CwG Weekly Bulletin #187 - Neale talks about Happiness and Love.

Neale talks about Happiness and Love:

There is a key to happiness and love that very few people have embraced—and that many have never even heard about. Communion with God gives us that key, and here it is: Happiness is a decision, not an experience. You can decide to be happy without having what you thought you needed to have in order to be happy, and you will be.

That is one of the most important things you could ever come to understand. Allow me, therefore, to repeat it. Happiness is a decision. Your experience is the result of your decision, not the cause of it. In other words, if you experience something as producing happiness, it is because you have made that decision about it. It is not the experience that produced the decision, it is the decision that produced the experience.

Happiness is
a decision,
not an experience.

The same is true, incidentally, of love. Love is not a reaction, love is a decision. When you remember this, you are approaching mastery. When you apply it to your life, you have arrived at the door.

You may think that you need a particular other person to be complete, or a specific job to be successful, or some other emotional or physical gratification to be happy. That is when you may wish to notice that you are here, right now, without it. Why, then, do you think you need it? Close examination will reveal that you do not need it, not even to be happy.

The irony is that when you move into happiness with or without that person or situation that you imagine you needed, you put yourself in a much better position to attract that person or situation. That is because happiness attracts. It is like a magnet. It is the highest energy, next to love. Indeed, happiness is love, felt. The trick, then, is to be happy before you have what you think you need in order to be happy. Do not wait until after you receive it—or you may never receive it.

CwG invites you to come from the place to which you wish to go. In a sense, you arrive there before you get there—and it is this arrival that takes you there. So choose to be happy, no matter what. This will be one of the most life-empowering decisions you will ever make.

How does one choose to be happy before anything happens to make one happy? There are many ways to do that, and we will look at some of them in this space in the weeks ahead. Right now, here is a simple technique suggested by the famed Buddhist monk, Thich Nat Han: smile five times a day for no good reason.

Smiling actually produces a biological effect in your body. It sends chemicals racing around your body and actually lifts your spirits. Try this today. Then, every day this week, smile five times a day for no good reason. Do it sitting in traffic. Do it standing in the shower. Do it walking down the street, or working at your desk. For no good reason, just break into a smile. Watch your mood change, even though nothing in your exterior has shifted.

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I have been contemplating lately what it would have "looked like" for me to have been a better person in the years leading up to this moment. I see that for me it would have meant being a whole lot less selfish, a whole lot less self-centered. It's so easy for me to wish that in hindsight. Yet when I try to apply the lessons of the past to my every day life here and now, I don't seem to do so well. My regret over my yesterdays dissolves, and my present moments move on pretty much as they always did.

So these days I'm looking at that. Why is it that I can see my shortcomings so clearly in the past, but that, as each new moment of Now is presented to me, I am so blind to them? If the purpose of life is to recreate myself anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever I held about Who I Am, why am I not doing that? I wonder, in short, what stops me from using life for the purpose for which it was intended...

And I'm not the only human being who I observe to be "stuck" at this intersection. It is the crossroad between a regretted yesterday and a self-promised tomorrow. I could start off on a New Path. I could truly change, inside and out. I do not have to wait until New Year's Eve to turn over a new leaf. I could do that now, step into my grander self now. I can't even change the way I eat, for heaven sake. Put that Oreo cookie in front of me and I'll gulp it down every time. Not once in a while, as an occasional treat, but every time I see one! So I have to make sure that there are simply none in the house. That seems to be my only protection against myself.

Now you might say that I'm making more out of this little weakness than I should be making, but I am very clear that it doesn't stop there. We are not talking about an Oreo cookie. We are talking about willpower. We are talking about the ability to become Who I Really Am on a moment's notice, to step into that expression of Self when it counts, when the temptation to be less than I am is placed before me. And life can be counted on to place that temptation before me repeatedly. That I've discovered. The temptations are not going to go away.

So each day I have a decision to make. Each hour, each minute. Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? And if I can't make the highest choice when it comes to Oreos, how in heaven do I imagine that I can do anything meaningful to make our world a better place?

That is the question. I call it The Oreo Question. And please don't tell me I'm being too hard on myself. Mountains are climbed one step at a time. When you decline to take the first step, you cannot take the last.

Do I meditate every day? Do I exercise every day? Do I eat healthily every day? Do I care for others every day as if they were truly One with me? Do I send forth my love and forgiveness, my compassion and understanding, my patience and my gentleness every day? Do I invite myself, challenge myself, every day to move to the next level in my awareness, in my expression, and in my experience of Who I Really Am?

Am I letting the times of my life slip away in single-moment increments, until the years claim my lost opportunities and turn them into more regrets? Forget about stopping the world from falling apart...can I even stop a bad habit?

That is The Oreo Question. And I've got to look at it. I can't keep running from it under cover of self- acceptance and self-love. I have plenty of self-acceptance and self-love. Maybe a bit too much. The question is, do I have any self-discipline? Self-determination? Self-awareness? And just who IS this "self" of which I wish to become aware? How shall I express and experience that?

That is the Oreo question. I invite us all to look at it today. Our own transformation may be right around the corner, enfolded in the answer.

This week with the momentum building that I spoke of last week things here at the Foundation feel so much lighter. This is a very good feeling. I love it when the pace is fast and the challenges that come up are at least interesting and new. This makes the days fly and the energy makes me personally feel as though we really are making a difference in the world.

What I’m thinking about this week and want to share with all of you is how much it seems that we are all making a difference in the world. I consider the CwG material so vital to those that share this planet with us and I’m just so impressed that some emails mailed to a bunch of people around the world can move this last CwG book to a huge seller on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. While I think this tendency of our world today to be in real time is pretty cumbersome sometimes; it’s pretty cool to watch in real time these book-selling lists that change every hour. Even cooler than that is to sit here and really get that with that type of ranking more and more people are getting this information, and deeply understand that in some little way you’ve played a part in that. I have and you have too. Even if you didn’t buy the book or do anything else, the fact that you are here reading this is a demonstration that energetically you support CwG in the world and that collective consciousness is very important.

The other place that many of you and your part of the collective have made a huge difference is in your willingness to support the Foundation through your contributions and offers of help and ideas. I sit here today and I find myself very grateful that I have this job that supports my family, a direct result of so many of you being willing to support us. While we’re not all the way in the clear yet financially we are so much better than we were.

I’ve gotten many wonderful emails from so many of you, and then there have been some that weren’t so wonderful. I also was informed that there’s been some derogatory communications on some of the Yahoo sites about me using this place to ask for financial support from our readers for the Foundation. That really gets under my skin, but I’m clear there will always be some folks that are invested in criticism or just a very different understanding of things than we have. That is what it is, but what it brought me to was a thought about why some of our constant financial supporters do support us.

With this in mind, I went to one of our tried and true supporters and asked if he would write to me about why he’s always supported us so generously. To my delight he wrote me this beautiful letter. I must say it brought tears to my heart and joy to my soul, and because of that I’d like to share it with you.

My father was walking painfully slow toward the restaurant door, shoulders hunched, cane in his right hand and a determined look on his face. There was no doubt in his mind that he would reach that door. And do so without assistance. Patrons also approaching that door started to step aside as he went up the stairs, one step at a time. Children rushed to the front door and held it open as their parents beamed with pride for exercising civility without being reminded. With a wave of his cane my father acknowledged the courtesy and walked through the door to the seating area.

At 95 years old my father demonstrates a great deal of independence. He still lives at home, alone. My mother passed away a few years ago. He has a gardener, housekeeper and nurse come by each week. The wheels-on-meals visits him each day. And he still dabbles in the stock market, as he always has, maintaining his own portfolio of financial securities.
But, what captured my attention that day at the restaurant was a universal reaction I have always seen of others, total strangers as well as friends, on their interaction with him. My father just seems to be surrounded by this aurora of goodwill. I have never tried to understand it. I just knew it was there.

As was our custom, we ordered from the menu after placing our hats and coats in their place. And then there was that silence. Not an awkward moment, just a moment getting adjusted to the surroundings. Then I leaned over to him and asked a question I have asked before. I knew the answer. I just wanted to hear it again.

When I was 8 years old my next door friend asked me to go to St. Jerome's for his confession. I had never been to a Catholic church before so I was quite excited. Seeing the dark interior wood-lined walls and deep red carpeting, I felt I was in another world. In fact I truly was, for the Protestant church I attended had simple white walls and substantially less glow than St. Jerome's. I saw my friend go into the confessional booth. How neat! From where I was sitting in the back of the church it looked like a great place to play in. All this I told to my father upon coming home.

"You don't need to go to a Catholic church", my father said. "Your have your own church".

He was not mad and did not express this with any semblance of doing something wrong. He was merely making a statement. Still, I wanted to know why I could not go to both churches. A question I did not have the nerve to ask. But, the question remained with me until I was 14. For at this leap in time, I was there in the attic going through my father's business papers. Oh, how sneaky it felt! It was not a feeling of sin. Rather, it felt like I was coming across something very important in my life. It was as if it was my destiny to be there. And then I saw it. A bunch of papers-. checks really. They were made out to a number of churches in our town-- checks for the Catholic church, the Orthodox church, the Protestant, Apostolic and a number of other religious houses, all with handsome sums and written year after year.

Again, I did not raise the issue. Not until I was 22 years old and just before I was being drafted into the Army. That's when I confronted him.

"Why did you not want me to go to a Catholic church and then you write checks to everyone?" I asked - no, I demanded.

These questions that had hidden in my heart were finally coming out. There had to be an explanation. Something I could understand. Something that truly addressed the agenda of my soul. For that is why we are alive. To complete the agenda of our souls. Conceptually God knows everything. And being a part of God, we experientially understand these facets of God within this contextual field called the Realm of the Relative.

I have taught this concept of conceptualization at a rehabilitation center nearby. I needed to be humorous in these teachings. I needed to explain that there is conceptually knowing something and experientially knowing something. And gave this example. Every rehabilitation center has some sort of cookout. Everyone loves to go to these things. I told my wonderful students that since they have gone to this before that the next cookout they can remain in the study room they are currently meeting in. They will stay there because they have already gone to the cookout the previous year. I told them that this is conceptually knowing something. But, since I loved them so much, I will take it upon myself to go out to the cookout and bring the food back for them to eat in the study room. I told them they need not worry about missing all of the fun and laughter because I was going to take copious notes and share them. I told them they should be happy because they already know conceptually what a cookout is. When they were ready to revolt I could then explain they now knew the difference between conceptual and experiential knowledge. And God conceptually knows everything but deeply desires to know everything experientially.

Back at the restaurant I was waiting for the answer I already knew. Would he stick to the same answer? Maybe he would try to add to it. Maybe he would deny his original reply when I was 22.

"You’re old enough now to pick out any church you wish to go to, and you have chosen something other than a Protestant church, which is fine.

They asked! Can you imagine? Someone asks and my father gives. No argument. No thought process in trying to figure out how much or with whom. Just a knee jerk reaction. The first dollar figure that popped into my father's head was the amount on the check.

Every act is a demonstration of who we are. That is what life has given us. An opportunity to demonstrate experientially what God knows conceptually. And giving to another is the same as giving to oneself. Because there is only one of us. By giving to others we demonstrate that facet of God. Demonstrate it experientially. And when one continues to demonstrate this consistently, with love, then that is what the Universe hears. And the Universe brings forth more opportunities to continue to demonstrate experientially who we really are. And as these good things flow from us, they flow to us. Because there is only one of us. There is no other way for it to flow.
If I am a giving person, life brings forth all facets of giving. Including goods things that come to me. I bring forth my own good luck.

And so it is with my father. Good luck is something he crated. It is something he brought forth. Because that is who he is. And he demonstrates it experientially.
And that is why children hold doors for him. That is why there is an aurora of goodwill around him.

Does this make him perfect? It depends upon the perspective. He is a Republican. Always has been.
Always will be. His living room is lined up with pictures of Republicans he has contributed to. They include blacks, Hispanic, gays and many others.

"The problem with Hillary is that she is a Democrat", he argued. "But, I would vote for her if she became a Republican".

I have learned much from my father. I understood most of what I learned from CwG. Those who know me have asked to explain why I give as much as I do. My answer is the same as my father's. They asked. I do not reside in Ashland. I live over 3000 miles away. My connection to the Foundation is limited to workshops and seminars and LEP that I have attended. And contributions. I have never publicized my contributions. I like to remain anonymous. It is because I know that good things will flow to me as a result of demonstrating experientially who I really am.

And so, I give you the same opportunity. And to give this opportunity I have generated this email. I am asking. I do not care what dollar amount you contribute. All I care about is giving the opportunity for you to demonstrate who you really are. The Foundation needs help.

A Secret Admirer

Marion Black, CEO
ReCreation Foundation, Inc.
dba Conversations with God Foundation

PS: My email is marion@cwg.org or my cell number is (541) 301-0365.

Life is the experience of The Singularity, knowing Itself as Itself through the experiences of Its Individuations. There is but a Single Agenda, and it is served through the distinctly different but remarkably co-joined experiences of every one of us.

That Single Agenda is for Divinity to be expressed and experienced in all Its splendor, and to recreate and define Itself anew in every single golden moment of Now. HOW It expresses Itself, HOW It experiences Itself, HOW It defines Itself, is up to you. That is the decision you are making every day. That is the choice you are demonstrating every moment. You are doing so individually and collectively. Every act is an act of self-definition.

Of this truth, and many others, will you be reminded when you merge with the Core of your Being. It is here that you will be rejuvenated, reunited, and reintegrated, should you have forgotten the original agenda, should you have lost your memory and your sense of Who You Really Are. And if you have not, but rather, have a full awareness of all of this and a full experience of it, it is at the Core of your Being where you will be replenished.

The great misunderstanding of all those who have forgotten the Ultimate Truth, the great illusion of all those who live in temporary amnesia, is that there is somewhere they have to "go", somewhere they have to journey, in order to "get to heaven," or "unite with God," and experience eternal bliss.

There is nowhere you have to go, nothing you have to do, and nothing you have to be except exactly what you are being right now, in order to experience the bliss of the Divine. You ARE the bliss of the Divine, and you simply do not know it.

Then why bother taking these endless trips? Why am I continuously journeying through the Space/Time Continuum? Why have I undertaken this endless search for God?

Your journey is not an endless SEARCH for God, it is an endless EXPERIENCE of God.

Understood in this way, the reason for the continuous journey becomes apparent. The journey is a process. It is the way that you know God---indeed, that you know yourself AS that which is Divine. This journey is therefore your greatest joy.

Okay, so I am taking these "trips" through time and space in order to experience God. But when do I actually meet God? Earlier you said that God will be the first experience I will have after my death.

If you believe that it will be, then it will be. But you do not have to wait until then. In fact, you have been meeting God all along. That is what I have been telling you.

Here is the central error of most human theology: you think that one day you are going to meet God. You imagine that you are one day going to get back Home. You are not going to get back Home.

I thank God every day for His Voice expressing Divine Wisdom so clearly through your mind. In CwG Bulletin #186, the question from Julie from Paris about wanting to be loved by a particular person described exactly the situation I’ve been struggling with for several years. Your answer to Julie about seeking content rather than form was exactly the answer I’ve been needing for years, and it has set me free! Thank you for being Who You Are!

Dear Neale,

I hope this e-mail is read by you because I do have a question that has been bothering me for a long time. I have just finished all four books in Conversations with God and have found them to be profoundly valuable in my experience to have a relationship with God. People say that they love God, but I always found that to be somewhat superficial because can anyone really say they know God and have developed a relationship where they have fallen in love with Him/Her (and I am not speaking about you because you seem to have fallen in love with God through your work). I am trying to develop this HONEST FEELING of LOVING GOD.

Well, here is my question: I lost my only child, Timmy, in an automobile accident on Friday, August 13, 1999. You might say he came into the world through an accident because on Friday, September 13, 1974 I had an automobile accident while I was 8 months pregnant. We survived, fortunately, but he was born almost a month early as a result of my water breaking from the traumatic experience of the accident. When he was born I was 24 years old just shy of my 25th birthday. When he died he was 24 just shy of his 25th birthday. When I was in labor with him I developed some severe knots in my hair that took many weeks to get out. When he died those same knots came back and it took a hairdresser and cutting of my hair to get them out.

Since 1985 I have been on a path about what death is all about to the point where my son one day said to me, "Mom you read all these near death experience books and other books about death and dying that I am afraid you are going to die". I told him I was tough and wouldn't die for a long time. Never knowing that he would go first. Before I read your books, I read the Journey of the Souls and the Destiny of the Souls by Dr. Michael Newton. In those books it declares that your child is no longer your child, your husband no longer your husband, and mother and father no longer that because they just played those roles in your present life time. If that is true, it is disheartening to me that my son is no longer my son. It hurts me to think that he will choose a new mother from our so called "soul group" and continue another existence with another family for his soul development. Excuse me if that sounds selfish, but it is hurtful enough to loose him without thinking that he is no longer my son anymore.

This has been and continues to be a long path for me. I have accepted his death because I do not have a choice, but to realize that he is no longer my son is devastating to me. Can you shed some light on this for me? Your testimony of God feels so right, so comforting. Can you tell me more, with your acquired wisdoms and knowledge what this is all about. I am saddened to think your conversations with God has stopped in your writings and I cannot gleam any more knowledge from a continuation of these wonderfully, spiritual books.

Please, Neale, if you could possibly find the time to reply directly, I would be so grateful for some inspiration on this subject.

A forever student of the Universe, Helen.

My dear Helen,

The very first thing that I want you to do is to go to www.amazon.com and order a copy of HOME WITH GOD in a Life That Never Ends. If you do that right now, after reading this, you can have a copy in your hands tomorrow. Then begin reading it and don't stop until you finish. In many ways it is almost as if this book was written for you.

In this final dialogue, God explains that "death is a process of re-identification." Each soul lives forever, and in the Time After Death the soul moves through a three-stage process in which it (1) ceases to identify with its body; (2) ceases to identify with its mind; (3) ceases to identify with its soul, merging at last with the Oneness, the Essence of Being that some of us call God. This is the Journey Home, and it is a joyful, wonder-filled journey that each spiritual entity takes after death, which is not death at all, but merely birth in another form.

Through all the annals of time it will be recorded that you gave physicality to the soul that has been called your son. Yet this soul is much greater than the localized, individual identity that it took on at the moment of this birth. In that sense, this soul is "no longer your son" -- nor would you want it to be. The soul is eternal, everlasting, and not limited in its identity with any individual incarnation, except when it chooses to be re-focused in that way.

What this means is that the gigantic spirit that is your son's soul can "get small again," reducing itself to one of its singular notions of itself, at any time in the Hereafter. What I am saying is that, as I understand it, the Individualized Essence of Being appearing in your lifetime as the soul of your son can, and does, reassume that specific identity at will, and it always chooses to do so at the slightest loving thought of him.

Souls, in truth, Helen, are "shape shifters" -- even as is God Himself. A soul never, ever forgets a shape it has once assumed, and no individual identity (the soul lives many lifetimes) is ever abandoned or lost or "set aside" forever simply because a particular physical life has ended. Rather, a soul may, as I have already said, reform itself around a specific shape whenever it wishes to do so. And one of the things that causes it to do so is Love.

Love is a particular form of Pure Energy that comes closest to resembling the Essential Energy of God, and when a soul is thought of with Love, that soul responds by reforming itself into the shape that it took when it was the object of the Love it is now feeling, and it will fly to the person thinking of it in that way. Love is a magnet that draws all souls to us, both those living in the physical realm and those living in the spiritual realm.

In this way, you son always retains his identity--at the same time that his Eternal Essence enlarges beyond it. This is a Divine Dichotomy that can only be fully understood in the context of a Greater wareness within which two apparently contradictory truths can exist simultaneously in the same space. Thus, the answer to your question, Helen, is that your son both is and is not "your son" through all eternity.

The near perfect symmetry of your son's life--the apparent "coincidences" having to do with his birth and death--suggests a Divine Plan and a level of Divine Intervention that reaches way beyond human comprehension. See this perfect design for what I believe that it is: a clear "signal" from one soul to another that a very high level of co-creation has been going on. I believe that this soul may be much more than simply your son, but may, in fact, be one of your Soul Partners through all eternity---an Aspect of the Single Self, dividing and reuniting through the eons of time, coming and going in each other's physical lives, co-creating on the Canvas of Forever an eternal experience of Love in every form. In other words, the experience of Who You Really Are, physicalized.

Be grateful for this experience, having had it once again, my dear Helen, and yearn not for, nor mourn the loss of, that which you will always have and which cannot be set aside by anyone or any belief: an eternal connection with the soul you have known most recently as your son. Celebrate this connection, and allow it to nourish you all the days of your life, and of your Endless Forevers.

May God's wisdom and comfort be visited upon you now, and expressed through you even during all the days of your life.

Blessed be....

Neale.

If you would like to send a comment or a question to Neale here at the Weekly Bulletin, you may do so by addressing an email to: weeklybulletinresponse@cwg.org. Please note that because of the volume of mail that we receive, it is possible your letter will not get printed here. However, we do our best to see that all letters get a response, if not directly from Neale, then from a CwG Foundation staff person, or LEP participant.

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The CwG Weekly Bulletin is written by Neale Donald Walsch. It is produced by Joanna Gabriel and edited by Rose Wolfenbarger with technical contributions from Marion K. Black and Roger Mellon.