Adapted from the forthcoming book, "From the Ashes: A Spiritual Response to the Attack on America," to be published by Beliefnet and Rodale Press.

Dear and Wonderful Beings,

I come to you in this hour of your deep sadness to bring you wisdom, for it is only at such times that you seem willing to hear Me--and hear Me now you must, if you are going to survive as a species.

Dearest Ones, you have not yet learned the basics of living together. You have not reached, through all the years you have been on your planet, the rudimentary understanding of the most elementary concepts of life, and it is not because you have not been told. It is because you have refused to listen.

So again I say to you, as I have said before, through other voices and at other times, let those who have ears to hear, listen. All of your human problems--all of them-would be solved in the blink of an eye were you to change a few simple things in the way you are attempting to co-create life together.

The first of these things is that you are not attempting to co-create life together but, rather, you are attempting to co-create it apart, and it will not work that way.

Yet you keep struggling and abusing and fighting, determined to obtain these things, and increase them, at any expense, even your own lives. And so you die worse in order to live better.

You cannot co-create life apart because you are not apart, you are together, intrinsically, spiritually, and yes, even physically. The great human truth is that you are all One. And the great human tragedy is that you do not know this. You do not know it in your experience, and you will not, until you try--and that is something you have adamantly refused to do.

This is why you have conflict, this is why you have discord, this is why you have war and murder and maiming and hurting. This is why you spite each other and compete with each other and argue with each other and race with each other against time to capture you know not what--to make sure you get it, and get enough of it, before it runs out. And this is why you struggle with each other to protect what you have gotten, although you don't even know what it is that you were after.

Was it success? Was it power? Was it security and safety?

You do not understand that security and safety is only found in not fighting for it. That authentic power is only experienced in not abusing it. That real success is only achieved in not straining and struggling and striving for it.

For if you achieve success by constantly straining, struggling and striving, what kind of success is that? And if you experience power by constantly abusing it, what kind of power is that? And if you find security and safety by constantly fighting, what kind of safety is that?

You are One Being, different but united, as the fingers and the thumb are different, but not separate from the hand. Difference is not division, yet because you see that you are different you imagine that you are divided.

OF the Body of God you are a part, yet FROM it you are never apart. Nor are you ever apart from each other, because you are a part of each other. Yet you are tearing yourself apart through your belief in apartheid, separation, and segregation of that which was never separated and cannot be segregated.

This insistent belief has created not only a tearing of each other, but a tearing at the very fabric of Life Itself for Life is What You Are, made manifest in physical form for the purpose of experiencing Life Itself. You are Life, experiencing Life, yet you cannot experience it abundantly, joyously, fruitfully, or harmoniously if you will not recognize and accept What You Are.

I tell you this: YOU ARE ONE.

With each other and with Me, you are FOREVER UNITED.

Now, for you to survive as a species, you must understand this, you must accept this, and you must examine what this means as a practical matter. You must apply it to your daily life--or your life will be daily threatened, and you will never know the grandest expression of Life for which you were intended.

Your insistence on being separate has caused you to create separate families, separate neighborhoods, separate communities and separate nations, imagining that this is the best and only way for you to co-exist--and yet, it is the only way that you cannot co-exist. For this is not co-existence at all, but UNco-existence, and it can only lead to the end of your existence. Your history has shown you this, your own life has demonstrated it, yet you DISprove your past in your attempt to IMprove your future.

The irony is that all that you seek to achieve through your separate efforts you can achieve without effort were you to discontinue your separate efforts.

The solution to your problems is clear. It is simple. It is obvious and it is immediately obtainable.

The solution is to experience Oneness Now Everywhere.

This means co-creating around the world a new society, in which you proceed FROM Oneness in everything you do.
In your governance,
in your economics,
in your spirituality,
in your ecology,
in the education of your offspring,
in everything that you put in place in your society.

This is not a new teaching. I have given it to you before, in many times and many places, through the voices of many messengers. In what you call The Old Testament it will be found in Malachi:
"Have we not all one father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers? "

In the New Testament, in Romans, it is written:
So WE, though many, are one body in Christ, and, individually, members one of another.

And in Corinthians:
Because there is one bread, we who are many...are one body.

The fear you have of Oneness is loss of individual expression and individual identity. You believe that Oneness is sameness, yet it is not.

Humans will never be satisfied with "sameness," nor should they be. For the desire of the self is to individually express the unified wonder of Life. In the books and in the teachings of other cultures and other traditions as well, this truth appears. Through all the ages have I given it to you. In many voices have I caused it to be spoken. Yet this is the truth you are afraid to hear. This is the step you are afraid to take.

Yet self-expression does NOT have to lead to SELF-DESTRUCTION--and that is exactly where it is leading right now. Oneness does NOT mean "sameness." You can be all parts of One Body and be strikingly and spectacularly different. And you ARE. Oneness living does not mean DISAPPEARING, it means APPEARING AT LAST--as Who You Really Are.

You are so worried about losing your identity, or dissolving into the All. The irony of this worry is that dissolving into the All is the greatest desire of your Soul. And so you are a being at war with yourself. The largest part of you wants nothing MORE than to experience its Oneness with Everything, yet the part of you that imagines you are small cannot abide it. You are afraid of the thing you want most. Some of you call this love. Some of you call it God.

Yet now you are being invited to create a new nation, to build a new society, to seek a newer world. And in this world the Call to Oneness will be sounded without fear, for you will have realized that what you feared most--your own individual demise--you have produced not by moving toward unity, but by avoiding it.

Even as you begin to build your new society, however, you will never be able to experience yourselves as One, nor act as One, unless and until you understand another great truth: There's enough. There's enough of everything you need to be peaceful and happy upon the Earth.

There's enough of everything you need to survive. Right now you believe there is not, and your competitions and your hoarding and your stressing and your straining and your killing and your dying are based on that belief. It is true that in some areas and in some places you have made it look as if there is "not enough." But that is a fiction, a creation of your own devise, a manufacturing of poverty with the tools of greed.

Greed is what has allowed you to create a society in which less than 5% of the people hold more than 80% of the world's wealth and resources.

There would be enough for everyone, even in areas where you have failed to make wealth and resources and opportunities available, were you to "live simply, so that others may simply live." Yet even though there is "enough" on your planet, that of which there is enough can be wasted. And you are doing this now. You have used more of your Earth's natural resources in the past 40 years than in the previous 40 thousand.

You call this progress, and it IS progress--toward your own demise. You have blinded yourself with greed and cannot see your own headlong fall into the abyss of your own creation. You want to continue living as you have been living, and you don't want anyone to tell you that you can't. And, in fact, you can--for a few more years yet. And then it will be over. And like the empire of Rome, like the civilizations of Atlantis and the Land of Mu, you will simply disappear yourselves.

You will either do it through your own greed or your own violence--or through a combination of both.

Yes, now you are on the brink of more violence, having experienced unthinkable violence already.

I have sent you messenger after messenger through the years to talk to you of violence. May I remind you of what some of them have said?

Thomas Jefferson:
"War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying, losses."

Martin Luther King Jr.:
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.

"Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish truth.
"Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.
"Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
"Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

These are the thoughts, and others like them, upon which you can build your new society if you choose. But you must begin to do so now, during these very days and times. You can put it off no further, wait for someone else to begin no longer.

It is as I have said to you in the Jewish tradition:
"If not now, when? If not you, who?"