There’s nothing you have to do
Question to Neale: Conversations with God says, “There’s nothing you have to do.” What does this mean? If this is telling us what I think it is, why bother working for a better world? Why bother even being a “nice person”? And if, as you say in What God Wants, the truth is that God wants nothing at all, why not just break all the rules, live a completely hedonistic life, and let the devil take the hindmost? This whole message leaves me frustrated. – AG, Minneapolis, Minn.
Dear AG: You ask a good question. Yet the statement, “There’s nothing you have to do” should bring you the greatest joy, and not a moment of frustration, because it is God’s greatest gift: Freedom. The statement does not mean there is nothing you will do in your life, it means that there nothing you have to do. In other words, nothing that you are required to do.
God does not require us to do certain things, or to avoid doing certain things, in order to “get into heaven.” That notion reflects an elementary (perhaps even a primitive) understanding of God and Life.
The God of Ultimate Reality requires, commands, and demands nothing. Why would God, when God is and has everything? What God desires is simply to experience Godself in all its glory. So God created Physical Life as an out-picturing, or expression, of Itself, giving Itself total Free Will to manifest Itself in any way that any of its countless aspects might choose to, using a simple formula: the higher and grander the choice, the higher and grander the experience.
The opportunity, then, that is placed before Human Beings (who are one out-picturing of God) is to express ourselves in each golden moment of Now in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are. The greater our vision, the grander our possibilities, to which there no limits.
Thus, the only reason to do or not do anything is not to “please God” or to avoid “displeasing God,” but rather, to express God and to experience God in the next grandest way possible, given the level of Consciousness of each manifestation of Divine Energy that exists in the Physical Realm.
The answer to the question, “Why bother?” is, therefore: We do, or not do, a thing in order to express and experience, and thus to know and fulfill, Who We Choose to Be.
Or, as CWG says; “Every act is an act of Self-Definition.”
Put simply, humanity is in the process of re-creating itself in every moment. Anthropologists might call this process “evolution.” It is the process by which all living things evolve. The reason for doing any particular thing, then, is to evolve—and to demonstrate and experience the level to which one has evolved.
We can help each other in this process. Indeed, that is what all Great Teachers have done from the beginning of time.
And now, we are coming to see that we are all “teachers,” in that humans have developed the technology for everyone now to see each other fully, openly, transparently. By using platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and, for that matter, the Internet as a whole—including this Internet Newspaper, The Global Conversation—we place ourselves (perhaps unwittingly) in the space of Teacher. That is, we are teaching others whether we know it or not.
Other people are watching us. How are we living our lives? How we are using these technologies? Are we using Facebook, Twitter, etc., to tell each other what we had for breakfast, and how frustrated we are that we missed our hairdressing appointment? Or are we using these technologies to share with each other what we have learned and what we have chosen to demonstrate regarding what it means to live our lives as human expressions of the Divine?
What are you using your life for? And how would you choose to behave and experience your humanity if you felt that you didn’t have to do anything in particular to pass God’s “judgment”? Now that is true freedom. And that is what is meant by on Earth, as it is in Heaven.
Can we create heaven on earth right now? Yes. Are we doing so? No. We are creating a hell on earth. And that, quite remarkably, is our own collective decision.
It doesn’t have to be this way. You can choose differently, right now, this day, in your life. And if everyone did this, we could and would change the world.
May God’s blessings flow to you, and through to, to everyone whose life you touch, both now and even forevermore.
— Neale Donald Walsch
