that we have backed ourselves into a corner, from which there is no escape?
Conversations with God told us that humanity nearly rendered itself extinct once before. Barely enough of us survived to regenerate the species and start over. Are we at this same turning point again? Have we arrived once more at the intersection where theology meets cosmology meets sociology meets pathology?
Right now we are still embracing a Separation Theology. That is, a way of looking at God that insists that we are “over here” and God is “over there.”
The problem with a Separation Theology is that it produces a Separation Cosmology. That is, a way of looking at all of life that says that everything is separate from everything else.
And a Separation Cosmology produces a Separation Psychology. That is, a psychological viewpoint that says that I am over here and you are over there.
And a Separation Psychology produces a Separation Sociology. That is, a way of socializing with each other that encourages the entire human society to act as separate entities serving their own separate interests.
And a Separation Sociology produces a Separation Pathology. That is, pathological behaviors of self-destruction, engaged in individually and collectively, and producing suffering, conflict, violence, and death by our own hands—as evidenced everywhere on our planet throughout human history.
Only when our Separation Theology is replaced by a Oneness Theology will our pathology be healed. We have been differentiated from God, but not separated from God, even as your fingers are differentiated but not separated from your hand.
We must come to understand that all of life is One. This is the 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 the New Cultural Story of Humanity.
Oneness is not a characteristic of life. Life is a characteristic of Oneness. This is what we have not understood about our existence on the Earth, the understanding of which would change everything.
Life is the expression of Oneness Itself. God is the expression of Life Itself. God and Life are One. You are a part of Life. You do not and cannot stand outside of it. Therefore you are a part of God. It is a circle.
It cannot be broken.
Headlines are being made about the suffering possibly endured by convicted murderer Dennis McGuire, who was put to death with a new and previously untried method by the state of Ohio on Jan. 16 as punishment for his killing of a pregnant woman years earlier. The state used a chemical injection never before utilized to put someone to death, despite warnings from some medical experts who said that the process might produce what was called “air starvation.”
NBC News quoted an Associated Press reporter who witnessed the execution who wrote that McGuire, 53, “appeared to gasp several times and made several loud snorting or snoring sounds during a ‘prolonged’ execution,” which several news agencies said took nearly 26 minutes from start to finish. Other witnesses said that Mr. McGuire also clenched his fists repeatedly, and tried in vain to raise himself up from the table to which he was strapped, apparently gasping for air.
In short, it did not appear to be a peaceful death — leaving many to ask: Is paying with his life enough of a punishment for someone sentenced to death for a killing…or is it acceptable for that punishment to include abject end-of-life suffering and agony for nearly a half hour?
Yet the main question has been avoided through all the news stories and commentaries on this particular event: Is the death penalty itself appropriate in an enlighted society?
Our answer is no. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, we are not going to solve society’s problems using the same energy that created them. We will not put an end to violence by using violence, an end to anger with anger, and an end to killing with more killing.
All we as a people are saying is that killing is perfectly okay when we believe that “right’ is on our side. But of course — with exceptions for those who are mentally incapacitated — all people and all governments thinks “right” is on their side when they kill, or they wouldn’t and couldn’t do it.
The central question then becomes: Is it ever “right” to kill people if one’s own life (or the life of others) is not in immediate danger?
A man in Florida, a former police captain, pulled out a gun and killed another man with whom he was having an argument over texting in a movie theatre because the other man threw a bag of popcorn at him, and the former police officer said he thought the other man was going to attack him. (Why he didn’t simply pull out the gun and say, “Not one step further….”, rather than shoot the man point blank in the chest from four feet away is not clear.) So now, once again in Florida, we are going to have a chance to see if that state’s Stand Your Ground law is going to be applied to justify killing someone.
Yet the question in this quarter is not, “What does the law say?” And not even, “What does our culture in general say?” But rather, “What does the Soul say?”
What does your Soul say? What do you believe is justification for killing someone? And if you agree that the State should have the right to kill someone because that person killed another — should the State’s execution include abject suffering?
Thank you very much for your show of interest by clicking through to this page. It will take you approximately eight or nine minutes to read what I have written here. I know that seems like a lot of time, but over the course of your life you will see it as really very little. Would you grant me the favor of giving me those few minutes? I think it could make a real difference on our planet.
I would never ask you if I did not think that when you’re finished reading this Information Page, you will be excited and ready to answer the call to join with me and others around the globe in doing something constructive, meaningful, and effective to help our world at this present critical juncture on our evolutionary path.
Let me begin by making the case for why to even bother…may I?
Right now, none of the systems we have put into place to make our world a better place are working. Not our political systems, not our economic systems, not our ecological systems, not our educational systems, not our health systems, not our social systems, and not our spiritual systems.
None of them—not one of them—has produced the outcomes for which it was designed, and for which we have collectively yearned. In fact, it’s worse. They have produced exactly the opposite. They have generated outcomes we say we don’t even want.
Our political systems are creating nothing but disagreement and disarray. Our economic systems are actually increasing poverty. Our ecological systems are generating environmental degradation. Our educational systems are failing to educate enough people in enough places to bring our species anywhere near the reaching of its full potential. Our health care systems are doing little to eliminate inequality of access to modern medicines and health care services. Our social systems are known to encourage disparity, prejudice, and injustice. And, perhaps most dysfunctional of all, our spiritual systems are producing intolerance, righteousness, anger, hatred, and violence.
The great sadness is that we imagine we can’t change any of this. The great happiness is that we can. All it takes is a shift in consciousness—and that is easier to bring about than most people think.
All change in consciousness is created by people who have already changed their consciousness, when they actively, excitedly, and expansively talk about their ideas and describe the possibilities that a New Consciousness places before humanity.
Let me share something here from Margaret J. Wheatley, author of Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future (2002).
This is a globally known consultant on organizational behavior. She received her doctorate from Harvard University, holds an M.A. in systems thinking from New York University, and has worked on every inhabited continent in virtually every type of organization. In other words, Meg Wheatley knows her way around. Here’s what she says:
“There is no more powerful way to initiate significant social change than to start a conversation.”
I couldn’t have paid her to say something better suited to make the point I wish to make here. In a 2002 article in Utne Reader Ms. Wheatley observes that “…true conversation is…a timeless and reliable way for humans to think together. Before there were classrooms, meetings or group facilitators, there were people sitting around talking.
“We can take courage from the fact that this is a process we all know how to do. We can also take courage in the fact that many people are longing to converse again…We are awakening an ancient practice, a way of being gathered that all humans intimately understand.”
Having said that, Ms. Wheatley offered a powerful concluding comment:
“Change doesn’t happen from someone announcing the plan. Change begins from deep inside a system, when a few people notice something they will no longer tolerate, or when they respond to someone’s dream of what’s possible.”
That is precisely, to the letter, what the Evolution Revolution is all about. It is a call to people everywhere, gathering in small groups of spiritual activists around the world, to ignite a global conversation (I call it The Conversation of the Century) that will sow seeds of sanity, producing at last the civilization of
Civilization.
We say that our civilization is civilized, but, of course, it is not. We can see that with even a casual glance. No civilization that allows over 600 of its children to die every hour of starvation is civilized. No civilization that kills people to demonstrate that it is wrong to kill people is civilized. No civilization that systematically makes life difficult and challenging and simply unfair for any of its members who happen to be black or female or gay—or belong to any minority group—is civilized. And no civilization that threatens and uses force (economic, social, or political), employs physical violence, and commits mass murder as a means of resolving differences is civilized.
Such an ongoing scenario could only be put in place—and then continually supported—by a race of beings so primitive as to declare barbaric behaviors normal and savage solutions unavoidable. Yet the movement from primitive thinking to advanced contemplations, the shift from lower to higher levels of consciousness, need not take millennia to materialize. Such a shift can occur spontaneously and instantaneously when effective alternatives to clearly undesirable, unworkable, and unprofitable approaches to creating our communal life are offered.
The problem is, none are widely being offered.
This is where YOU come in!
If we are going to make any kind of difference in our world in 2013 and beyond, we are going to have to do two things: (1) Enter (indeed, ignite) a conversation about what needs to be accomplished and how to accomplish it; (2) Get about the business of creating change not only in the things we do, but in the way we think.
This can only be accomplished by doing something revolutionary. Perhaps it is not so revolutionary at that. Science and Medicine and Technology have produced many breathtaking advances by doing it consistently. But in the area of most critical importance to the every day person—our social, cultural, political, and religious beliefs—the majority of human beings have been stubbornly resistant to doing it. And what is it that Science, Medicine, and Technology does that most humans in every day life staunchly refuse to do…?
Question the Prior Assumption
Everything begins, of course, with some sort of original information—and it is that very information that few people wish to question—even if the information is creating disaster.
Humanity has for centuries tried to solve its problems at every level except the level at which those problems exist. It continues to do so today.
We approach our problems as if they were political problems, open to political solutions. We talk about them, we hold debates about them, we pass resolutions about them. When nothing changes, we seek to solve our problems through economic means. We throw money at them, or withhold money from them, as in the case of sanctions. When that fails we say, aha, this is a problem to give to the military. We’ll solve it with force. So we drop bombs on it. That never works, either, if a long-term solution is what anyone is looking for, but do you think we would learn?
No. We just simply the cycle all over again. It’s back to the negotiating table for more talks, then back to the bank for more money, then back to the bombs for more clout.
The reason we keep running like a mouse on a wheel is that no one dares to look at the cause of the ongoing conditions we seem fated to endure. Either we truly don’t know, or we are afraid to admit, that our biggest problem today is not a political problem, it’s not an economic problem, and it’s not a military problem.
The problem facing humanity today is a spiritual problem,
and it can only be solved by taking a long, hard look
at what it is we all believe.
Once this is understood, the solution becomes obvious. Until it’s understood, the solution escapes everyone.
It’s what people believe that creates their behavior. Therefore, it is at the level of belief, not at the level of behavior, where conduct can most profoundly be modified. For decades we’ve been talking in psychology circles about behavior modification, or Behavior Mod. What we really should be talking about is Belief Mod.
Ah, but here we go. Oh, boy. Watch out. We’re talking now about the most sacred part of people’s underpinnings. Many people would rather die for their beliefs—or kill others—than change them.
It doesn’t matter whether the beliefs are functional. It doesn’t matter whether they are actually working, in the sense of making people happy and producing a better life.
Many people would rather be unhappy doing what they believe than happy doing something else. They are actually happy being unhappy. Under this convention, suffering is a virtue. It makes one a worthy person in the eyes of God.
So the spiritual understandings of billions of people on this planet are not insignificant in all of this. You cannot change social conditions by trying to change the conditions themselves. Do you know how long it has been since we’ve been trying to eradicate simple hunger in this world? Do you know how many non-profit organizations have been, and continue to be, undertaking that task? This is just one example of our utter impotence. There are others. The eradication of cruelty to women. The elimination of political persecution for anyone holding views opposite to those in authority. The list goes on and on…and on.
Social conditions can only be changed by changing
the beliefs that produce such conditions.
And that, my dear companions on the journey, is what we now have an opportunity to do. And the wonder of it is that we can do this as part of the process of our own individual evolutionary voyage. We can do it by allowing the evolution in our own personal beliefs to become part of an Evolution Revolution on Earth.
Most of you reading this already agree with what’s been said here. The trick is to get others to agree. In large numbers. “Nothing,” Victor Hugo famously said, “not all the armies in the world, can stop an idea whose time has come.” But first, the idea must be put “out there.” That’s what The Conversation of the Century is designed to do. It is designed to put evolutionarily revolutionary ideas into circulation.
You can ignite such a conversation in your community. And I will join your group, by telephone conference call, in your explorations and in designing your action plan to expand, at last, Humanity’s Cultural Story, offering people around the world a new idea of who we are, why we are here, what it can mean to all of us if we inspire another way to be human.
I am inviting and encouraging all of you to create Evolution Revolution Focused Activities around the globe, including meaningful discussions which can be ignited, and action plans which can be designed, in response to all that we see taking place in our world. These groups would seek to place into the world a compelling invitation for people everywhere to explore how an application of the concepts of a new kind of spirituality could create a planet with far less suffering and turmoil and much more joy and peace for all.
Helpful in this regard might very well be the document found at this link: One Thousand Words That Will Change the World, These are the 25 Core Messages of Conversations with God, and they are not intended to be placed before others as the Be All and End All of answers to our challenges, but as a viable starting point for discussion.
What we are suggesting here is nothing less than a Civil Rights Movement for the Soul, freeing humanity at last from the oppression of its beliefs in a violent, angry, and vindictive God, and releasing our species from a spiritual doctrine that has created nothing but separation, fear, and dysfunction around the world.
It is time for human beings to begin replacing this dogma, finally, with an ethos of unity and cooperation, understanding and compassion, generosity and love. Yet this will take a change of mind and a change of heart. And courage. The courage to reject every notion, every idea, every teaching of a God who would reject us.
The world has contrived to fill ours head with those notions, these ideas and these teachings since we were children. Now, because of the speed of worldwide communication over the Internet, we have a golden opportunity to invite, create, explore and adopt a New Thought about all of this, a thought that runs counter to virtually everything we’ve ever been told or heard about God, about each other, and about Life and what it is really all about.
Here at The Global Conversation internet newspaper we have reserved this section to provide you with discussion group ideas, topics, questions, and action items to use as tools in facilitating your own Evolution Revolution activities in support of the Civil Rights Movement for the Soul. That is the name we have given to a global movement which has been put into place around the world by Humanity’s Team to help our species write and live into a New Cultural Story on our planet — a story based on a new spiritual awareness that could alter forever for the better the way we experience life on Earth.
I envision a Berlin Evolution Revolution Activity Group, a Toyko Evolution Revolution Activity Group, a Buenos Aires Evolution Revolution Activity Group, a Los Angeles Evolution Revolution Activity Group, and similar activity groups all around the world as outgrowths of the Spiritual Sphere of the global action plan of Humanity’s Team.
If you believe it is time to ignite an Evolution Revolution, create an activity group in your community. And here is how I can become part of your group: If you gather at least six people on a regular basis in your home to explore these critical topics, I will join you on a regular basis, electronically and in real time, for an ever-expanding global group discussion that could alter humanity’s future—just as other vital and passionate conversations have changed the course of human history in the past.
To learn more about how you, your family and friends may participate, write to neale.donald.walsch@HumanitysTeam.org.
So where do you begin?
1. Join and support Humanity’s Team: This is a global organization that I created, now with members in 73 countries, that is sponsoring the Evolution Revolution as part of its Twelve Spheres of Life Initiative. You can enroll as a member as part of your participation in this dynamic spiritual outreach.
2. Create a local Evolution Revolution Activity Group and commit to meeting on a regular basis—once a week or once or twice a month, depending on your time availability.
3. Use our website as a tool to facilitate your pod by using the questions and action items we post here as part of your discussions.
You may want to consider opening your first gathering with life’s most critical question, taken from the pages of The Storm Before the Calm. (That book can be read on this website. You’ll find a direct link to it in the lower right hand column of our home page.) The question with which you can initiate your group exploration:
How is it possible for 6.9 billion people to all want the same thing—survival, safety, security, peace, prosperity, opportunity, happiness, and love—and to be unable to produce it, even after thousands of years of trying?
Here are more Evolution Revolution discussion topics…
Month #1
1. What, if anything, could cause all the people of the world to feel happy, safe, and secure?
2. What understanding or spiritual message do you believe could have a positive effect on seemingly intractable global situations, such as the continuing conflict in Syria, the internationally tense political “standoff” between North Korea and the United States in the Spring of 2013, the latest revolution in Egypt, and other global crises?
Here is an Evolution Revolution Action Item
Month #1
The Global Conversation will soon be offering a Resource Center that will provide our visitors the e-mail addresses and contact information for some of the world’s most influential leaders and politicians. As well, the mailing list of major global media outlets—newspapers, magazines, television networks, etc.—that help form and shape public opinion.
As your first action item, we invite your Evolution Revolution Activity Group to collaborate on the writing of letters that can be distributed globally, sharing your thoughts, your ideas, and your opinions about what is taking place in our world, and how we can create changes that will benefit all of humanity. If you had the opportunity to spend five minutes with someone who is in a position to influence significant change, what would you say? Put it in a letter. When enough such statements start appearing in Letters to the Editor columns around the world, on the Internet, and yes, in the mailboxes of world figures, change begins to happen.
If you would like your letters to be considered for publication and shared with our global audience here on The Global Conversation, please e-mail them to Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.
Thank you!
Thank you for giving me these few minutes to lay all this out for you.
I hope you will join me in creating something
that can bring even greater meaning to your life and healing to your world.
You can begin immediately by sending an email right away to
neale.donald.walsch@HumanitysTeam.org
Just say, “I’m in.”
You’ll get a letter back leading you through
the Start Up Process.
Let’s ignite an Evolution Revolution.
A revolution with a new kind of leader.
The old kind of leader said, “follow me.”
The new leader says, “I’ll go first.”
We think that the late George Carlin, a wonderful comedian who comedy so often carried deep social messages, put it perfectly when he wrote, near the end of his life…
The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways,but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.
We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.
We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.
We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life. We’ve added years to life not life to years. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We’ve done larger things, but not better things.
We’ve cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We’ve conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We’ve learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.
These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete…
Remember; spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever.
Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and leave your side.
Remember, to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn’t cost a cent.
Remember, to say, ‘I love you’ to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you.
Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person will not be there again.
Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind.
AND ALWAYS REMEMBER:
Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
If you don’t send this to at least 8 people….Who cares?
George Carlin
