A Note from Neale... My dear friends... I want to explore today the personal character of this Pure Energy called God. . . this Essential Essence that can form itself into any shape and take on any personality . . . this Source of Supreme Intelligence and Absolute Power that all religions tell us about As I’m sure you know, the vast majority of the world’s people believe that God exists. The question is: What kind of a God IS this? Much of the world believes in a God who is a male super-being who demands obedience. We also know that the vast majority of those who believe in God believe that God is judging, condemning, and punishing when God’s demands are not met. I’m sharing this with you today not because I think YOU believe these things about God, but because you know so many OTHER people who do. And it might be good for you to store in your memory some articulations around all of this, whenever the subject of God....and the kind of God we have...es up. All of us here know that God does not demand our obedience. And if the whole WORLD believed that, the spiritual basis for much of the righteousness that underlies, justifies, and motivates humanity’s most egregious and self-damaging behaviors would evaporate. Further, if the judgment and punishment that people think is PART of God’s requirement for obedience were understood to NOT be part of God’s Kingdom, the foundation of humanity’s entire legal system would be shaken to the core, with many of the laws in many of our countries having to be rewritten or repealed. As well, if we embraced the notion that God demands and commands nothing, many of our cultural norms, customs, and prohibitions would be stripped of their moral authority, and would likewise eventually have to be abandoned for lack of any premise or basis. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the case of marriage rights and same gender marriage. Even as restrictions against marriages outside of a person’s faith or race were one day held to be “against God’s Law”—but are now seen as perfectly acceptable expressions of love—so, too, will gay marriage one day become widely embraced everywhere as entirely appropriate between people who deeply love each other. This will occur when the entirety of humanity abandons all notions that an expression of true love that strays from past societal norms somehow breaks God’s commandments. So let’s look at this . . . if there are no commandments from God, then we can no longer kill, no longer punish, no longer judge, oppress, harm, restrict, limit, or damage others in the name of the Lord. This would wipe out an entire mountain of vindication for a huge catalogue of human cruelties and atrocities. The question is, would it also remove from humanity’s experience a moral compass upon which our species has depended? What would our new moral compass be? I’m going to suggest that our moral compass would be... whether a particular choice, decision, or action serves what it is that we are trying to DO. There are those who say that God demands or commands things not because God needs something, but because WE need something. Specifically, we need instructions, directions, requirements, and commandments in order to stop ourselves from running amok, and to help us make our lives work. This viewpoint holds that without commandments and directions, we wouldn’t know how to behave—or be willing or able to behave in ways that serve our continued survival because of our very nature. It is said by some that it is “human nature” to behave irresponsibly and uncontrollably, selfishly and even violently, and that it is only God’s requirements and restrictions—and the threat of God’s punishment if we don’t heed them—that keeps us from being totally self-centered, self-serving, and self-destructive. God’s regulations—and the threat of God’s punishment—have been our moral compass. Following suit, punishment has become the rationale for all civil laws and regulations restricting and governing the behavior of people---from stoplights and speed limits that must be obeyed, to product labeling rules that must be followed, to sanitary standards that must be maintained, to workplace regulations that must be followed. Without these and other behavioral rules being imposed, the conventional wisdom goes, everybody would do as they pleased, no one would be protected, and people everywhere would be the victim of those who are careless or unscrupulous. Yet are humans incapable of being self-regulating? The answer is no. All humans have the innate ability to govern their own behaviors, and to adjust them to the degree that they harm no one, while producing maximum positive results for each individual, as well as maximum benefit for the collective. All we have to do is determine to USE that innate ability. Ironically, what ignites the desire to USE this ability is the absence of rules and regulations . . . from God or anyone else. God understands this. That is why the ultimate gift God has given humanity is Free Will. Freedom is the fundamental nature of divinity. And God knows that humanity will always act in humanity’s best interests, once those best interests are made clear. It’s our BEST INTERESTS that will become our Moral Compass once we let go of the idea that we need GOD’s okay. When you get all the RULES out of the way, you FIND your way. If you want a wonderful example of this, watch people as they whiz around the traffic circle at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. There you will find no lane markings, no traffic lights, no signs showing who goes first or where, and no police officer to direct the dizzying flow of traffic. Thousands of people make their way around that monument every day in a hectic mish-mash of interweaving — and they do not have to be forced by any law or regulation, to yield the right-of-way, stop before smashing into others, or go when others have moved. They do so automatically. When you know what it is you’re trying to do, the preferable and beneficial action to take becomes instantly obvious and very clear to you. That’s why there are fewer traffic accidents on the circle around the Arc de Triomphe than there are on the Champs-Élysées a hundred yards away, where traffic lights abound, lanes are clearly marked, and the way to proceed is guided by rules and regulations. Humanity on a global scale cannot become clear about its own best interests until humanity on a global scale is clear about what it is trying to do. And this is where we have fallen short. We have not moved to total clarity and mutual agreement on what it is we are “up to” here during our time upon the earth. Once we do, our behaviors will self-modify and self-regulate in ways that will produce maximum effectiveness. A species that is highly evolved is one that has reached a collective understanding about what is in its highest and best interest, based on a mutually held awareness of what it is seeking to achieve and to experience. Because we are not at that stage in the development and evolution of humanity, the pressing question today becomes: What could get us there? CwG states that the answer is: A letting go of our Ancient Cultural Story about who we are and why we are alive; about the purpose and process of life; about the nature and desire of God. CwG says that a huge shift in humanity’s thinking—perhaps the biggest invitation ever issued by life to life—would be the accepting, embracing, and adopting of the following spiritually revolutionary statement: Nothing can occur in all the Universe that violates the Will of God. Everything in human theology, virtually every tenet of every standard brand religion on the face of the earth, is rooted and built on exactly the opposite thought. God’s will can be violated, those religions say. Indeed, this is the foundation of the standard religious doctrine of judgment, condemnation, and punishment. Yet the violation of God’s will is utterly impossible unless there is something more powerful than God in the universe—something that can OVERRIDE God’s will. But nothing of the sort exists, for God is the All In All, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the Sum Total of Everything. Those who say that God ALLOWS God’s will to be thwarted, and that, therefore, it IS possible for people to violate the will of God, have rendered themselves blind to a simple logic: If God allows something, then it is not against God’s will. You could not lift your little finger if God did not want you to. Everything that happens, therefore, happens because God allows it to, or it wouldn’t and couldn’t be happening. God allows it to by acting through YOU, in you, as you. There is no separation between you and the Divine. God’s greatest desire is for that fundamental aspect of divinity that we just spoke of—freedom—to be expressed in every moment by every manifestation of Divinity. That means YOU. And since God cannot be hurt or damaged in any way by anything at all, God has no reason to place restrictions on the freedom of ANY of God’s creations or creatures. God also has no reason to judge, condemn, and punish anyone who USES that freedom. Indeed, to do so would be to change the definition of freedom itself, so that it would then mean: “The ability to do as you are told, or suffer the consequences.” Yet that is not what freedom means. That is not freedom at all. Freedom is Love demonstrated; it is Love in action. Restriction of any kind is not Love in action, because restriction is limitation, and Love knows no such thing. Free will is obviously NOT free will if the use of it in a particular way produces indescribable and everlasting torture in the fires of hell. Such a response to the use of God’s greatest gift would make a mockery of both the gift and The Giver. Yet it is good to remember that Free Will means nothing in an environment in which there are no choices. If God is to experience Its full wonder and glory, that which is NOT considered fully wondrous or glorious in human terms must exist alongside of that which IS ... so to produce a CONTEXT within which wonder and glory itself may be not simply known, but expressed and experienced. Thus, the physical universe has been created as a Contextual Field within which choices become possible. In the absence of Darkness, Light cannot be experienced. In the absence of Small, Big cannot be experienced. In the absence of There, “Here” cannot be experienced. In the absence of Slow, Fast cannot be experienced. Nothing can be experienced in the absence of a contrasting element. It can be known theoretically, but it cannot be expressed experientially. Therefore God has created a universe in which Divinity has what appear to be exact opposites, or dualities, but which really are not. Using an example from our physical reality, we often label things as either “hot” or “cold.” These appear to be opposite ends of a polarity, but they are not. They are degrees of the same thing—called temperature. There is no “duality” in temperature, there is only One Thing, variously expressed. In much the same way, all manifestations of life are expressions demonstrating degrees, or variations, of the single thing...called Divinity. And thus has God invited divinity’s human individuations to judge not, and neither condemn, that which seems to oppose them . . . . but to see it as simply another aspect of the Self, providing an opportunity to be a light unto the darkness, that they might know Who They Really Are—and that all those whose lives they touch might know who they really are as well, by the light of this example. One’s free-will selection or choosing of any thought, word, or deed need not be, therefore, a demonstration of one’s obedience, but may be an acceptance of one’s invitation from God to step into the highest demonstration of one’s best idea about oneself. So no...God does not require our obedience. Only our ATTENTION. God invites us to PAY ATTENTION to who we are, to how life works, and to the Law of the Universe. Wow. We are lucky here, are we not? So go out now, and SHARE THE LUCK. With love,
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 08:42:35 +0000
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