Friday is normally Book Day on this blog, but on this particular Friday before Christmas I want to look at a question: Is peace on earth possible?
Here is what I observe on this subject: Humanity is losing patience with itself—and rightly it should.
We are seeing that most of the institutions we’ve put into place to make life better have only made life worse. That includes government and politics, business and commerce, education, and yes, even religion.
Our governments and politicians have made a mockery of us, our businesses and industries have betrayed us, our educational systems have failed us, and, to our great sadness, our religions have been unable to save us from the tragedies and the indignities and the horrors of our own devise. Indeed, in many cases our religions have created them.
Violence is everywhere, terrorism has become the new century’s chief political tool, and a year ago the world was moved to a new and dangerous frontier with the establishment of “preemptive strike” as a legitimate action of nation against nation. Scarcely a day goes by that we do not hear about some major corporation cheating and hoaxing and bilking people out of billions.
In the midst of all of this I, like a lot of people, have done a lot of hard thinking. I’ve even done a little praying. In my own way. A few years ago I wrote a very angry letter to God—and God answered. This may seem unbelievable, but that was my experience.
I received God’s replies in the form of words gently spoken into my ear at first, and later, whispered inside my head. I kept a diary of those replies, and when one of them said that what I was hearing would one day become a book, I had my notes typed up and sent off to a publisher, as a test to see if what I was being told had any validity.
To my surprise, those notes became a publishing phenomenon, producing the series of books known as Conversations with God. In one of these books, Tomorrow’s God (March 2004, Atria Books), I asked God exactly what is going on in our day-to-day life on this planet.
Here’s what I was told.
All that has happened has occurred for a very simple reason—although one that is widely misunderstood: The beliefs upon which our lives have been built are mistaken. What we’ve been told about Life turns out not to be true.
Life does not have to be about “survival of the fittest.” It does not have to be about power over rather than power with. It does not have to be about struggle and suffering, oppression and repression, conflict and violence. And we are not separate from each other or from God, and so, we don’t have to continue acting that way.
Life can be about love and harmony and joy and oneness with each other and with God. It can be about abundance and happiness and fulfillment and that elusive thing called peace. But what this will require is an entire restructuring of our thinking about Life and God.
Don’t scoff. We’ve done this before.
The Renaissance was a period during which we changed our ideas of just about everything. The whole of human society was altered, shifted, transformed. It is time now for the Second Renaissance. It is time for us to have the courage of the great thinkers, writers, and artists of the 14th-16th Century in blazing new trails, opening new paths, embracing new concepts, expanding into new understandings and producing new expressions of Life.
It is time to accept the possibility that there may be something we do not understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which could change everything.
Right now we believe that Life is arbitrary, capricious, vengeful and violent. We believe this because we believe in a God who is arbitrary, capricious, vengeful and violent. And because we believe this, we allow ourselves to be arbitrary, capricious, vengeful and violent. Our understanding of God forms the moral underpinning, and produces the outcomes, of our lives.
There is only one way to change the way human beings behave with each other and the way they experience life, and that is to change the beliefs upon which those behaviors and those lives are built.
Here are some revolutionary new beliefs that humanity might find it beneficial to explore.
• God doesn’t need anything, least of all for us to behave in a certain way in order to “get into heaven.”
• There is no One Path to God, with all other paths leading to hell and damnation.
• There is, in fact, no such thing as eternal damnation. There are consequences to our actions, but those consequences lead to the evolution of the human soul, not to something as simplistic as everlasting punishment or reward.
• Everything and everyone is united, made of the same stuff and part of the One Thing There Is. That One Thing is called by many names, including Life, and God.
These ideas form the basis of a movement that is now emerging on this planet that I call the New Spirituality. It is the Second Renaissance—a civil rights movement for the soul, freeing humanity at last from the oppression of its past beliefs about God, about Life, and about each other.
The idea that we are separate from each other, and the idea that some of us are more worthy of God (and, therefore, more worthy, period), are two of the most self-destructive concepts ever embraced by humanity. Those ideas are killing us. They are causing most of those who are not being killed to live in poverty. (5% of the world’s people now hold over 85% of the world’s wealth and resources.) They are applying the brakes to humanity’s evolution—and may soon be bringing an end to life as we know it on this planet.
We must try now, earnestly try, to open our minds to new thoughts about God and Life. Our future depends on it.
My wish is that this Christmas Season may be the time when humanity works earnestly to create Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Humans Everywhere. I believe that it will take a New Spirituality for humanity to do this. I ask that you help me in creating the space of possibility for this New Spirituality to emerge upon the earth.
The “New Spirituality” is defined 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.” Now, isn’t that a wonderful idea?