(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 our natural impulse toward the Divine, which does not make others wrong for the way in which they are doing it.”)
Sunday is Message Day on the blog. Monday through Friday we look at contemporary events and day-to-day occurrences at the intersection of Life and the New Spirituality…but on Sunday, we reserve this space for a teaching derived from the material in Conversations with God
This week’s message: The Basic Wisdoms
The extraordinary spiritual occurrence that is the Conversations with God dialogue began in 1995 with the publication of CwG-Book 1 and the sharing, in that text, of what I have come to call The Basic Wisdoms.
CwG-1 contained three main statements with which God opened this extended, years long dialogue. These are:
1. We are all one.
2. There’s enough.
3. There’s nothing we have to do.
The book makes the point that this is really all we have to know to heal the world. And it is. Everything which has come after that is the seven-book CwG series has been an elaboration of these points, an expansion of them. That is why these are called The Basic Wisdoms.

The first Basic Wisdom is really the only one humanity will ever need. “We are all one” says it all. After that, nothing more needs to be said. If we all acted as if there was only One of us, if we all lived as if we were part of the Same Being, everything in our lives would change. The collective experience of life on this planet would change as well.
When I came to see and to deeply understand that We Are All One, I very quickly saw the implications of this. Among other things, I concluded that:
1. What is good for you is good for me.
2. What is not good for you is not good for me.
3. What I do for you, I do for me.
4. What I fail to do for you, I fail to do for me.
I realized that if people everywhere were clear about this, it would shift everything. Our politics would change. Our economics would change. Our social systems would change. Our religions would change. Everything, from top to bottom, would be altered forever, in ways that would dramatically improve our lives.
So what stops us from accepting this truth? I believe it is fear. We are afraid to live as One because we are afraid to lose our individuality, and we think that this is what would happen. We are afraid to embrace the Unity of All Life as a guiding principle, as a concept for living, because we are afraid to face the Ultimate Reality. While we are told that melding into the Oneness is an experience of pure bliss, we recoil at the idea of no longer knowing ourselves as who are separately.
Lack of spiritual understanding is at the core of our fear, for if we understood the highest spiritual truth (that we are as separate fingers on the same hand, and that we may experience our “individuality” whenever and however we wish, while experiencing the bliss of Oneness as well) we would never be frightened. And yet, spiritual understanding is very difficult to achieve in a world in which teaching such truths is itself seen as apostasy.
Many of our mainstream religions speak of a Separate God and of the Separation of Souls. And, particularly in Western cultures, the idea of individualism has been raised to almost godly proportions. Indeed, everywhere around the globe it is Separatism that receives humankind’s favor, manifesting itself everywhere. It manifests as nationalism and what I call “religionism” — two forms of “betterism” that are now threatening the very survival of the planet. And so, a concept that would save the world — the concept of our oneness — is shunned by the world.
The Second Basic Wisdom could heal the fear created by Separatism, if only it could be embraced. The idea that “there’s enough” makes Separatism unnecessary. We remain separate from each other only in order that we may ensure our survival.
We think that “every man for himself” is, ultimately, the only way that we can survive, and so we separate ourselves into groups, called, variously, Cultures, Nations, Religions and Ideologies. We say that these groupings help us to identify ourselves, but the truth is they are an attempt to indemnify ourselves. We seek indemnity from the ravages of life, and we imagine that our safety will be created by separating ourselves, not by unifying ourselves — even though our life experience teaches us exactly the opposite.
Were we to adopt a philosophy of “enoughism,” we would come from a place of knowing that there is enough for everybody, and then the fear that drives us apart would turn into a joy that draws us together. (This is precisely what happens when we fall in love.)
In truth, there is enough of everything we imagine we need to be happy — all we have to do is find a way to share. There is even enough of God for all of us. All we have to do is find a way to share that.
Yet sharing is not something that humans do easily, because we have a deep-seated fear that we are giving away something of which there is only a finite quantity. And so, we only share when we are sure that we have enough for ourselves. Yet blessed is he who shares that of which he experiences he has not enough –for in that sharing will he experience his abundance.
Sharing God is perhaps our most difficult generosity. We just can’t seem to do it. We say that God is a jealous God, but in truth it is in humanity where the jealously lies. We want to appropriate God, to make God ours and ours alone. And so we create a way to worship God that we say is the only “right” way, claiming God’s approval and God’s rewards as ours and ours alone.
We have told ourselves that there isn’t enough approval and there aren’t enough rewards to go around. That is our prevailing thought. And so, we must compete for both approval and rewards. We call these competitions “religions.”
If we understood that God’s approval and rewards are unlimited, our endless competitions would cease. Likewise, if we understood that there is enough of everything we tell ourselves that we need to be happy upon the Earth, we would cease our ruthless and self-destructive political, economic and military contests.
The Third Basic Wisdom could bring us to these understandings.
We think that there is something we have to do in life because we imagine that there is not enough of the Stuff of LIfe, and so we have to do things to get it. Yet the Third Basic Wisdom says, “There’s nothing we have to do.”
The insight behind this wisdom is that it is not in Doing that happiness is secured, but in Being. It is “beingness” that brings the soul, the heart, and the mind the greatest experience of itself. And Beingness requires nothing exterior to ourselves. The fact that we Are creates “enoughness” automatically. Our very existence is “enough” to achieve what the soul seeks to achieve.
Knowing this changes everything and the irony is that when everything changes inside of us, everything changes outside of us. All the things we thought we had to struggle for come to us virtually without effort –and certainly without having to enter into competition.
What the soul yearns for is to “be” kind, to “be” love, to “be” One With Everything. This is the natural yearning of the soul because this is what the soul knows Itself to be — and the soul wants nothing more than simply to experience ITSELF.
This is all that God wants, too. In fact, creating the human soul is one of God’s ways of experiencing this.
Each individual soul is an energy package — part and parcel of God — waiting to be released. “Energy waiting to be released.” Isn’t that an interesting way to look this idea of the human soul? “The Energy of GOD waiting to be released.” Isn’t that an even more interesting way?
That is what the soul is. The soul is the individuation of God, waiting to release Itself. That is, it seeks to re-LEASE itself. When it does this, you have a NEW LEASE ON LIFE. Physical life in any particular identity is never permanent. It is not something we own. It is, in a sense, something we “rent” from God.
Sometimes re-leases Divine Energy in tiny increments and sometimes It does this in big gulps and sometimes it does this all at once. When it does this in tiny increments, we call the experience Soul Growth. When it does this in big gulps, that is called Breakthrough. When it does this all at once, that is called Transformation, or Enlightenment.
There is nothing one has to do to achieve growth, breakthrough or enlightenment. It is all, and only, a matter of what one is being.
When one is being Perfect Love no matter what one is doing, one has achieved enlightenment. This is not difficult to achieve, and the world is convinced that it is. That is our dilemma.
Perfect Love is experienced when we realize — that is, when we “make real”, or real-ize — the Basic Wisdoms: We are all one. There’s enough. There’s nothing we have to do.
We can make these ideas real in our lives just as easily as we have made other ideas real in our lives. We can change our mind about things. A change of mind produces a change of heart, and a change of heart produces an experience of the Soul That Never Changes—which is Who We Really Are.