October 2007 Archives

Wednesday is Question and Answer Day on the blog...a time for exploring many of the questions that people have recently asked about the nine Conversations with God books and the New Spirituality. Here's this week's entry...

Topic: Wanting and Choosing
Question asked by: Tricia Bratton
Question: I remember in your book, I think it was the transcript of a talk you gave on abundance, you made the comment that you were wearing expensive Italian shoes, and that it took you a long time to be comfortable with wearing shoes that cost that much.

I know I have some work to do in the area of lack and abundance. I work a lot with the poor and the homeless. Last year I went to Nicaragua, where we fed a meal to families and children who scrounge through refuse in the dump outside of their town in order to survive. I came away from that experience feeling almost embarrassed by the excess of our country, and even myself, in the light of such need, in realizing that we throw away more food at a meal than these people eat in a day or a week.I wondered how much do I really need, and can I live more simply and fully without such material excess? If we are all one, and the suffering of others affects me, don't I have a responsibility to pare down my excesses and material comforts?

I used to resent the rich, and I don't anymore. I know some good and loving wealthy people. But I struggle with discerning how much do I really need to use of the earth's resources when my excesses are so extreme in light of the world's poor?

I understand my struggle with abundance and lack creates the money issues I have at the present time. And I am eager to overcome it. I am just not sure how to change my thought about this matter.

Neale's Response: I believe that we might all benefit from the adage, "Live simply, so that others may simply live." I do not believe, however, that this means we may not have any "luxuries" in our lives. An occasional luxury is a wonderful experience, and us giving ourselves that offers a wonderful example. It does not teach anyone anything for us to live without nice things that we can afford. Luxury to excess -- which is what I believe you are talking about, Tricia -- is something I have sought to avoid.

Changing your experience of lack is about changing your thought that there is "not enough." CwG in the first chapter of the first book says that the three basic principles of life are:

1. We are all one.
2. There's enough.
3. There's nothing we have to do.

Those foundational principles, setting the tone for the entire 9 books that follow, encapsulate the Conversations with God message. These statements alone could change the world.

(Ask Neale may be accessed on a daily basis in the Messengers’ Circle at Neale's personal website: www.nealedonaldwalsch.com. Each week Neale selects a question from those posted there and publishes it in this blog.)

I have been feeling wonderful lately. As I explained yesterday, I have been having many encounters lately with The Holy Experience. I think that part of what is behind all of this may have to do with the fact that I was remembering when, many months ago now, I spent the entire weekend going over the "script" of my life. I mean really, not figuratively. I had the screenwriter and the producer/director, and the director of photography of Conversations with God: The Movie at my house for three days going over the first draft of the script for the film, and that kind of experience can throw one into deep introspection, as you might imagine.

I haven't lived my life the way I would have liked to. I mean, I have made some choices that have been hurtful to others, and I so regret that. Yet I see now, as I review the entirety of my life, that certain things had to happen exactly as they have happened in order for me to be here now, just as I am. And I am clear that the God of my understanding forgives me completely and utterly for my offenses, holding me in the cradle of Her love, embracing me in the warmth of His compassion and deep understanding, encouraging me now and giving me the strength to move forward with my mission in this life.

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This is another in a continuing series of blogs on The Holy Experience. The series began a week ago yesterday.
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My mission is plain and it is simple: to give people back to themselves. This is the mission of all of us, and each of us is playing it out in the way that is natural and perfect for us.

We have been sent here to experience and to express ourselves in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are, that we might know ourelves as God would have us know us -- as part of the Everlasting Divine. We have been given the gift of God's joy and God's peace in our heart, and offered an invitation to share it with everyone whose life we touch -- regardless of exterior appearances that sometimes seem to make it impossible to do so.

I have come to see that all of life's circumstances, conditions, events, and experiences have been sent to me as gifts, creating a Contextual Field within which I might choose how I wish to experience myself, and decide what part of that interior experience I shall now express in physical form. And so I thank God for each and every manifestation of life now producing that Contextual Field. I shall judge not, and neither condemn.

This living without judgment is the hardest part for me, but it is the beginning of the Holy Experience, and as I have looked at my life in depth in these most recent days it has been made clear to me that so many people would have to live without judgment of ME in order for me to feel the love that is all around me. And so, the least I can do in exchange for this unspeakable blessing is to offer the same in return, and to live without judgment of others. For who among us shall cast the first stone?

I was invigorated this morning by this freedom-giving thought: I am forgiven, by God and by all those who love me. I choose now to forgive myself as well, thus to dwell in the joyful place of enlivened creation. For nothing good is created from guilt, and all things wonderful emerge from joy.

What a joy this life is, with all its sadness and pain, its strife and travail, its tests and its obstacles. What a joy to be alive and experiencing all of it, and to be able to choose which part of it to internalize and call my own. Having this choice, and exercising it, is the Holy Experience.

The end is the beginning

I said in the last installment which appeared here last Thursday that each moment in life is truly holy because each moment ends. This is not something that everyone knows. Everyone knows that each moment ends, but everyone does not know that for this reason each moment is holy.

And even while everyone knows that each moment ends, many people hope that no really wonderful experience ends. This is a contradiction in terms, yet people still engage in this wishing. They hope that their perfect relationship will never end, or that their perfect job will never end, or that their particular and present happiness, however it is showing up, will never end—but it always does. This does not mean that it will not or cannot be replaced by a new happiness, but the present happiness will always end.

That is something that is very important to remember. It is also important to know that the end of our present happiness is the beginning of our new happiness. Now if one’s happiness is tied to present and particular circumstances, one’s happiness is always and forever in jeopardy. Yet if one’s happiness rides the tide of all events, and, indeed, creates them, then one has discovered and embraced the Holy Experience

It is the very fact that each moment is like a snowflake, breath-takingly beautiful, awesomely perfect in its design, absolutely individual and unlike any other, that makes it so remarkable, and renders it holy.

Do we not fall in love with people for this exact reason? Why not, then, fall in love with moments in precisely the same way? Deciding to do that is the beginning of the Holy Experience. It is the Choice Point of Sacred Creation.

There is nothing more profoundly inspiring and absolutely empowering than this fact that each moment is new. It is born, it lives, and dies, right NOW.

Right here, right Now, is each moment born. Right here, right Now, is each moment lived. Right here, right Now, is each moment ended. It is all happening at one Time, in this moment, right Now.

The wonder of all this is that This Moment can be recreated from moment to moment, or created in a new way, with whatever modifications, enhancements, alterations, or adjustments that we choose.

We are not who we were yesterday. We are not even who we were a moment ago. Nothing is. And yet it can be, if we choose for it to be. All we need do is recreate it.

In life we can recreate ourselves as we just were, or we can recreate ourselves anew, in the next moment. We are always remaking ourselves. It is never a question of whether, but of how. Are we recreating ourselves as we were before, or in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are?

The Holy Experience is the experience of recreation. It is the experience of Total Knowing that the Totality of You is Never Known. It cannot be, because it has not yet been created.

Everything that ever was, is now, and ever will be, is now. And so, in the language of the Realm of the Absolute, there is nothing that has not been created. Only in the language of the Realm of the Relative could the statement be made that the Totality of You cannot be known because it has not yet been created.

In truth, all of You has been created. Yet all of You has not yet been experienced by the individuated part of You that is the localized expression of the Universal Self.

The only way for the individuated part of You that is the localized expression of the Universal Self to experience all of You is to recreate parts of You until all of You has been Known. Yet the All of You is infinite and eternal. Therefore, it cannot be known or experienced in any relative sense, but only in an Absolute Way. Since the Local You does not know that it is the Universal You, it imagines that it is creating, rather than recreating, itself in each moment. This is its conceit.

The Holy Experience is the dropping of this conceit. It is the shedding of this illusion. It is the lowering of this veil. This happens when we come to know that we are not who we thought we were. It occurs when we understand that we are nothing at all, except exactly what we are right here, right now. And that we can change that at our absolute discretion.

Who are you right now? What are you? Are you confused? Are you frustrated, finding all this difficult to follow? Are you annoyed that you are not ”getting it,” or overjoyed that you are?

You are none of these things unless you say that you are. And you cease to be these things the moment that you say you are not. That moment is the holy moment. That experience is the Holy Experience.

When you understand the truth of Who You Are, you understand infinity. You can actually experience this understanding. That is, you can embrace it not only intellectually, but experientially.

There are at least five areas in which you can do so. Many more, I am sure, but five that I can immediately think of. You can experience infinity in:

1. Love
2. Wisdom
3. Abundance
4. Energy
5. Divinity

These five areas of life expression have, in my mind as I think of them, several sub-areas. And so the complete listing looks to me like this:

1. Love/Relationship/Sexuality
2. Wisdom/Awareness/Consciousness
3. Abundance/Wealth/Health
4. Energy/Creativity/Aliveness
5. Divinity/Joy/Peace

These are the areas of life expression in which it is possible to encounter or create the Holy Experience. But before we get into that, let me see if I can more closely describe the Holy Experience by more broadly defining it. We will do that on Thursday in this space.

I had the Holy Experience today. I had it this morning. I am still having it as I write this.

The experience feels interestingly like a new beginning. So many things are changing in our world, and so many things are presenting themselves for change in my life. I experienced this morning that I want to change how I am, becoming more loving, more patient, more compassionate, more giving.

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This is part of an extended series of blogs which began last Monday. It covers the topic of The Holy Experience, available to all of us.
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Yes, much, much more giving.

This is wonderful, this feeling of willingness to change and to become a larger version of myself that I am having today. It is part of the continuing adventure, of the never-ending process, that is the expansion of my humanity and the evolution of my human soul.

Just when I think "the game is over," it never is! This is what is so extraordinary about Life. Even after what we imagine to be our death, life is not over. It never is and it never will be.

I don't know why I am feeling all this right now, why I am knowing this as part of my experience today more than usual, but I am. It just feels like a new energy is coursing through me. And that feels good. I thank God for it. I thank God for letting me get up today with such revitalized energy, even at my age. I am not a young man any more, but my heart feels young as ever.

How about you? How goes it with you this day?

I consider Tomorrow's God to be one of the most exciting book in the entire CwG series. It is so exciting because it contains what I believe to be the best news that humanity has heard in the last century or more. In this book, God tells us that before the next 30 years are out, our species will create a new God. Or, more accurately, a new understanding of the only God there ever was, is now, or ever will be.

The book describes this new God in great detail, then moves on to tell us how the emergence of this new God will affect the most important aspects of our collective experience on this planet, including religion, education, politics, economics and commerce, and human relationships.
In this lesson, we shall explore one of the other topics opened up by the dialogue in Tomorrow's God: the Basic Principles of Life.

My experience of these basic principles is that they have always been in evidence in my Life, I just never saw the evidence, never recognized it for what it was.

Then along came Tomorrow's God, and once more, as with the other CwG dialogues, Life was made clear at a new level.

In this latest conversation, God tells us that all of Life is supported by three underlying principles. Life is functional, adaptable, and sustainable.

This means that everything in Life functions. Life is not willy-nilly. It works in a particular way, for a particular reason. The final reason, of course, is that Life wishes to go on. So, everything in Life seeks to function in a way that assures more Life. Left to its own devices, that is exactly the way it works. Yet Life includes sentient beings, beings who have control over the process of Life itself to some degree. These beings can alter the course of things, intervening in what Life would do of its own accord.

When sentient beings interfere with the order of things (such as we have been doing now for years with our environment, to list an obvious example), the order of things itself has to adapt. And it will. For this is the second basic principle of Life. It is what Life IS. Life is adaptable. It is functional and it is adaptable.

And so, whenever Life is affected or impacted by sentient beings in a way which threatens to render life itself non-functional, Life will adapt itself to that impact and adjust how it proceeds. It does this in order to render itself sustainable. When it has returned to a state of sustainability, it is once again fully functional, and the circle is complete.

Now let me give you an example from Nature of how this works, and we’ll see if we can understand it more clearly...

The human race is losing patience with itself. I think people are saying, “There’s got to be another way.” We’re becoming more and more clear that there is. We simply have to make that choice.

Sometimes people think they must live the way they are living because they have no choice. The appearance of things can often make it look as though this is very, very real. But it is never real. Never.

People do have a choice, and this book is going to prove that to you. People have a choice in the life they are creating and they have a choice in how they are experiencing the life they are now living. Before you get to the final page here you’re going to be given the most powerful tool there is with which to make your choices real. For now, know this: People who make a different choice are people who make a different world.

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NOTE: Saturday is Prose & Poetry Day here on the blog, a time to take a moment once a week to relax the mind, open the heart, and access the soul through the gift of prose from one of the many books of The New Spirituality, and through the poetry of m. Claire, author of the forthcoming volume, Openings.

This week's prose...an excerpt from What God Wants...
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It is time now for the Choice Makers to step forward. If they do not, the world will continue moving in the direction in which it is moving. That is not a direction in which humanity says it wishes to go. Yet what is humanity willing to do about that? This is the question now before the world.

If humanity’s highest idea about the direction that it wishes to take is not asserted now, its lowest idea could be embraced by default. That is what is happening at this moment in some people’s minds in many parts of the world.

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