Weekly Bulletin #311
October 3, 2008
Our changing world
NOTE: The Weekly Bulletin is sent free of charge to anyone who asks for it. It is a publication of the ReCreation Foundation, a non-profit organization undertaking the work of sharing the message of Conversations with God with the world. That message is that the purpose of life is to recreate ourselves anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are.
In This Issue...
Notes from Neale
An additional article of interest for you
Best of the Blogs
The Calendar
Notes from Neale...
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My dear friends...
We are in Europe this week, bringing the messages of the wonderful CwG books to audiences from Findhorn, in Scotland, to Ausburg, in Germany. Our program in Zurich went wonderfully well, and this week we are resting in Hamburg.
We have re-designed the delivery of this message (I find that I have to do that about once every 24 months just to keep my understanding of the material-and the way I share it-fresh. So the new program is now called FROM HAVING TO BEING: Living the Messages of Conversations with God.
This particular "angle" grew out of an exchange that I had with a participant in our spiritual renewal retreat in Ausburg, a woman who wanted to know how she could have all that she wishes to have in her life. My response to her inquiry has been turned into the article below. I posted that article this week on the CWG Blog at Belietnet.com.
The work of moving this extraordinary, freedom-giving message into the world is now moving into high gear. And it is happening not a moment too soon. Our world is changing all around us. Present systems are collapsing. Financial systems. Ecological systems. Educational systems (that is, ways of teaching, and the things we are teaching). Thought systems (that is, our entire previous Cultural Story about who we are and how it is with us).
Life as we have known it is collapsing all around us. China just sent a man to the moon. It is preparing to place a space station over the earth. It has become the global power to reckon, already overtaking the United States in many, many ways. (You must be aware that our country is hugely in debt to China on this very day. Right now China is financing America. If the Chinese were to now call in that debt, America would be through.)
Let me tell you how bad things have gotten. Em went to the local grocery store here today to stock up on some things for our Hamburg apartment, gifted to us as a place to stay on-and-off during our European swing. Guess what...
They would not take an American credit card.
Nor would they for any purchase less than $60US at the restaurant we went to last night. We have to go the local bank and get cash, in Euros, to buy anything here. Wanna know why? The American dollar is so weak that the cost of credit cards transactions is not worth it to local businesses.
Everything here cost twice as much in U.S. dollars (meaning the dollar is worth about half what the Euro is worth). This is not a good time for Americans to travel. Think $2 for everything that $1 buys in the States. So we're talking $8 to $10 for a tube of toothpaste. And, the other night, $30 for a glass of wine. No, I did not say a bottle, I said a glass.
Time was when the American dollar was the most desired currency in the world. People everywhere begged you for "greenbacks." I traveled around the globe for NASA's Project Aidsat in the mid-1970s and I remember this well. Things are remarkably different today. As is our way of life right at home.
Yet I am not talking here about the disintegration of the American way of life. I am speaking about the eventual (and rapidly increasing, right in front of our eyes) dissolution of the human way of life. We are going to have to find a new way to be human in the years just immediately ahead...or humanity itself will be all but vanquished. Our present way of living is not sustainable.
I know that People of the New Age are not supposed to speak that way. I know that People of Positive Thought, and Practitioners of the Law of Attraction, are not supposed to say such things. But evolved sentient beings everywhere always begin the final stages of their collective evolution by looking directly at what they have already created before choosing what they want to create next.
You cannot create what you do want until you look directly at, and remove, what you don't want. We are sculpting Tomorrow. We do so by chipping away Today. (Life is doing this anyway, with our without us. The question is, do we want this to happen TO us, or to happen THROUGH us?)
Our job as revolutionary evolutionists is to chip away at the block of marble. It is the block that stands between the creator and his vision. He sees the vision inside the block, already existing. Then he removes the block piece by piece until only the visions remains. This is an act of sheer artistry. In this context, we might call it (to use anthropologist Jean Houston's perfectly appropriate term) Social Artistry. The sculptor is not putting something there. He is taking something away. She is reshaping what is there now by eliminating what she does not want. Of course she has to look at what is there now in order to do that.
Enough said.
Neale.
An additional article of interest for you
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From HAVING
to BEING
by Neale Donald Walsch
A lady in the spiritual renewal retreat that I facilitated in Ausburg, Germany in September of ‘08 asked me a question that will live on in my memory forever-because it so perfectly epitomizes the human condition.
The lady allowed as to how she had used the "Law of Attraction" to create the ‘perfect man' in her life...but that she had not yet managed to create the ‘perfect job.'
"How can I have what I want to have in my life?" she asked. "I mean, all if it. The Law of Attraction says that you can ‘have it all,' that nothing is too much to ask, so what am I doing wrong?"
I looked at her for a very long moment, then I said: "'With respect, may I gently observe that ‘having' is kindergarten stuff. ‘Being' is graduate school. ‘Having' is what children want. ‘Being' is what students of mastery seek.
"Why are you so concerned with ‘having' everything you want to have in life? Why not be concerned about ‘being' everything you've always wanted to be? And I don't mean what you've wanted to be, I mean what your soul has wanted to be."
I told the woman that we were talking about States of Being here, not occupations or activities. We are not talking about stuff the body does. We are talking about stuff the soul IS, and which the soul seeks to express and experience, using the body as a tool with which to do so.
For most people such talk is pure "gobbledegook." They can't relate to a word I said. In this spiritual renewal retreat, however, there was great receptivity in the room. The woman to whom I was speaking clearly understood-and saw immediately the shift she chose to make in the focus of her life.
"There is," I told the group, "an irony here. For the moment you begin focusing away from the desires of the body and on the agenda of the soul, the desires of the body automatically begin to be fulfilled."
In other words, all the love, all the creativity in one's work, all the physical safety and security, all the fame, money, power-all the anything that one could possibly need suddenly falls in on you...without your even trying to create it. It literally crashes in on you. It comes to you without effort.
This is what was meant by, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all else will be added unto you."
I told the lady in Ausburg that the first step in having everything you want is to not want it, not need it, not search for it or reach for it or strive for it or yearn for it. First of all, I said, your life has nothing to do with your body. It has to do with your soul. The body is something you have, it is not something you are. As I've said, it is a tool. A device. A mechanism. It is a physical machine, and a marvelous one, impeccably designed to facilitate the creation of the soul's desire.
And what is the soul's desire? To experience Itself as some aspect of what it knows Itself to be.
What the soul knows Itself to be is Divinity. It understands that It is Divinity, individualized. This is not an intellectual understanding. This is a cellular knowing. The soul knows what It is; that It is a smaller part of a Larger Whole; that It is the singularization of The Singularity; that It is an Individuation of God.
Speaking scientifically, the localized energy unit that is You is aware of Its identity as part of the universal energy that is All That Is. You might call this universal energy Pure Intelligence. Or First Cause. Or Primal Essence. It is the ground of being of all life. Whatever you wish to call IT, IT exists everywhere, and there is nowhere that IT is not.
Everything is made up of IT, and without IT is made nothing that has been made. Nothing stands outside of IT, for that would be, by the very nature of IT, impossible.
A tiny-one might say, minuscule-portion of IT is what You are. You are That Which Is Universally Present, localized and presenting Itself in the form that You take now.
This is something that many minds cannot comprehend. Mainly because we have been taught for centuries that we are everything BUT what has just been described; we are, in fact, everything unlike God. SO much so that God threw us out of the Garden of Eden and told us never to come back again until we had cleansed ourselves, purified ourselves, and perfected ourselves-becoming like God again.
Then, realizing the impossibility of any of us ever becoming really Perfect, God sent us his Only Begotten Son to become Perfect on our behalf. I don't mean to be irreverent here, but this was sort of a Surrogate Perfectionist. Somebody who could do for us what we could not do for ourselves. It took God-Made-Man to become Perfect AS Man. Ordinary men, who were not God, could never do this.
This is the teaching of some of humanity's major theologies. Thus, they have said, God set for Man an impossible task, then came down to earth in human form to save us by doing it for us.
Such a theology requires human beings to embrace the notion of separation. We must hold an idea of God as being separate from humanity, utterly.
God is, we are told, watching humanity to see if it is going to do what is required (accept Perfection through The Surrogate), and judging humanity if it does not, and punishing humanity with unspeakable torture forever, and even forever more, if it fails to do what it was never capable of doing in the first place. For how could The Part ever be a great as The Whole? Is not The Whole always greater than the sum of Its Parts?
It is against this backdrop that the New Spirituality announces that you are not separate from God, and never were, but that each individual soul is the living expression of Divinity Itself. God is Life, and we are each an expression of Life Itself. And a magnificent one at that.
Yet if we are Divine, why does it take so long to create what it is that we choose to create? Isn't it the job of Divinity to create? And if so, why are humans so inept at doing that?
The fact is, humans are not inept at doing that. Humans are creating all the time. The world as it IS is a manifestation of humanity's creation. The problem is that most people are creating unconsciously. That is, without even knowing it. ("Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.")
We are creating with our thoughts, words, and actions all the time, but we imagine that our collective experience on this earth is something that is happening TO us, rather than something that is happening THROUGH us.
By rejecting the idea of our own responsibility in the matter, we can step aside from having to do anything about it. This frees us to go about gathering all the things that we want to HAVE. All the money, all the power, all the fame, all the sensations of the body, and the toys of life by which we are tempted.
These experiences were never meant to be "temptations" sending us straying from our experience of Godliness, but rather, pathways to that experience. All of the experiences of the relative world were meant to show us, experientially, Who We Really Are. Unfortunately, we have gotten just the opposite message. That is because we have been sent just the opposite message.
Religion-the Old Spirituality-has taught us that all of the good things in life are actually bad things. Dancing is bad. Singing is bad. Sex is bad. Money is bad. (Goodness, money is the root of all evil, we are told!) Fame is bad. Power is bad. WE are bad. Everything about us is "bad." God, on the other hand, is Good. In order to achieve Godliness, therefore, we need to reject who we are and become perfect, as is our Father in Heaven. Or receive cleansing and purification (called Forgiveness) by accepting Jesus Christ, His Only Son, Our Lord.
The New Spirituality is teaching us that we are Good, because we were never separated from God. Therefore, we are not to reject who we are, but just the opposite...to accept Who We Are; not to become perfect, but to realize our already-and-always-existing perfection. This is called Self Realization, and it is achieved through Awareness of our Eternal Oneness with The Creator; our Everlasting Unity with God.
Our freedom from the ravages of every day life does, indeed, come, therefore, from accepting and embracing God. Yet not as part of some separate, far away reality, but as part of our innermost reality; as our very State of Being. ("I am with you always, even unto the end of time.")
And so I told the lady in Ausburg, "Having things for the sake of ‘having' will get you nowhere-and is very difficult to do in any event. Try first to BE what you came here to be, exhibiting all the qualities in your daily life of the Identity that is truly yours. Then you will find yourself having all the things you were previously stressing and straining to have, without your doing anything!"
The idea, then, is to focus on Being. And being what? Any aspect(s) of The Divine that it pleases you to be. Love. Compassion. Understanding. Patience. Forgiveness. Wisdom. Clarity. Healing. Abundance. Awareness. Or any one of the hundred-and-one other things that Divinity Is.
This is what you came here to do. This is why your soul came to earth, to exist in the Realm of the Relative. This is why you have embraced a body. This is why you have created this physical expression you call "you." God came into physical form in order to experience Godself, Fully. Completely. Absolutely.
Right here. Right now. As You, and everything else that Life Is.
Blesséd be.
NDW
Best of the Blogs...
Each week we present in this space the best from past entries on the worldwide CwG Blog. The blog may be accessed daily on the home page at www.beliefnet.com.
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The world's problem
posted on Beliefnet on Thursday September 25, 2008
There is a problem in the world today, but it has nothing to do with politics, economics, or military excursions. Can you guess what it might be?
A fascinating discussion took place at a three-day CwG event I recently facilitated in Scotland. In the presentation hall tucked into the heart of the fabled and famous alternative community known as Findhorn, I ventured in my third visit there to explore the possibility of personal transformation as an achievable experience.
Titled The Real God, the Real You--the Process of Re-identification, the program spoke of humanity's actual place in the overall scheme of things, rather than the place to which we have relegated ourselves through what I call Separation Theology
Separation Theology is a theology which says that God is "over there" and we are "over here," and that the two shall never become one--unless they do. It all depends on how we live our lives. If we are good human beings and do what God wants, we will be allowed back into the Kingdom of Heaven from which we (or, more precisely, our ancestors) had been evicted. If we are bad human beings and do not do what God wants, our banishment shall never be lifted, but continue forever in more severe form, accompanied as it will be by extraordinary and unthinkable pain inflicted by unending torture--this as a punishment from God for offending Him by acting badly...or, if we have actually acted pretty well, for seeking to return to Him in the Wrong Way, along the Wrong Path.
The exploration at Findhorn emerged from the Conversations with God series of books--nine in all, covering 3,000 pages of dialogue surrounding these and other ecclesiastical issues. Speaking to the group assembled there, I shared that to me the single most impacting piece of information in the CwG texts was the statement in HOME WITH GOD in a Life That Never Ends that "death is a process of re-identification."
In this final installment of the CwG series God reveals to humanity the process of what we call "death" and what happens after it, as well as the Eternal Journey of the Soul from the Spiritual Realm to the Physical Realm and back again, and the purpose of all of Life
Without getting into that in detail here (a close reading or re-reading of this remarkable and theologically exciting book may be in order for you here if you have an interest in life's cosmology, its purpose, its point, and its outcome), let me simply say that the situation in which we find ourselves on this planet today is that we continue to try to solve the world's problem at every level except the level at which the problem exists.
First, we try to solve it as if it was a political problem, because we are used to using political pressure on this planet to push energy around to get people to do what they don't want to do. We hold discussions and write laws and pass legislation and adopt resolutions in every local, national, regional, and global organization we can think of to try to solve the problem with words--but it does not work. Whatever short-term solutions we may create evaporate over time, the problem reemerges. It will not go away. So we say, "Okay, this is not a political problem and it cannot be solved with political means. It must be an economic problem..." You see, we are used to using economic power on this planet to push energy around to get people to do what they don't want to do.
So we try to solve the problem as if it were an economic problem. We throw money at it, or withhold money from it (as in the form of sanctions), to try to solve the problem with cash--but it does not work. Whatever short-term solutions we may create evaporate over time, the problem reemerges. It will not go away. And so we say, "Okay, this is not an economic problem, and it cannot be solved by economic means. It must be a military problem..." We are used to using military might on this planet to push energy around to get people to do what they don't want to do.
So we try to solve the problem as if it were a military problem. We throw bullets at it and drop bombs on it to try to solve the problem with weapons --but it does not work. Whatever short-term solutions we may create evaporate over time, the problem reemerges. It will not go away. And so we say, "Okay, this is not an easy problem. This is going to be a long, hard slog. Many lives will be lost in trying to solve this problem. But we are not going to give up. We are going to solve this problem if it kills us." And we don't even see the irony in our own statements.
You see, we are very used to trying to force solutions in our world. Yet solutions that are forced are never solutions at all, they are simply postponements. I know that you have all heard the definition of insanity. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting to get a different result.
The sadness of humanity is that we are forever ready to settle for postponements in place of solutions. Only primitive cultures and primitive beings do that. Highly evolved beings would never, ever settle for a 10,000-year-postponement in the solving of their largest problem.
The problem in the world today is a spiritual problem. It has to do with what people believe. It has to do with our most fervently held thoughts and ideas about Life, about God, and most of all, about ourselves.
This problem of beliefs creates a condition of hopelessness, helplessness, anger, and rebellion. That condition produces a circumstance of run-away violence.
The problem of beliefs is a problem which all of us have helped to create. This is true because all of us have beliefs--and if those beliefs are mistaken, and we then pass on those beliefs to our children and our grandchildren and our neighbors and our friends--we join together to write a Cultural Story that creates the very Conditions which produce the very Circumstances we are trying to avoid. Yet we cannot eliminate them and we cannot avoid them until we eliminate and avoid the beliefs that created them.
And that is OUR work, my friends. That is OUR job. We must change the Cultural Story that created the Conditions that produce the Circumstances we seek to avoid. Yet we will never do that, we will never even be able to, as long as we refuse to acknowledge our own responsibility in the matter.
It is WE who hold the beliefs that we hold, that create the Cultural Stories that start the spiral going. We, ALL of us --- including the people who use violence to announce and to scream out their discontent --- must change our cultural story, must change our beliefs, if we expect and hope to see a change in humanity's behavior.
This is because all behavior springs from belief. All behavior. Everything you do, you do because you believe something. You believe something about who you are, you believe something about what is currently happening, you believe something about what you are doing--and, most sadly of all, you believe that you are "right" about all of that. The possibility that you may be "wrong" never occurs to you.
Yet we are wrong. About almost everything. Certainly about almost everything that is important, such as God, and who God is, and what God wants. And Life, and how it works, and its purpose and function. And we are wrong about each other, and about ourselves, and who we are in relationship to each other...and to God.
The problem in life is a spiritual problem--and the spiritual problem is a simple problem of misidentification. We have misidentified Who We Really Are. We have failed to answer accurately life's four major questions: Who are we? Where are we? Why are we? What are we doing here?
Most people have not even asked themselves those questions, much less answered them.
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The Calendar
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A look at events at which Neale Donald Walsch will share the message of Conversations with God in the weeks ahead. You can learn more about the work of the ReCreation Foundation at these events...and on its official website, www.cwg.org, as well.
NOTE: Not all events are sponsored by the ReCreation Foundation, but because all of the events move forward the message of Conversations with God, which is the mission of the Foundation, the Foundation is pleased to inform you of them.
October 7 - 12, 2008
Dorset, England
Your Conversation with God - The 5 Day Retreat
www.lovelightpromotions.com
October 17 - 19, 2008
Venice, Italy
Workshop
Stefano - Tel: +39 338 7180315
Email: stefrusso@yahoo.it
October 24 - 26, 2008
Cabourg, Normandy, France
Workshop: Another Way of Loving
Tel: 00331 5375 3535
Email: info@recreer.net
www.grandfestival.fr
October 31 - November 2, 2008
Copenhagen, Denmark
Workshop
Email: svend.trier@get2net.dk
November 5, 2009
New York City, New York
Free evening program: Have Your
Own Conversation with God
East West Living Book Store
6:30 to 9 pm
Tel: 352-442-2244
Email: support@nealedonaldwalsch.com
November 6, 2008
Happier Than God: The One Day Experience
A spiritual renewal event
New York City
Tel: 352-442-2244
Email: support@nealedonaldwalsch.com
November 8 - 11, 2008
Phoenix, AZ
Celebrate Your Life
Contact +1-480-970-8447
www.celebrateyourlife.org
November 12, 2008
Dallas, Texas
Benefit Lecture for Free2BU program
"Peace begins at home"
Unity Church of Dallas
Tel: (214) 717-1310
Email: Angel@Free2BU.com
December 28, 2008 - January 1, 2009
Ashland, OR
Your Conversation with God
The Holiday Retreat - The 5-Day Experience
Will: +1-352-442-2244
Email: will@cwg.org
www.cwg.org/main.php?p=Retreats&sub=RSchedule
January 22 - 25, 2009
Los Angeles, CA
The Freedom Formula Experience
Contact: +1-800-930-3713
Email: Info@thefreedomfoformula.com
March 10 - 12, 2009
Ashland, OR
Deep Study CwG Intensive
Contact Will 352-442-2244
email: will@cwg.org
March 20 - 21, 2009
Denver, CO
Weekend Workshop
Mile Hi Church
Contact: +1 303-232-4079
June 19 - 22, 2009
Golden, B.C. Canada
Quantum Leap Retreat
Quantum Leaps Lodge
Email: info@quantumleaps.ca
quantumleaps.ca/neale_donald_walsch.php
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