I had the honor of being the master of ceremonies on Saturday at a Celebration of Life event in honor of my father-in-law. The room was packed with family and friends of my wife’s Dad, and I had the chance to share with this standing room only audience some thoughts arising from the final book in the CWG cosmology, titled HOME WITH GOD in a Life That Never Ends.

The response from those present was so positive that I feel moved to share those words with you here as well, as some of you may have experienced in recent weeks or months the death of a loved one.

What I have been told by God is this:

Death does not exist — not in the way that most of us think of it, which is as the end of life. In fact, there is no such thing as the “end of life.”

In truth, what we call death is another beginning. And those are not just hollow words. Those are words of insight into life’s largest truth: That there is more going on here than meets the eye.

So grieve when a person dies if grief is what you feel — and who does not, when we have lost a loved one?

But let yourself know that even the expression of grief in your loss is a living demonstration of the most beautiful part of life, which is love.

Then, even in our grief, we can feel ourselves honoring what is most important in life. In this life and in the Life Eternal.

From this place of love expressed, let us endeavor to see a death in our family even as we would welcome a birth in our family — for death IS but “birth in another form.”

Embrace, as best you can, the death of another, therefore, with soft celebration, even as our loved ones who have departed celebrate their Continuation Day.

And let us know and trust this truth as well: No one dies at a time or in a way that is not of their choosing.

The passage of the Soul is ended only when the agenda of that passage is complete, and not one moment before. There is no such thing as being “incomplete” on the Journey of the Soul.

Finally, tell everyone this: It is impossible to die without God. The Divine is there to greet everyone.

God will embrace you, comfort you, welcome you, and assure you that you are perfect, just the way you are.

Then you will be welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven, where you will be celebrated for Who You Are, and who you have always been. For who we all are.

I am told, this is who you are. This is who we all are…

You are goodness and mercy and compassion and under-standing. You are peace and joy and light.

You are forgiveness and patience, strength and courage…

…a helper in time of need, a comforter in time of sorrow, a healer in time of injury, a teacher in times of confusion.

You are the deepest wisdom and the highest truth; the greatest peace and the grandest love.

You are these things. And in moments of your life you have known yourself as these things.

Life invites you to know yourself as these things always.

Many people have the experience that Divinity exists, but not nearly as many have the experience that they exist as Divinity. This is not because they are not capable of experiencing themselves as Divine, it is because they do not conceive of themselves as that. This is evidence of our spiritual immaturity, not of our spiritual identity.

The days of our spiritual childhood are receding, however. We are evolving, and our spiritual growth has brought us the awareness that something has been missing from our experience. What has been called the Cloud of Unknowing is being lifted.

We know now that Life, and that each of us as a Life Form, has the potential — nay, the inherent impulse, the deep and natural desire, the urging and the yearning — to express something much grander, something much more glorious, than what we have accepted as the norm.

We are ready now to create a New Normal. And we are clear now that this New Normal will emerge only when we access and express what has always been Natural.

In the past, what is “natural” and what is “normal” has not always been the same. In fact, too often it has been “normal” to act in a way that is not “natural.” This is because we have not previously been fully aware of our true nature. We have thought that we are less than we are—and we have been acting like it.

All of that can now end.

There are those who say that the way we have been living life on Earth will not end and cannot end, that it is impossible to substantially alter our behaviors, given the nature of human beings. Yet it is possible precisely because of the nature of human beings.

Human beings are not simply chemical creatures. They are not merely biological entities with a body and a mind that emerge into physical life, live their years as fate provides, then watch helplessly as life, consciousness, self-awareness and their very beingness is stripped from them forever.

You know now that you are more than this. You can feel it. You are not your body and you are not your mind. You are a larger entity, having a body and having a mind.

You are aware now of the Larger Reality. You are clear now that there is more to this physical life that we are part of and that is all around us than meets the eye. You see now a Larger Truth—and the implications of that Larger Truth. You have brought forward your inner knowing of the True Nature of Things.

Every living cell of every living thing knows what it is doing. Plants do not turn to the sun by chance. White corpuscles do not rush to heal the wounds of the lion by coincidence. There is a form of intelligence built into the system at the cellular level that causes Life to do, at every level of physical expression, what it does naturally.

So it is that human beings do not endlessly seek unity and yearn to express oneness as a fluke. It is their very nature to do so. It is human nature.

And it is the Consciousness of human beings—the quality of being Self-Conscious—that allows us to find (indeed, to create) an answer to life’s biggest dilemmas and peaceful resolutions to life’s biggest problems (both personal and global). The question is not whether we are capable of creating such answers and resolutions, the question is whether we are willing. Do we have the will to do so ? And if not, what could cause us, individually and collectively, to have such a will?

Let that be our question of the day.

I think there are three things that could cause us to muster the individual and collective will to live our lives doing what we would do naturally, rather than what we would do normally. 

1. We would have to see and agree that what we normally do in most situations is no longer working.
2. We would have to see and agree that giving in to our True Nature, that demonstrating Who We Really Are, is the only, and the perfect, way out of our mounting human dilemmas.
3. We would have to see and agree that it is actually possible to live according to our True Nature. We would have to know that we really can express, with our thoughts, words, and actions, our highest idea of Who We Really Are. (Or as some would say it, “The better angels of our nature.”)

There is only one way that I know of to accomplish #3. We would have to try it. We would have to commit to truly undertaking the effort, knowing that if we rose to our Highest Selves even part of the time, it would be enough to make a real difference, both in our own lives and in the collective experience of humanity.

The present collective experience of humanity calls out to us. Is this who we really are? As a species, is this how we wish to see ourselves being? Are we okay with what we are seeing? If we are not, are we content with saying, “Hey, there’s nothing I can do about it! What do want from me??”

Is there truly nothing we can do about it? Is it our only recourse to simply hunker down, wait it out, hope that nothing horrible that is happening in the world touches us before the horrible stuff can be solved and made to go away? And what would solve it, anyway?

Does any of this have anything whatsoever to do with your own personal journey through life? Well, that would depend on what you felt was the reason for your own personal journey through life. Why are you here? What is your own personal journey all about? Is there a purpose? Is there an agenda? Or is your being here just a happenstance, a random occurrence, a biological incident?

What’s really going on here on this planet? In your heart, in your mind, in your soul? Do you even have a “soul”?

It’s time to start answering some questions.

No, no. It’s past time.

The world has never been in more turmoil than it is today. Individual lives have never felt more tenuous. The Human Journey has never seemed more senseless.

What is the point of all this?, human beings are asking themselves. Why bother living if it’s just about encountering saddening and upsetting, unraveling and upheaving experiences at every turn?

Are we really nothing more than a species of sentient beings run amok, blowing up H-bombs under the ground to prove our invincibility, ending people’s lives by injection to demonstrate our righteousness, allowing hundreds of the world’s children to die of starvation every hour as we defend a global economy that benefits one-tenth of the planet’s population?

Have we so lost our collective mind as to think that the way to stop gun violence is for everybody in the world to carry a gun?

Have we so lost our collective will as to find no way to stop war to this very day, creating refugee crises rendering millions homeless?

Have we so lowered our collective standards as to find it actually preferable for divisiveness, rudeness, insults and tasteless verbal bullying to become the hallmark of political leadership?

Is this what we have come to? Gun-toting, fist-pumping, verbal-bashing, jaw-jutting, loud-mouthed intimidators and strong-armed tyrants daring anyone to stand up for what is gentle, peaceful, and loving?

Apprehension and fear, uncertainty and frustration have never been more keenly or deeply felt by more people in more of the moments of their lives than they are on this day. At this writing these emotions are driving the election cycle in the United States, they are driving the violence seen the world over, and they are driving a hole though the collective heart of humanity.

Is there nothing to be done? Are our individual, personal lives to be nothing but a series of the best responses we can muster to the worst-case scenarios we encounter?

I want to suggest that it doesn’t have to be this way. I want to suggest that there is a path out of this box canyon into which we seem to have collectively trudged — or been herded.

The answer is to collectively express, to the degree that it is humanly possible, our True Identity. Life is inviting us to announce and declare, express and experience, become and fulfill the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we’ve held about Who We Are.

We are told in Conversations with God that we are, each of us, Individuations of The Divine. If this is true, our current days and times are providing us with an opportunity to demonstrate Divinity.

It will not be easy. It is not even easy in our own kitchen, in our own living room, in our own bedroom, much less in the wider arena that we call our own world. Yet we are assured that it is possible. Others have done it. And many others have moved toward it. And even the attempt to offer this demonstration — even getting one quarter of the way there…one sixth of the way there…one tenth of the way there…one one-hundreth of the way there — could change the world.

Should we accept this invitation, from this day forward the question “But what can anyone do?” can be rendered null and void. There wold then be only one question remaining. “Will we do it?”

So here we go again. Here we are once more, at the Starting Gate on a New Year. Here we stand even as we have stood before at the dawn of another Life Cycle. And these days, these times, will go by as fast as the last year has flown. Before we know it, it will be January two-thousand-seventeen. A whole year will have passed — again.

So what can we do in this blink-of-an-eye that we call a year? What can we be in this blink-of-an-eye we call a life? That is the question that Life Itself places before us. And we don’t have that much time left in which to answer it. It is as my wonderful life companion and wife, American poet Em Claire, wrote in her work entitled Precious Occurrence.

I am a precious occurrence,

and I don’t have long.

We are a precious occurrence.

And as long as we think we have,

we don’t have long.

Too much time is being spent

running

from face to face

asking, “What is my name?”

If you don’t yet know it,

or if you’ve forgotten,

then become still, go within

and answer it.

You are a Precious Occurrence:

Tell Us your name.

(From the volume Home Remembers Me
Copyright © 2013 by Em Claire)

I have learned across the span of my 72 twelve-month cycles on this planet that every year can seem like a tiny moment — and every tiny moment can seem like a year. How I experience Time depends on what I am doing with it.

I can pack more meaning, more of what is truly important in life, in five minutes or five hours of intentioned, focused activity than I can in five days or five weeks of lollygagging around. All of us have had this experience. All of us know exactly what I am talking about.

The trick, then, to making 2016 meaningful will be to make it purposeful. And the trick to making it purposeful will be to decide on your purpose for every moment ahead of time.

As I said — and I can guarantee this — 2016 will go by so fast, you won’t even know what happened. Not, that is, unless you decide right now, ahead of time, what you want to have happen. Aand why.

That is the value of New Year’s resolutions. They help us to become aware of why we want these next 12 months to be visited upon us, of how we want these next 52 weeks to be used, of wherewe want these next 330+ days to take us, of what we want these next 8,000+ hours to produce, of whether we want these next 480,000+ minutes to add anything of lasting value and spiritual importance to our lives and to the lives of others.

We have something on the order of 28 million seconds that will be gifted to us by life in these upcoming minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months. Which of these seconds will be spend on things that don’t matter, and thus squandered, and which will be devoted to the Agenda of the Soul, and thus most valuably and wondrously and Divinely used will be up to you — and is being decided by you even now; even in the moment that you are reading this.

What will you spend your time on in 2016? And why?

I want to offer one of the most important books I have even read on this subject. It is titled The Only Thing That Matters. Its begins with this:

Dear Companion on the Journey: It is wonderful that you have come here.

There is something you wish to know and something you wish to do, and Life understands this. That is why you are reading this.

Here is what you wish to know…

98% of the world’s people
are spending 98% of their time
on things that don’t matter.

You have been part of that 98%. Now you are no longer. From this day forward you choose to spend your time on The Only Thing That Matters. The question is, what is that?

Here is what you wish to do…

Find your answer to that question.

This requires a deep exploration of the Self. You are in the right place for such an important and remarkable undertaking. Trust that. If you weren’t in the right place to find your answer, you would not be here. Do not think you have come to this book by chance.

Do not think that.

Think this: My Soul knows exactly what it is doing. 

Also, think this: My Soul already knows what really matters.

So it is not a question of “finding” that answer, it is a question of remembering. It is not a process of discovery, it is a process of recovery. This data does not have to be researched, it merely has to be retrieved.

==================================

And the book goes on from there. I commend it to your reading. Especially and particularly at this moment when the New Year is beginning, I invite you to explore this book’s contents. They can change your life.  If you have an interest, you may find it here.

In the meantime, as you step off into another 12-month Cycle of Life, may God’s blessings be experienced by you and flow through you all the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds ahead. May Time be simply a measure of how much Divinity has been expressed in this Universe through the Individuation known as You.