Weekly Bulletin #316
November 8, 2008
It's the Biggest Election of your Life
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
17 Steps to being Happier Than God
Best of the Blogs
The Calendar
Notes from Neale...
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My dear friends...
We have just undergone a sea change in American politics – and this is part of a larger change that is now being visited upon the earth and her people.
I have written about this in Tomorrow's God, and it is happening. We are going to see in the months and years just ahead a shift in global consciousness and spiritual awareness the likes of which we could never have dreamed of even a few short years ago. The election of Barack Obama this week is a huge sign of that.
No matter which candidate you voted for, whether you favored the Republican or the Democratic, you cannot help but acknowledge this enormous and historic shift. Even John McCain and President George W. Bush both acknowledged it in separate remarks following the election. Both acknowledged the enormous historic significance of what just happened – and, in a spirit of extraordinary graciousness, both men asked all Americans to give our new President their uncompromising support as the nation moves forward to face the challenges that loom ahead.
There will be other changes as well. Our financial system has already changed. Our environment is changing rapidly. Our social system (the way we live together and work together) is changing right before our eyes. Our schools are changing, both in approach and in content. And yes, our spirituality is changing, too—and not in small ways.
I am going to be talking more and more about all of this in the weeks ahead. My lectures and programs all over Europe, on a tour that just ended this week, focused tightly on what I have been calling The New Cosmology. This is an entirely new way – a revolutionary way, really -- of holding our experience of God and of understanding the purpose of life.
I will be sharing this with a handful of people on Dec. 7 in Medford, Oregon when I deliver the first presentation of a new one-day program that I have created. (For more info go to www.nealedonaldwalsch.com.)
And the Foundation’s annual Holiday Retreat has been filling up very fast. There are still some spaces left... but they are going quickly. This is our most popular program every year, taking place annually in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. For more information on this wonderful end-of-year spiritual renewal opportunity, please go to www.cwg.org.
We will all be facing significant challenges in the times just ahead. There has never been a more appropriate time to fall back to our spiritual fortress. Conversations with God tells us that we are never alone – and that we are never more than a thought away from help and guidance, courage and clarity.
As we move into our uncertain tomorrow, let us hold fast to our certain source of wisdom and strength – our friendship with God. And I will see you here next week.
Neale.
17 Steps to being Happier Than God
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In the book Happier Than God we are given 17 steps to unlimited happiness, any one of which will work to bring us greater joy... even in times of great challenge such as those we are all facing today.
Below are the first three of those steps. I will be publishing more of them in the Bulletin in the weeks ahead. Of course, all of them will be found in this latest book in the CwG cosmology.
1. Bring an end to Separation Theology.
Work in your own life and your personal belief system to eliminate any thought of separation from God. Just get rid of that theology.
Separation Theology is a theology that insists that we are “over here" and God is “over there." Its doctrine tells us that God separated us from God as punishment for our sins, and that our job now is to get back to God, which is possibly only if God will allow it, which God will do only if we obey God’s commands, follow God’s laws, and submit to God’s will. In short, we must do What God Wants. (For my separate exploration of this subject, see What God Wants, from Atria Books, 2006.)
This Separation Theology has produced a Separation Cosmology (that is, a way of looking at all of life on this planet that includes separation as its basic principle), which, in turn, has produced a Separation Sociology (that is, a way of socializing our species that requires us to act as separate beings serving our own best and separate interests), which has produced a Separation Pathology (that is, pathological behavior producing suffering, conflict, violence, and death by our own hands).
Only when our Separation Theology is replaced by a Unity Theology will our Separation Pathology be healed. We must come to understand that all of life is One. This is your first step and it is mine. It is the jumping off point. It is the beginning of the end of how things now are. It is the start of a new creation, of the placing into reality of the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about who you are.
The Unspoken Truth reveals to us that Oneness is not a characteristic of life... life is a characteristic of Oneness.
Life is the expression of Oneness Itself. God is the expression of Oneness Itself. Life and God are One. Oneness is God and life. It is a circle.
When we understand this, we see God in everyone and in everything. Including our divine selves. We see clearly that we are God Godding. That is, God in the act of recreating Godself. God, and life, evolves. God never stays the same, but becomes bigger and more of what God is, in every moment.
God is more of everything now than God was a nanosecond ago. When we solve our own case of “mistaken identity," when we identify ourselves as That Which God Is, we will be as happy as God.
But now follow this: If we use the term “God" to indicate the Collective Divinity and the term “you" to indicate the Individuation of Divinity, and if the day comes when you have raised your consciousness to a level where you are happier than many other Individuations... well, then, you will be happier than “God."
The Individuation that is “You" will be of higher consciousness than the largest number of other individuations of Divinity that we call “God," just as previous messengers and avatars and masters (Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and more) have experienced their Individuated Consciousness to be raised above the level of the Collective Consciousness. It then became their mission to raise the Collective Consciousness of humanity so that the Entirety Which Is God could evolve even further, continuing to expand in consciousness and total self-awareness.
This is what they were doing here.
All of life is Divine, and when we treat all of life as Divine we will change everything. For how can one aspect, how can a single Individuation of Divinity, ever be totally happy so long as any other Individuation is totally unhappy? The answer is, it cannot. And so, we will raise each other up, that we might all experience ourselves, one by one, being “happier than God."
“I am come that you may have life, and have it more abundantly," saith the Master. And the Master-in-You will one day say the same thing. When the earth is thus transformed, person by person, no more will children die of starvation. No more will millions suffer from oppression. No more will nation battle nation. When we treat everyone as Divine, there will be war no more.
2. Stay in touch with who you are.
Remember that you are not your body, but a soul traveling with the body on a journey to joy. Remember that your soul is an everlasting part of God. Remember that you and God are One. Then become clear on what is most important to that Individuation of Divinity that is manifesting as You, right here, right now. Treat everything and everyone as if it was perfectly tuned to everything and perfectly timed to your soul’s agenda. Understand that because of Who You Are, nothing can hurt you, and there is nothing you need to be absolutely happy in this when/where of your eternal existence.
What I am saying here is to see yourself as a Spiritual Being with a body, on the sacred mission of self-realization and self-creation. First, realize Who You Really Are, then re-create yourself anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about that. Your task each day—and it is not as difficult as it may at first seem—is this: Remember your identity. Retain your identity. Recreate your identity.
Remember your identity in the face of every evidence to the contrary.
Retain your identity in the face of every situation that would deny it.
Recreate your identity in the face every invitation from life to stay right where you are.
3. Give others every experience you seek.
The fastest and easiest way to retain your identity is to place others in touch with theirs. The fastest way to have any experience is to cause others to have the same experience. If you wish to experience your Divine Self and your true identity, cause another to experience their Divine Self and their true identity.
Give people back to themselves.
You can do this in a hundred ways in a thousand lives in a million moments.
Whatever you wish to experience in your own lifetime, cause another to experience in theirs. If you wish to experience love, cause another to be loved. If you wish to experience abundance, cause another to be abundant. If you wish to experience success, cause another to be successful. If you wish to experience power, cause another to be powerful. If you wish to experience wisdom, cause another to be wise. If you wish to experience romance, cause another to be romanced. If you wish to experience forgiveness, cause another to be forgiven. If you wish to experience safety and security, cause another to be safe and secure. If you wish to experience perfect partnership, cause another to be perfectly partnered. If you wish to experience peace, cause another to be at peace.
What I am saying here is that Personal Creation begins best with another. Focus first on the other, the other, always the other, never first on the Self, and that which the Self wishes to experience will be realized sevenfold. Whatever you wish to create for yourself, create for another. This is the Energy of Attraction at its most powerful.
Why this works: What you bring to another, you bring to the Self, for there is no other in ultimate reality. There is only the Self. When you understand this, you understand everything you will ever need to know about how to be happier than God.
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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Is Oneness 'sameness'?
(Posted on Beliefnet on Thursday October 30, 2008)
Is there any place for the idea of "Oneness" in our political system -- or in any other human system, for that matter?
On October 28 the reader posting here as "SheerLuckHolmes" added the entry below to the Comments Section of this blog, in response to my question here about why there is such a Great Divide in America today. I love this Comment entry, and I wanted to interact with "SheerLuckHolmes" on this today...My remarks are in italic.
Neale...Your book series, CWG, pretty much makes this clear. There is so much "this vs. that", et. al., because the basic belief system held tightly by humanity in separateness. The greatest majority currently on the planet have no doubt what-so-ever that we are separate from God and separate from every other person on the planet. With this belief system coloring all the thought patterns, speech & behaviors, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to come to any agreements for getting along with each other.
I agree with you in large measure. However, I am wondering if we can at least learn to disagree agreeably while we are waiting for all of us to "get" that "we are all One." By the way, "we are all One" does NOT mean "we are all the Same." Yet it is as CwG says...contrast does not have to produce conflict, nor difference create division.
The answer for humanity is not for us to become Identical, but to remain Individual. Yet Individual does not have to mean Indecipherable or Indistinguishable. We are all Individuated Aspects of The Divine, yet the great wonder of The Divine is that It can make Itself manifest in a million-billion-ka-jillion different ways and forms.
So I am not sure that a thought pattern of separateness makes it "difficult, if not impossible, to come to any agreements for getting along with each other." I think that we CAN come to such agreements before we come to mutual understandings of our Oneness and mutual acceptance of our basic Single Large Identity.
People with the wealth of Warren Buffett make a stock buy of a billion dollars and the 'average man' finds that amount of wealth hard to conceptualize. Then that common man learns that this billion dollars is less than 5% of Mr. Buffett's entire wealth and it is off the charts incomprehensible.
You mention the Democratic candidate's plan to "redistribute the wealth." Others say that is moving toward socialism, still others say it is moving toward fairness. Socialism has been tried before and failed. Capitalism has and is being tried before and is currently failing. All the other 'ism's have been tried and failed. What hasn't been tried yet is any system where the motivating belief is truly 'we are all one'.
Here I agree with you completely. I am now urging humanity to consider embracing a New Cosmology. That is, a new way of looking at all of life, which can produce a new way of experiencing it. This would include, of course, a new way of experiencing our economies; a whole new financial system; an entirely new commerce.
The New Cosmology Movement will ask and answer life's Four Profound Questions:
1. Who are we?
2. Where are we?
3. Why are we where we are?
4. What are we doing?
A much quoted statement of Jesus is something like, it would be easier for a camel to enter the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
This does not mean that it is "bad" to be rich, or that rich people cannot get into heaven. What it means is that riches create great temporal temptations that can make it very difficult for the average person to keep his eye on the Main Chance. Wealthy people can more easily, one presumes, get "caught up" in the wonders of physicalization - to the point where all focus on the True Intent of the Soul is lost.
I belief this is because, after a certain point, true wealth becomes just numbers and, more importantly, power. And that power is always power over others. This is a demonstration of separation, in this case the power of the wealthy over the unwealthy.
Yes, agreed. Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Do you think any 'wealthy' person on earth would give up their wealth so that every person on the planet could be given an equal amount? Do you think either McCain or Obama would give up all of their money and accept a check for equal the amount that every other person on the planet would get also? The belief system of us vs. them is just too strong.
No, nor would I. Yet that is not the requirement of Oneness. The Unity of All That Is does not require All That Is to be Equal in All Of Its Manifestations. In fact, such Equality would defeat the entire purpose of physical life, which is to create relativity, and thus, contrast. So let us no confuse "Oneness" with "Identicality" or "Equality." No one would argue for a single moment that every person on the planet be paid the exact same amount of money, no matter what they did for a living. That would not be Oneness, that would be insanity. It would also rob the species of much of its incentive.
No, what "Oneness" demonstrates is not "Forced Equality" - the same check for everyone - but the same OPPORTUNITY for everyone. Every aspect of Divinity is given the same opportunity to demonstrate and express the same degree, indeed, the ultimate degree, of Divinity. Yet not every individuation of God does so...nor should be forced to.
The wonder of life is Choice. It is the gift given to all of us. Religion calls this Free Will. When Choice is taken away from us, either directly or as a result of a system that simply robs us of it (as do some political systems and some economic systems and some social systems in our world), then Separateness rears its ugly head. Then we experience not only "difference," but "division." It is THEN, SheerLuck, that "The belief system of us vs. them is just too strong." So what we need is a changed orthodoxy. A different cultural story. A New Cosmology.
This change is not going to happen over night, nor is it gong to happen over the next four years, regardless of who wins. It is going to take another generation, starting right now with each person who sees the value of 'we are all one'.
As each individual starts changing their thoughts, words and deeds to live their spirituality of oneness with others, things will change.
Indeed.
I challenge each person reading this blog to examine their thoughts, words and deeds today. Can you give examples of how you are LIVING your spirituality on a daily basis to treat every other person you deal with as yourself?
Wow. Now this I totally "get." This was a great challenge, SheerLuck. This was a great challenge to place before us. Terrific. Exactly on point.
I was once asked by a teacher of mine, "If you were brought to trial today and prosecuted for being a person of spirituality; would you be convicted by an overwhelming amount of evidence?" So I ask you, the reader, would you be convicted?
I am certain that I would be found innocent, by reason of insanity. No one would ever accuse me of being a person of spirituality. Not if they observed my behaviors for even one day. No, I would stand innocent on that charge. But I would be innocent by reason of insanity. It is insane for me to experience and express myself as NOT being a "person of spirituality."
I am acting insanely. Every day. And so is most of humanity. Jesus did not act insanely. Neither did Buddha. Neither did Muhammad. Neither did Moses. Neither did Gandhi. Neither did Mother Theresa. Neither did, for that matter, my own mother...and very many other ordinary, "regular" people. Perhaps you are one of them. I most definitely am not.
So, SheerLuck, I am going to take you up on your challenge. I am going to do my darndest to treat every other person I deal with as I would want to be treated. It all gets back to something quite simple: The Golden Rule.
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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.
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 7, 2008
Medford, Oregon
When Everything Changes, CHANGE EVERYTHING
A Doorway to Peace in a Time of Turmoil
A one-day spiritual enrichment event
Tel: (352) 442-2244
Email: support@nealedonaldwalsch.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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