There is a way to create peace in this world. Sometimes it feels as if there is not, that the cause is hopeless, but there is a way that we can achieve harmony on this planet. There are the Five Steps to Peace.
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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, Silent Sacred Holy Deeply: Heart.
For this week’s prose we offer…the second in a series of excerpts from The New Revelations…
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(NOTE: You are reading a portion of dialogue from a book in the Conversations with God series.)

The 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.

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This week’s gift of poetry
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Sun breaks open in my heart
without moderation.
There is Heaven, here.
But don’t ask me to come Home, just yet.
Don’t try to summon all of this Love, Home
for I have only just found
a Living Place.
Somewhere I can put my love.
A grassy knoll, where on my back I lay
musing at the broad sky, knowing I can light it –
even the stars disappear
in the making of this kind of love.
There are too many ways to say the same thing…
that is why god likes to rest at my feet –
to hear what Love will say next.

(A Living Place – m. claire – copyright 2007 – all rights reserved)
For more of the work of this new poetic voice you are invited to visit www.mclairepoet.com.

Note from Neale: We will continue our discussion of life purpose and life mission in our next blog entry. In the meantime, check out this link if you would like to spend seven days on vacation with me in a very small group of folks who enjoy deep discussion and fearless exloration of the kind of things you are reading here….
http://www.nealedonaldwalsch.com/cruise.cfm)