(This weblog creates, for us all, a chance to meet at the interaction of Life and the New Spirituality. It is written by the author of Conversations with God, the worldwide best-selling series of books. The “New Spirituality” is defined by the author as “a new way to experience and express our natural impulse toward the Divine without making others wrong for the way in which they are doing it.”)

HIGHLIGHTS OF TODAY’S BLOG…
* Direct quotes from a startling book
* The Five Steps to Peace
* The challenge of embracing new ideas
* What creates our behaviors?

(This is the seventh in a series of blogs on the seemingly unending conflict in our world. The series makes the point that there is a way to avoid the constant conflict and killing upon the earth, and that way is for the earth’s people to adopt a New Spirituality — a new “story” about God, about Life, and about Each Other.)
In the most recent installment of this series, last Thursday, we looked at the seemingly everlasting tendency of human beings to use violence as a means of conflict resolution. We asked: Is this all part of the human condition? Is there nothing that can be done to turn the tide of such primitive behaviors? What kinds of beliefs could possibly form the basis of a value system that would not only allow, but actually recommend, violence as a course of action in the face of differing points of view — and even in the face of what people on one side or the other of a disagreement would call “oppression”? Is there simply no way to heal this aspect of humanity’s collective experience?
We said that some people might argue that a firm belief in God might be the answer, but it is obvious to all observers that religious fervor has in too many cases done very little to bring about peace. Such fervor has, in fact, been the actual cause of much of the violence in the world today — and over many centuries and millennia. Yet if religion can’t stop the violence, what can? If God is not a deterrent, then who and what could possibly be?

This question is answered in startling direct and unmistakably clear terms in The New Revelations, the first book of the Second Trilogy in the Conversations with God Series. The message was brought through seven weeks after 9/11.
I stopped in my tracks — as most of the world did — in those first few moments after this unspeakable tragedy and wept openly, turning to the God of My Understanding with these plaintive words…
God, please be here. We need help.

I am here.

We need help.

I know.

Right now.

I understand.

The world is on the brink of disaster. And I’m not talking about natural disaster; I’m talking about man-made calamity.

I know. And you’re right.

I mean, humans have had disagreements before, and serious ones, but now our divisions and disagreements can lead not simply to wars—which are bad enough—but to the end of civilization as we know it.

That is correct. You have assessed the situation correctly.
You understand the severity of the problem, you simply do not understand the nature of the problem. You do not know what is causing it. So you keep trying to solve it at every level except the level at which it exists.

Which is?

The level of belief.
The problem facing the world today is a spiritual problem.
Your ideas about spirituality are killing you.
You keep trying to solve the world’s problem as if it was a political problem, or an economic problem, or even a military problem, and it is none of these. It is a spiritual problem. And that is the one problem human beings don’t seem to know how to solve.

Then help us.

I am.

How?

In many ways.

Name one.

This book.

Now that might seem like an arrogant answer, or at the very least a self serving one, to appear in one of my books. Nevertheless, that is what came through. And I made a solemn promise to myself when the Conversations with God experience first came upon me that I would never edit or substantively alter the material that came through me. So I presented it there, and I present it here, for others to judge.
Yet later in this remarkable text I was given many, many insights into how we might all change the world; how we could, indeed, bring at end at last to the violence that has characterized the human experience for millennia.
What the world needs, God said, is a new idea about God, about Life, and about Each Other. The people of the earth need to create a new Cultural Story. About everything.
Everything.
Life. Love. Peace. God. Purpose. Salvation. Differences. Conflict. Happiness. Our very reason for living. We need to recreate it all over again, from the top. For Life informs Life about Life through the process of Life Itself. We are telling each other about ourselves by being ourselves. We are teaching our children how to be “human” by the way we are being human. And the way that we are being human right now is not the way we want our children to be. We are teaching them one thing, then doing another. But it’s not our fault. In a sense, it’s not our fault. We are merely acting and reacting the way that we were taught to act and react. We are being the way that we were taught to be. “And the sins of the father shall be visited upon the son…even unto the seventh generation…”
And so what we need now is a new Cultural Story. A new idea about ourselves that we tell to ourselves. Yet, God said to me the The New Revelations, it is not going to be easy to create and embrace that. To quote once again from the text…

…your society dismisses out of hand some of the brightest new ideas and some of the wisest older people.
Ask Hermann Kümmell.

Hermann Kümmell?

A medical doctor in Hamburg in the late 1800s who had a terrible time convincing other physicians that it was a good idea to wash their hands before surgery.
The idea of “scrubbing up” was summarily dismissed by “those who knew better,” with Kümmell turned into a laughing stock and practically driven out of his beloved medical profession for even suggesting that such a practice could save lives.
This stubborn tendency of human beings to cling to their past, to refuse innovation or new thinking until they are forced to do so by an ultimately embarrassing weight of evidence, has been slowing your evolutionary process for millennia.

Yet now it does not seem as if we can afford to have that process drag on. It feels as though, now, time is of the essence. We have reached a crossroad here.

Yes. You are facing now a new and startling danger—a danger posed to your entire species. A threat to your very survival posed by the combination of a split in ideology and an advance in technology which makes it possible for you to seek to resolve your differences with tools of human destruction unlike anything you may have heretofore dreamed of in your worst nightmare.

My God, what can we do?

There are five things you can choose now if changing your world, and the self-destructive direction in which it is moving, is what you wish to achieve.
1. You can choose to acknowledge that some of your old beliefs about God and about Life are no longer working.
2. You can choose to acknowledge that there is something you do not understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which will change everything.
3. You can choose to be willing for a new understanding of God and Life to now be brought forth, an understanding that could produce a new way of life on your planet.
4. You can choose to be courageous enough to explore and examine this new understanding, and, if it aligns with your inner truth and knowing, to enlarge your belief system to include it.
5. You can choose to live your lives as demonstrations of your highest and grandest beliefs, rather than as denials of them.
These are the Five Steps to Peace, and if you take them, you can shift everything on your planet.

Why all this emphasis on God and our beliefs? Why are you not telling us to change our worldwide political or economic systems? Why are you not telling us to change our laws and stop our violence and share our resources and discontinue our discrimination and halt our oppression and redistribute our abundance and end our wars and live in peace?

Because those are all changes in behavior.

Aren’t our behaviors exactly what we need to change right now?

Yes. If what you decide you now desire is a world living in peace and harmony, the answer is yes.

Okay, you’ve got me. I don’t understand. Why are you talking about beliefs when what we need to do is change behaviors?

Because beliefs create behaviors.

And so we see that our challenge in the first quarter of the 21st Century is to change our beliefs. How? By inviting human beings to embrace a new set of beliefs that more wondrously serve them.
Yet how can we do this? And who can do it?
Stay tuned. More tomorrow…
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If you would like to discuss these and other
important spiritual and temporal matters with
Neale Donald Walsch personally, and, indeed,
if you would like to become a messenger of
the New Spirituality, join Neale in the
Messengers’ Circle at www.nealedonaldwalsch.com
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