 Dear Friends,
This month's good news is that Neale Donald Walsch has written a new book – Tomorrow's God – his best one yet in our opinion. In it, we read some words about relationships that had such a healing effect on us that we want to use this letter to share them with you:
God: In the days of the New Spirituality all people will understand that nothing has any meaning save the meaning they give it. ... Nothing means anything at all, except what you say it does. That includes all the things that have been done to you, and by you. You can give these things any meaning you want, but be careful, because the meaning you give them is the meaning they will have for you. Then you will act on this, believing it to be real.
If you wish to remain clear, it is going to be important for you to remember that you have made it all up.
You can take these things that have happened in your life and laugh them off, and say, ‘It's nothing. It's not worth losing my peace over. It is of no injury to me. I am not that’. Or you can say, ‘I am deeply hurt. I am badly damaged. This is horrible. I can't stand it.’
Either way, what you say will be what you experience.
Neale: Yes, well, I try saying the first, but the second seems to win out a lot. I mean, let's be real here. Things sometimes hurt. A lot. Help me out.
God: The feeling of being hurt is simply an act of forgetfulness. You have forgotten who you are, you have forgotten who the other is, and you have forgotten what you are both doing here. You have melted into the maya, you have become the illusion. You are living the story you have created, as a playwright who has fallen asleep and is dreaming that he is living his own script.
You can play out the script to the bitter, sad end if you wish, but you already know the ending, so what's the point?
Neale: No, I don't know the ending. What is the ending?
God: The ending is always the same. You will one day awaken – in this lifetime or the next or the next – and you will then understand Who You Really Are, and Who Everyone Else Is, and you will forgive everyone everything, and you will go past forgiveness to the place where you are clear that forgiveness is not necessary.
You will see the perfection in the whole process, how it all worked wonderfully to produce your own evolution, and you will thank all of the players in your script, and you will dance together and be merry, for God's love will embrace the lot of you, and you will embrace each other as well, in your love for God, which is Life itself.
Neale: You are certain about this.
God: There has never been anything more certain said or revealed. In the days of the New Spirituality all people will understand the purpose of relationship and the Process of Life, as well as their role in it, and they will bless the process and call it holy, they will engage the process and call it adventure, they will experience the process and call it joy – and they will complete the process and call it Nirvana ... then to happily begin the process all over again at the time of their choosing in the never-ending cycle of bliss that is Creation Itself.
This is the story of Consciousness, unfolding. This is the story of Humanity, evolving. This is the story of You, being.
* * * * *
Of course, it's not the first time we’ve heard Neale Donald Walsch say something like this.
The first time – it seems like ages ago now – we were deeply embroiled in a long-term situation that was giving us considerable emotional pain. And when we tried to view this situation in the light of the idea that nothing had any meaning except the meaning we gave it, and that others could only hurt us because we had given them the power to do so, we could do little more than just stare dumbly. ‘What? Are you telling us this only hurts because we think it hurts? Pull the other leg!’ Like many other liberating ideas we read about in Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God books, we have to confess that we didn’t understand it first of all. Nevertheless, we kept it in mind, and decided that, even if we couldn’t understand it, we could at least choose it as one of the lenses through which we would view our experiences in future, even if the only sort of lens we could muster at the time was the kind you find at the wrong end of a telescope!
It actually took several years for it to dawn on us that the reason why we were in such emotional pain was because of a dissonance in our core beliefs, and that, if we were able to correct that dissonance, we would then be able to attach a different, peaceful, healing meaning to the whole situation.
What dissonance? Well, it was this: Our deepest, core belief and experience was that the Divine is in us and in all human beings. The Divine - that Thing which is All Good, All Wise, All Powerful - is in us, and has infinite power to make Itself felt, both in us, and through us. That’s what we believed. However, we also held the belief that we could be attacked, that we could be harmed, that we could be hurt, that our work could be spoiled or prevented. Added to that, we believed that others could be intermediaries between ourselves and the Divine, and that our spiritual needs could be theirs to give or withhold. Do you see how, by holding this second set of beliefs, we were effectively giving out the message that something could be more powerful than the All Powerful? Or that the Divine within us could somehow be incapable of doing what, actually, It cannot help doing, simply by virtue of Its Being? Clearly nonsense, as is immediately evident when you look at it eyeball to eyeball. However, it's strange how we tend not to look at things eyeball to eyeball when we're telling ourselves dissonant stories like this – the metaphysical equivalent of driving along with one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake! No wonder we were having such painful experiences!
It was when this realisation came to us, that we were first able to begin doing what Neale Donald Walsch, the Dalai Lama and indeed spiritual teachers throughout the ages suggest: to bless and be grateful to our ‘enemies’. For we realised then, that those who appeared to us to be causing our pain, had given us a gift greater than any friend could have done: they had held up a mirror in which we could see what we wouldn’t have seen otherwise: a huge part of ourselves that was sorely in need of healing.
Once we came to this point in our healing, we could experience our first glimmer of awareness that the judgements other people form about us, and the actions they take as a result of those judgements, are their choice ... and their problem. They do not belong to us and need not touch us in any way. Indeed, they cannot, if we are secure in the presence of the Divine within us.
Our healing – by which we mean the alignment of every atom of our being with the Divine Truth within us – is still going on, of course. Healing happens in layers. You dissolve away one, and then find another, deeper one underneath, into which you must let the light shine. And of course, what we are healing is not merely a personal problem, but a collective one. Almost everybody has it, for the whole worldview we are surrounded by in our society expresses the belief that we can be harmed, that we could be separate from the Divine, or that something else could be more powerful than the Divine. So we persevere, letting the light shine into layer after layer, knowing that what we resolve for ourselves we resolve for all. Sooner or later, a new worldview will prevail, as described in Tomorrow's God, one which is closer to the truth, and which therefore allows healing to occur more easily.
Meanwhile, we are eternally grateful to everyone with whom we have interacted in this, and all our lifetimes. Namaste!
With much love from all of us at Cygnus Books.
Geoff, Ann, Martyn, Sarah, Jackie, Jacqueline, Eileen, Catherine, Alison, Cherry, Penny, Brian, Phil, David, Naomi, Chris, Saijai, Vanessa, Derek, Eddie, Shane, Matthew, Jon, Sam & Pat
Text & photographs © Cygnus Books 08-Mar-2004
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