Neale Talks About Courage

 Neale Talks About Courage My dear friends...

It takes an enormous amount of courage to get through life. I never realized that it did, but it does. I mean, when I was young, it didn't seem to me that life required bravery, in particular. Determination, perhaps. Stick-to-it-iveness, perhaps. A lot of tolerance for older people who didn't understand anything at all, perhaps. But not necessarily a whole bunch of bravery.

I was wrong.

As soon as I found out what life was really all about -- which wasn't until I was 50 years old, by the way -- I understood very quickly that courage would be required. Yet even then, I don't think I was very clear about how much. Now I am.

What life is really all about is the journey of our soul. We are on an endless walk through time, moving from the Spiritual Realm to the Physical Realm and back again. This is a joyous journey, let me make it clear, and that is why we have created it and are taking it. The joy in the journey comes from experiencing and re-experiencing, creating and re-creating, knowing and knowing again, Who We Really Are. Midway between the Physical Realm and the Spiritual Realm is the Realm of Ultimate Reality. This is where we reunite with the Essential Essence in the moment of bliss that is described by some Eastern mystical traditions as "Nirvana."

All of this is described in beautiful detail in the extraordinary addition to the Conversations with God series of books: HOME WITH GOD in a Life That Never Ends. And now that I know exactly what is going on here, I can get on with my real reason for being on the earth. This doesn't mean that my day-to-day life has to change. I don't have to change jobs. I don't have to change locations. I don't have to change my marital status. I don't have to change anything in my life that is in my life right now. What I will change, quite voluntarily, is not what I am doing in my life, but how I am doing it.

If I understand that this physical life was created for me as a means of deciding and creating, becoming and experiencing Who I Really Am and Who I Now Choose to Be, then the way I move through every moment of my life will be quite different from the way it was before I understood this. Because, you see, in every moment of my life I will be inviting myself -- no, more than that...challenging myself -- to become the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever I held about who I am.

If I say that I am "he who is compassionate," it will not be enough for me to simply be as compassionate as I was yesterday. As I re-create myself anew in the next golden moment of now, I will reach for the next grandest expression of compassion. I cannot be satisfied with the way I was regarding compassion last month, or last year, or in the decade before this. If I say that I am "he who is loving," it will not be enough for me to simply be as loving as I was yesterday. As I re-create myself in the next golden moment of now, I will reach for the next grandest expression of love. I cannot be satisfied with the way I was regarding love last month, or last year, or in the decade before this. And so, too, with every aspect of divinity that I choose to express through me, as me.

It takes great courage to move to the next level. And it produces great joy when one gets there. Ask any Olympic skater. Ask any ballet dancer. Ask any writer who has just finished a book, or any athlete who has just made the team, or any actor who has just been added to the cast. Or ask anyone at all who has strived for and achieved anything of value in life -- such as, for instance, a beautiful lifelong committed relationship with another human being.

Moving through the rocky shoals of lifelong relationship, and keeping that relationship intact, requires great courage. It is one of the most courageous things that any person can do, and surely one of the most difficult. The same is true of one's commitment to any significant and meaningful endeavor. And imagine if we are talking about a lifelong relationship with God…and with the highest Self.

Many people move through the entirety of their lives and never have a truly meaningful and significant relationship with their own highest Self. Many people do not even know what that is. Many people are so caught up in a false story about who they are that they miss the opportunity altogether in this lifetime to create and develop the kind of relationship with God and Self that I am talking about here.

I don't mean that to be judgmental, it is simply and merely an observation. And I could be wrong. My observation may be inaccurate. But this much I can tell you. Those who do create and develop the kind of relationship with God and Self that I am talking about here have learned, as have I, that it takes sheer bravery to do so. That is because in the search for the higher Self, we inevitably encounter the lower self -- and that is never a pretty picture.

As I encounter my lower self -- which I promise you, I do every day, and sometimes in the most unexpected ways -- I must call up great compassion and great love. I must learn to give these gifts to myself. And that's not an easy thing to do. I find that I am the last person that I am willing to forgive. I have made some grievous errors in my life. I have done some very unkind things. I have inflicted enormous hurt on others. I have been unbelievably selfish and enormously insensitive and uncaring. And that is only the half of it.

And as I move through my life I am deeply aware of all that I have said above, of every moment in which I have come up short, of each instance in which I failed to simply be nice, much less be grand. And so now, as I move into the last third of my life, I find that it takes great courage to face myself, to face my past, and to face the commitment that I have made within. For that commitment calls me to a higher expression and a larger experience of my True Self. And I am confronted with that choice every moment of every day.

Every time I look at myself in the mirror, I am reminded of it. Every time I look into the face of those Beloved Others who populate my life, who I have created as my companions on this journey and the co-creators of my life script, I am reminded of it. Every time I pick up a really good spiritual book, or even read articles such as this (much less write them), I am reminded of it. Life reminds me of my commitment to life every moment of the life that I am living. That is the purpose of life -- and I have only in these most recent years understood that.

So today I embark on the journey once again, asking God for Her help, feeling that He will be with me every step along the way, and praying that I may this day move closer to the goal that I have set for myself: that I might forgive myself for my yesterdays, that I might love myself in my todays, and I might experience myself, at last, as Who I Really Am in my tomorrows.

One of my greatest joys is that I know I am not walking alone. All of you are walking with me. We are embarked on this journey together, and together, with compassion and love as our guide, we can lead each other back Home. That is our invitation, that is our opportunity, and that is our reason for encountering esach other as we are in this very moment. When I understand that, this becomes the Holy Moment, and I honor it and experience it as sacred, both now and even forevermore. 

And life is never again the same.

With Pure Love,

Read this week's Letter to Neale here

*****

Read a message from one of the prisoners impacted by our Prison Outreach HERE

Dear Neale,

If we are creating our realities by our thoughts, words and actions, what about the victims of brutal crimes, senseless slaughters/mutilations? Do those people choose to die that way?

Alfreda, PA

Neale Responds

My friend,

You have asked a very fair and penetrating question. And the issue is even larger than you have stated it. For it is not only a matter of our intentions and choices, but of God’s. I mean, is it God’s will (even if it is not ours) that these horrible things should happen? Philosophers and theologians have been trying to answer that question from the beginning of time.

Alfreda, I was given an extraordinary answer to this question when I asked it in my dialogue.

First, it was made clear to me that there are no victims and no villains in life. Now that was difficult for me, because to my eyes so many of the things we have done to each other are very cruel, very horrible, and to me the people who perpetrated these heinous crimes certainly were the “villains” of our society. Still, God said in CwG, Book 2, “I have sent you nothing but angels.” And the parable of The Little Soul and the Sun in CwG, Book 1 explains how this could be true.

That parable has been made into a wonderful children’s book of the same name by Hampton Roads. I cannot recommend it highly enough as a way for children (and adults) to better understand why, as wonderful Rabbi Lawrence Kushner puts it, “bad things happen to good people.”

In brief (re-read the CwG or children’s book material to get the full essence of this), the human soul is an aspect of divinity, choosing freely to experience life in the universe (and, as part of that experience, life on earth from time to time) as a means of recreating and experiencing itself as who it is. Now in the realm of the relative (which is the realm in which we live in the physical worlds), you cannot experience that Which You Are except in the space of that Which You Are Not. For in the absence of that Which You Are Not, that which you are—is not!

That is, Alfreda in the absence of “small,” the concept of “big” cannot be experienced. It can be imagined, but it cannot be experienced. The only way to experience a purely conceptual idea such as “big” is to experience a purely conceptual idea such as “small.” Now in very elementary terms, Alfreda, this is why God created “evil.” For in order for God to experience Itself as the all-consuming good, there had to be something called the all-consuming evil.

Of course, there was not. There was only God. God is all there was, all there is, and all there ever will be. Yet God wished to know Itself in Its own experience. This is the same wish we all have. Indeed, this “we all” I’ve just spoken of is God Itself. Every part of life is an aspect of divinity, seeking expression and experience of the divine. Yet that which is divine cannot know and experience Its own divinity except in the presence of that which is not divine. And the problem is, that which is not divine does not exist. So, since we have the power to create anything, we have simply made it up! That is to say, we have imagined it. We have literally called it forth.

Now this whole process is not one which any individual soul undertakes consciously. We set our agendas, Alfreda, long before we enter the human body. We even make agreements with other divine beings on how we might best create and experience ourselves as the aspect of divinity we choose in this lifetime. So, no, it cannot fairly be said that, at a conscious level, people choose the horrible experiences to which many of them are subjected. So what does that do to the theory that we are creating our own reality by our thoughts, words and actions? It doesn’t change it one bit.

It just explains the mechanism by which that reality comes to be experienced. As CwG carefully explains, the moment we think, say, or do a thing that initiates the process of expressing Who We Really Are, everything unlike it may come into the space. This can be necessary in order to create a context within which the experience of Self which we have chosen may be realized.

Every religion on the earth teaches forgiveness as the path to salvation. Most of them simply teach it for the wrong reason, saying that we should forgive, and leave the judging to God. Well, the news is that God will not judge, either. Would God ask us to do something that God would not do? That would be asking us to be bigger than God! Yet the reason God will never judge, and asks us not to judge, either, will be made clear to us when we return to the realm of the absolute. It is then we will understand again God’s promise: “I have sent you nothing but angels.”

I strongly recommend that you get a copy of The Little Soul and the Sun. And read it to your children—or any children with whom you come in regular contact. For if children understand this concept early, it will change the world.

With Love,