CwG Weekly Bulletin #280 - What will it take?

My dear friends...

I've been wondering...

1. What, if anything, could cause the world to expand its ideas about God?

2. What, if anything, could cause human beings to change their understandings about Life?

3. What, if anything, could cause you and I to alter our thoughts about ourselves and about who we are in relationship to each other?

IN SHORT: What, if anything, could cause our species to modify the drivers of our behavior?

A Discussion in Four Parts

THIS IS going to be a discussion in four parts, centering round what I have come to call behaviorifics - the causes and birthings of human behavior. I am rolling it out here in the Weekly Bulletin to see, frankly, if it makes any sense. Your comments and reactions as we go along will be happily received.

The four areas of our exploration will include:

An exploration of why we behave the way we currently do.
An exploration of the question: Is there any need to change our current behaviors?
An exploration of what could cause us to change our behaviors if we wanted to.
An exploration of the role each human being plays in all of the above.

1a. What causes behavior?

The cause of behavior is thought. All behavior is driven by an idea that we have about something.

All thought is belief. Every idea is a mental construction built upon previous mental constructions which are built upon previous mental constructions...which are built upon even earlier mental constructions, which are built upon our earliest memories of how things are.

Every thought is a memory, extended. In each Present Moment we pull up a memory of a Past Moment and apply it to a Future Moment. That is all that is happening; that is the entire process that we call decision making.

1b. Where do ideas come from?

Every idea is the re-application of an older idea. There is no such thing as a New Idea-although there is such a thing as a New Application of an old idea. Human beings, by their inherent nature, are incapable of having New Ideas. That is their eternal hardship, that is their eternal handicap, yet that does not have to be their eternal curse. For while they are not capable of having new ideas, human beings are capable of producing an endless variety of adaptations-twists and turns on, and modifications of-old ideas. And some of these adaptations are so ingenious that these are labeled New Ideas, and hold the very same value.

One form of adaptation is expansion. I have been told that what the world needs right now is a rapid expansion of its ideas about God, about Life, and about Each Other. We will speak more about that presently. But first...

1c. When Ideas become Beliefs

A Belief is an Idea turned to stone. It is no longer pliable. It is no longer stretchable or flexible or plastic in any sense of the word. It is a thought held so long in the human consciousness that it is no longer called an "idea" at all, but, rather, something that we say we know.

Ideas become knowledge when they cease to expand.

Ideas become dogma when they begin to contract.

Thoroughly contracted dogma becomes doctrine.

Doctrine becomes belief when the heart contracts to match the smallness of the mind. It is then that humanity becomes less humane. It is then that humanity becomes dangerous. It is then that humanity is in trouble.

All "belief" comes from small or closed perspectives-which is the only perspective that the Mind can have. This is because the Mind can only hold what it has collected. It cannot contain information or data about that to which it has not yet been exposed.

The Soul, on the other hand, has nothing to do with "belief." It has only to do with "knowing." The Mind "believes," and the Soul "knows." The Soul holds everything that it has collected-and it has collected everything. The Soul knows everything that God knows, for the Soul IS God, miniaturized.

Ideas do not and cannot exist in the Soul. Only Truth-what you would call "what is"-can exist in the Soul. Pure Awareness, or what might be termed Ultimate Knowing or Christ Consciousness, is all that exists in the Soul. An "idea" is impossible under these circumstances. All "ideas" that could possibly be, have already been "processed," experienced, and fulfilled. There is nothing left to be done. There is nothing left to be thought. There is nothing left to be experienced. God, and the Soul, has "been there, done that."

The only way for the Soul to continue its experience of life in any meaningful or joyful way, therefore, would be for it to find a way for the Divine Being that It Is to "forget" what it totally knows.

It has done so. It has found such a way. We calls this way, "life."

Physicalization is the way that the Soul has created for the Divine Being that we are to experience Its divinity again and again, as if it had never been experienced before. The process by which the Divine Being recreates its own experience of divinity is a process called that we call Thought. Everything begins with Thought.

The three Tools of Creation are Thought, Word, and Deed. Of these, Thought is the instigator, the originator, the Prime Force or Divine Creative Essence. Every experience you have, have ever had, and ever will have, is forged first in Thought. It is not real. It is simply your thought about it. Whatever the "it" is, your experience of "it" is nothing more than your Thought about it, realized (made real) through action and word.

Yet your Thought must emerge-it has no choice-from the collection of data that is stored in the Mind. Thus, your idea about everything is energy from the past about the past, having to do with all that has passed. It has nothing to do with the Present, nor can it, for the Mind has no way to perceive That Which Is Present.

All of this is a long way of saying that we behave the way we do because this is the way we have always behaved-or, as far back as we can collectively remember. The only way that we could ever change our individual or collective behavior would be to expand our thinking beyond the Past and into the Unchartered Future; into what we would call the "future," but what the Soul knows is not the future at all, but the ever-present Present. I call this the Unrealized Present. That is, the Present that has not been made "real."

To step into this expression of life we must move from Experience to Knowledge-from the field of energy that contains what we have done and what we imagine is true based on what we have done, to the field of energy that contains what we Know based on what IS.

That field of energy can only be accessed through the doorway of the Soul. It cannot be accessed through the Mind. In other words, in order to understand anything that I have just said here you have to be out of your mind.

More on this next week as we continue with this series on "behaviorifics," and a look at what, if anything, could change our supposedly "unwanted" global reality. I mean, I know of no one who says he or she wants or desires a world the likes of which we are now creating-yet we don't, any of us, seem to know how to change things in any major material way, in any really significant way, in any long-lasting or truly life-altering, experience-shifting way that affects all of humanity and moves us away, at last, from conflict and violence and misery and heartache and suffering and oppression and repression and depression-all of which, all of which, we are told by every spiritual master who has ever walked the planet that we can rid ourselves of, if we only wanted to.

Let's look at how this could happen, shall we? In the weeks ahead, let's take this exploration.

Love and Hugs,

Neale.

Hello My Friends:

I want to take this time to share with you a great new program that the Foundation is about to begin rolling out. It's the Conversations with God Provider Network.

For many years we've been aware of the sense of isolation that many Conversations with God readers experience. Those who come to the material and then begin (or continue) on their paths of spiritual evolution by integrating the CwG material into their lives, their families, and their communities, often feel alone and as if there is no one who is "where they are", or seeing the world with new eyes, as they are.

Not a day goes by that I don't receive emails and/or phone calls from readers such as these who are seeking to connect in one way or another with like-minded individuals.

There is another contingent of Conversations with God students and teachers who have fully incorporated the material into their personal and professional lives. These individuals are sharing, teaching, and using the CwG material as an integral part of their lives and their work. While these people may be more proficient and active in their use of the material, they, too, often suffer from a sense of isolation and of being all alone in the world, with just the material by their side.

Since its beginning the Foundation has supported these individuals with Wisdom Circles and Study Groups, which began shortly after the first book was published. We produced and offered a comprehensive manual on how to start a Study Group. We have always listed these groups on our website. These groups offer folks a place where they can find others who are interested in studying, discussing, and fully exploring the messages of Conversations with God.

Still with all of this, there are not enough groups to "go around." Just the other day I was talking to a dear friend and we were laughing at how different we are now than we were just a few short years ago, and how, with the exception of just a few close friends who are on the journey with us, there's virtually no one who has been around for years and years.

Oh, sure, I've got my mom (who thinks I'm going to hell because I've foregone Catholicism for CwG) and my dear father (who thinks I'm wonderful no matter what), but other than that, there's no one in my life who has been in it BBO (that's "Before Book One").

Actually, I consider myself very lucky in that I have all of you who write often, and the staff and friends of the Foundation who keep my world full...even though we're only talking about ten people or so.

While all of us have friends such as this, and while there are Study Groups and Wisdom Circles around the world, we are acutely aware that there are still huge numbers of readers who want more. And they want to DO more. They don't want to simply "get together" now and then, or to join in a small group to study the material. They want to provide an opportunity to others to learn more about CwG, because it has changed their lives!

We at the Foundation have been aware of this phenomenon with our readership for a very long time. Our retreats, newsletters, bulletins, and the activities of our sister organizations (Humanity's Team, the School of the New Spirituality, and The Group of 1000) all allow interaction with others and with Neale to some degree, but none of these are truly the solution.

It is clear that the more one grows and expands one's personal spirituality, the more one wants to share this wonderful, expanding and freedom-giving experience!

Now, let us make one thing clear: Neale and the Foundation have always actively discouraged "proselytizing" or efforts to "convert" anyone.

That having been said, it is Neale's stated life purpose to "change the world's mind about God." He would like to offer our planet a new way of thinking about God, about Life, and about Each Other. He created this Foundation in order to do that.

So we do encourage people who feel they have benefited from CwG to make it available to others who may be interested in learning more about the principles of the New Spirituality. We do invite folks to "provide access" to this wonderful material to others-and to demonstrate with the living of their own lives how powerful CwG can be in bringing about a new way of living and in creating a new world for all of humanity.

Last Fall, when Neale and Em returned from their European Tour they brought with them an acute awareness of just how many readers of CwG fall into this category. These are people who are out in the world doing whatever it is they do, but very much in alignment with CwG. These wonderful folks are fully utilizing the CwG message through the vehicles of their professions and in their community interaction, but they have no common "store front." That is, no one else knows about them in this context. They have no place where they can find one another, and where the general public can find them.

Whether they're counselors, teachers, massage therapists, coaches, physicians, nurses, what have you, they're out there, they are sharing the wonder of CwG through the living of their lives, and they routinely ask Neale for support as they place the CwG message into the world.

Neale, Em, Rita, Patty, and I and a few others met over breakfast one morning and Neale's enthusiasm was palpable as we engaged in a lively brainstorming session about all this-from which the CwG Provider Network was born.

Right then and there we began to plan, and in April you'll begin to see this huge new program hit the ground running.

What is It?

The CwG Provider Network will be a virtual gathering place comprised of individuals and businesses that provide their services, gifts, and the fruits of their labors to the world in a way that is in deep alignment with the philosophies and spiritual principles of Conversations with God-whose way of being in the world provides access to the CwG message because it IS the CwG message, lived!.

The ReCreation Foundation will review the applications of people throughout the world who wish to become a "provider" and who fill out a standardized application form. In exchange for being listed on our worldwide website, Providers will formally agree to adhere to the basic CwG philosophies and The CwG Code of Standards and Practices.

Provider Network activities will include a virtual meeting place/storefront/website where each provider may post his/her contact information in a customizable and personalized, yet standardized interactive web platform.

This platform will support Provider-initiated online meetings and other virtual interaction between individual Providers, Provider Groups and Networks, and between Providers and the Foundation.

Anyone who loves this material and who wishes to live it on the ground as they walk through their lives, and who feels ready and willing to now share it with others in a non-intrusive, non-aggressive, simply responsive way, may do so. Many of you already are. It's just a question of others knowing that you are!

There are over 7 million people in the world who have read Conversations with God. There are many more millions who have heard of it, and, of those, many would like to know more about it. The CwG Provider Network will allow them opportunities to do so. People may "Google" Conversations with God and find their way to our CwG Foundation website...but then what? How do they find YOU?

NOW THERE IS A WAY!

When they come to our worldwide CwG web portal, they will be able to look up an country or community in the world and find someone in their own area who is providing access to the CwG material and a living experience OF it.

That's what the Provider Network is all about.

Now it is important to make it clear here that no specific "training" is required to become a CwG Provider and to join the Provider Network. All one has to do is fill out an application and undergo a review process. Not everyone who applies will be approved for listing on our website. In other words, listing is not simply "automatic." We want to make sure that we are placing on our site information about people who are reputable, honest, sincere, and so forth. But once approved, Providers will have a listing on our website-kind of like a "yellow pages" of People of the New Spirituality Who Are Providing Services and Opportunities in Alignment with the messages of Conversations with God.

Get it?

This is a great idea!

Now, while no formal training or program is a prerequisite, we already know that there will be many people who desire to delve even more deeply into the CwG material, with Neale right there at their side, so that they can feel really prepared to engage with our world in this new way.

We don't want to leave anyone in a lurch who has such a desire. And so the Foundation will begin, this Fall, to conduct a new Provider Preparedness Program. It will offer people a wonderful chance to become even more involved and more grounded in the basic CwG Messages and Philosophies, with Neale and other staff members teaching the material principle by principle. The CwG Code of Standards and Practices will also be discussed in detail, exploring how anyone can "do business" in our world using the model of transparency, and other CwG principles..

How we're going to roll The Provider Network out to all of you!

~ Early in April the new provider website will be launched from the www.cwg.org site

~This site will include a world map with lights that indicate the location of every existing study group, wisdom circle and LEP graduates

~We will introduce the Basic CwG Philosophies and The CwG Code of Standards and Practices

~ The Foundation will post an Application Form and process on the website and begin to accept and review provider applications for approval

~ Over the Labor Day weekend we'll formally launch the Provider Network with a Free Two-Day Gathering in Ashland, followed by a week long Provider Preparedness Program

There is more to be announced as we finalize our plans in the months to come.

These are exciting times we live in my friends, and I'm so glad we're all here!

Love and light,

Marion Black, Executive Director

marion@cwg.org / cell: 541-301-0365

It's the same old question, over and over

When will we close the gap between the rich and the poor in our world...? When?

I know, I know...it's the same old question. It's the question all truly caring, compassionate -- and, I want to say, civilized -- people have been asking for decades, for centuries, for millennia. When. When???

This is, of course, not an economic problem. And it is not a political problem. This is a spiritual problem. It has to do with our most fundamental beliefs about Life, and about Who We Are, and about who we are In Relationship to Each Other.

There are those who say we are our brother's keeper. But Conversations with God goes much further. It says, "You are more than 'your brother's keeper.' You are your BROTHER. You and your Brother are One. There is no separation between you. All ideas of Separation are Illusions."

I bring this all up today because, as you must surely know if you are not living in a cave somewhere, over 1,000 people have died in recent violence in Kenya in the wake of the re-election of its president, Mwai Kibaki. The political opposition claims that the election was stolen -- but the big clashes in Kenya seem not to be about only this most recent upset, but about the long-term problem of the massive gulf between the upper and lower financial classes there.

Reuters New Services, in an analysis of Kenya's events written by Helen Nyambura-Mwaura, reports that "Kenya is a land of stark contrast: the rich drive gleaming luxury cars, can afford to enrol their children in top British schools and in the case of one local magnate, send suits to London for dry cleaning. But most live a hand-to-mouth existence and some Kenyans believe the bloody post-election crisis that has exposed the east African country's tribal divisions could also inflame the gulf between classes and further exacerbate instability."

Describing what she called a "huge wealth gap," the Reuters report said that in Kenya, 10 percent of the people control 42 percent of the economy, with the poorest 10 percent holding less than 1 percent, according to U.N. figures.

This is not news to the rest of the world -- and it is certainly not news to readers of Conversations with God, which has been pointing out in book after book that a tiny percentage of the world's people hold the largest percentage of the world's wealth -- and that this imbalance is going to lead to inevitable conflict on our planet unless and until something is done to help those billions who live in abject poverty.

In the case at hand, for instance, "almost half of Kenya's 36 million people live on a dollar a day and most struggle to put their children through school or pay for decent health care," Reuters reports. On the other hand, Reuters reports, "Cabinet ministers take home more than 1 million shillings ($13,820) a month."

That's over $13,820 per month versus $36 per month, in case you missed those numbers, or read right past them, tsk-tsking.

Small wonder there's violence taking place. Tomorrow we'll look more closely at the Kenyan situation. But the real question is, not just "What's going on in Kenya?", but rather, What's going on in the human heart that allows anybody, or any group, to treat anyone else like that?

And, of course, this is not just a Kenyan problem. The problem of way-off-balance distribution of wealth is a problem that has affected every country in the world at one time or another -- and affects most to this very day.

And the reason this is true has to do, as I've said, not with economics and not with politics, but with our spiritual beliefs, our most sacred, fundamental beliefs about humanity, about God, about the process we are all undergoing here that we call Life...

One day we will all "get" who we are in relationship to each other. But that day will only come when humanity as a whole embraces a new set of understandings, a new set of beliefs, about who we are as a species, and about what it means to be human.

I call these new beliefs, loosely, the New Spirituality. And it is what is going to be needed in the world today if we are going to survive, if we are going to be able to live life as we have known it on this planet (with a few improvements for a great many), and if we are going to have any kind of decent world at all to hand over to our children and our children's children.

Oh, there is so much to say on this. So very much to say! I'll pick up on this topic tomorrow. Meanwhile, I want you to ask God...ask the God of your understanding...what is Right and True and Good with regard to all of this? Will humanity ever graduate to the point where, in any country, humans would never allow government officials to earn almost $14,000 a month while poor people have $36 to stretch across those same 30 days?