 We’re moving into a period of time on this planet when the decisions and choices we make will produce a critical impact and an extraordinary effect on the lives that we are collectively creating.
So, it’s really important that we come together and share our reality, share our understanding, become even more clear about what it is that we hold in common. And when we find that there are differences between us, find a way to celebrate those differences. Because if we don’t learn how to celebrate our differences, we’re not going to be able to make a difference on this planet. And you came here to make a difference. That’s why you came to this particular planet at this particular moment. Whether you know it or not, you came here with a very big agenda. And for most people, if you’re like me, the agenda is much larger than you might originally have thought or imagined. I’m going to repeat that. I said: For most people, if you’re like me, the agenda is much larger than you might originally have thought or imagined.
Come to the edge
To begin with, your life has nothing to do with you. And that might change your whole idea about what you’re doing here. And your life has nothing to do with your body. That also might change your whole idea about what you're doing here. Your life has to do with the agenda that has been set for you by you, by that part of you that we’ve come to call, in our language, your soul.
And it has been my observation that very few people have spent a lot of time during this particular life paying attention to the agenda of their soul. I know that I haven’t. Most of my life, I paid attention to the agenda of my ego, of my mind, of my body – in other words, of that part of me that I thought I really was. And I paid very little attention to the agenda of my soul, to the real reason I’m here. And yet, those of us who begin to pay attention to the real reason we're here begin to make an extraordinary impact on the world – an impact beyond anything you might have imagined possible. Suddenly you find yourself at a ... at a precipice, at the edge. And it is very much, as Apollinaire once put it,
‘Come to the edge.’
‘We can’t. We’re afraid.’
‘Come to the edge.’
‘We can't. We’ll fall.’
‘Come to the edge.’
And they came.
And he pushed them.
And they flew.
It’s time to fly
There are a few of us, a very few of us, who are now ready to fly, who are ready to go, as Gene [Roddenberry] said, to places where no human has gone before – who are really ready to fly now, and to take all those whose lives they touch with them, on a flight of fancy that will truly change the world. And in these days and times, you will have an opportunity to decide whether you are one of those select few; selected, I might add, by yourself, not by anyone else. This is a self-selecting process. You’ll wake up one day and look in the mirror, and say, ‘I select me. I choose me. I’m it.’ It’s a game of tag, with only one player. ‘I’m it.’
Choose yourself
So, in these days and times, you get to choose yourself; or not, as you wish. As you wish. But if you choose yourself to play in this particular game, you’ll find that you have caused yourself to set aside all of your prior beliefs, understandings, thoughts, and ideas about what it is that you are doing here, about why you brought yourself to your body at this time and in this place. You'll change everything you ever thought about that. And you'll find that your life, indeed, will have nothing to do with you, or with your body.
And yet the irony is that, in the moment that you decide and declare that your life has nothing to do with you or your body, everything you ever sought, hungered for, struggled to obtain for yourself and for your body will come to you, automatically. And you won't even care. Because you will no longer need it. You will enjoy it, for sure. But you will no longer need it. And the struggle will at last be over.
Follow me
But it will have just begun for the hundreds and the thousands and, maybe, the millions of people whose lives you will touch. And you will see them every day – people for whom the struggle really has just begun, who are taking those first few steps on the journey home. And they, like you, will reach out a hand, figuratively, if not literally, and sometimes even quite literally. And they'll look around them, and hope to find someone who will reach a hand back, who will say, ‘Come, follow me’; who will dare to say, ‘I am the way, and the life. Follow me.’
That may sound almost too religious for some people. But this is the third and the last of the children's games that the child in us, which is our soul, will play. No longer hide and seek; no longer you’re it; now, follow the leader.
Follow the leader. And you’re the leader. And we’re going to follow you. We’re going to walk in your footsteps. I’m going to make the choices that you are going to make. We're going to make the decisions that you are making. We’re going to say the words that you say, touch the world in the way that you touch it. We're going to follow your lead.
If you thought that the whole world was watching you this day, and following your example in everything you think, and say, and do, would it change in any way how this day went for you? Maybe for some of you, just a little bit.
Well, the whole world is following you, whether you know it or not. That’s the great secret: the whole world – surely the world whose lives you touch – is following you. We’re watching you. We’re seeing who you really are. And we’re seeing who you think you are. And we’re taking our cue from you. Like actors on a stage, we are imitating you, because we have no one else to imitate. We're all that there is. There's no one else.
We can look outside of ourselves for some larger example out in the sky someplace – maybe even in our imaginations. But in the end, we will imitate each other. In the end, children will imitate their parents, and parents will imitate their parents. And nation will imitate nation. In the end, we will take our cues from each other, until one of us steps out and says, ‘Not that way. This way.’
If not you, then who?
So your decision at this time in your life, at this really critical period as we move into what is truly a new age, your decision is critical. It's not a small decision. Because you're not making it just for you. The decision you make in these days and times, you’re making for everyone else in the room. And the reason for that is very clear. Because there is no one else in the room. Except you. Here you are, in your many other manifest forms; here you are. And so the decision you will make for you, you make for all of us. Because there’s only one of us here.
That might sound a little esoteric. First we sound religious, then we sound esoteric. But it is these thoughts, these concepts, these ideas which must begin to drive the engine of our collective human experience, or our collective human experience will not be collective much longer, but will, in fact, disintegrate and fall apart, even as will our planet.
Past the point of no return
We are at that point now. You know when aeroplanes in the old days used to cross the ocean, they called it ‘the point of no return’? Too far to turn back, not far enough to safely make it there? There’s this little red zone, you know, when you're neither there nor here, you’re neither here nor there.
It feels very much as if that’s where we are right now on this planet, in many ways: in terms of our ecology, in terms of our worldwide economy. We see, in many areas of the world, the whole thing is falling apart, in terms of our social structures, our spiritual understandings, the education of our offspring. In so many ways and in so many areas, it feels as if we’re in that no-man's land, in that red zone. We're not here, and we're not there, either. Neither here nor there, but we’re beyond the point of no return. We have crossed the Rubicon, and now the question is: What do we do, and how do we get the rest of us to go over to the other side? And the answer to that question will be, in fact, supplied to the human race by people like you. By you.
And if you think it's about people like me who happen, in this particular day and time, to be enjoying our fifteen minutes in the sun, you're wrong. I want to impress on you that it's not about the people in the front of the room. I just happen to be here now by – I want to say – by sheer happenstance. It could just as easily be you.
The call
So why am I sitting here in the front of the room? I want to tell you why I’ve chosen to be in the front of this room. I’m very clear now that I was called on to be a messenger. I’m very clear now that, in fact, I’ve always been a messenger, and that there's no place I can allow myself to be except in the front of the room. Because I have a very important message to share with everyone whose life I touch. And here is the important message I’ve come to share: All of you are messengers, and there’s no place else for you to be except in the front of the room. All of you have come to share a very important message with everyone whose life you touch. And here is the important message that you have come to share with them: All of them, each of them, is a messenger. And they have come here with a very important message to share. And there’s no place else they can be except in the front of the room.
The message
And here is the important message they have come to share: Everyone is a messenger. And here's the message all of us have come to share with each other: ‘Hello, wake up. Do you know who you really are? Hello. Wake up. Do you understand?' Here’s the message we’ve come to share: You and I are one. There's only one of us in the room. If you think we’re separate, cut it out. We’re not separate. There’s only one of us in the room. And there’s no difference between us. And if you think there's a difference between us, cut it out. Because there is no difference between us. And stop trying to create an artificial difference where there is none. And when you can’t, then you and I are one, and there’s only one of us in the room, and only one of us on the planet, and only one of us in all of creation. Everything that causes you pain and misery, travail and struggle, heartache and difficulty, will disappear. It will simply go away.
So stop thinking that you’re over there, and I'm over here. There's no place where ‘you’ end and ‘I’ begin – such a simple, elegant message that changes everything. When will we get it? When will we get it? We'll get it when we send it. Did you hear that. We'll get the message when we send the message.
From Applications for Living, copyright 1999 by Neale Donald Walsch, published in the UK in 1999 by Hodder & Stoughton.
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