Notes from Neale…
My dear friends…
Below in this letter is the second excerpt from my new book, When Everything Changes, Change Everything. Don’t miss that! But first, let me say that it was fabulous to be in Hawaii and to join with my wonderful friend Alan Cohen in two joint presentations, one on Maui and one in Honolulu. Alan is an incredible teacher and a wonderful presenter and it is always an honor to be on the same platform with him. He has so many wonderful things to say that the man practically writes a book right in front of you! Wisdom, wisdom, wisdom every time he opens his mouth. What a treat!
We came back to Oregon to find snow and rain and cold winds and, oh, my, what a reality shift from those beautiful islands! But don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love Ashland. It is a fabulous place to call home, and every year winds up in the Top 5 on those lists of Best Places in America in which to live. It’s just that the temperature switch was so severe and so fast!
Many people in those island events were focusing on the changes that are occurring in so many people’s lives right now. Pink slips and home foreclosures and investment losses and relationship challenges being created by all of the above…
I am soooo pleased to tell you about our wonderful five-day CWG intensive, the Spring Cleaning for the Soul retreat – the only East Coast retreat this year – to be held at the Four Points Sheraton BWI Airport Hotel, in Baltimore, May 20-24.
This is a wonderful opportunity for you to learn more about the practical aspects of the principles from the Conversations with God books, and how to apply those wonderful messages in your everyday life. I love this program because it gives me lots of time to spend in a very personal way with a handful of people, looking deeply at CWG from every which way, and also doing a lot of personal spiritual process work with me!
Yes, I facilitate this retreat personally, and it is always a highlight of my year. By the way, the 20th and 24th are partial days (the program does not start until the evening on the 20th), so you can use those days for travel. The three middle days are loaded with lots of my personal sharings and insights on the material and its application, question-and-answer time, and process time. We begin each of these days at 9 a.m. and go until about 10 p.m. Lots of special time for me to personally share with you – time for you to get all the answers to all your questions.
What is this worth to you? Are you worth whatever the cost is? Or are you scrimping because you can’t afford to do something for yourself right now, in these difficult economic times?
The irony of life is that it is when we need to be uplifted the most, we pay attention to that part of our needs the least. It is especially during challenging times such as these that we should be scurrying to the source of our spiritual nourishment. What would CwG say about that? Perhaps it is time to re-read Chapter 8 of Conversations with God, Book 1, which is on relationships and points out that the most important relationship is the one with your Self.
The cost of these 5 days is $695 per person…and there are ways to reduce that cost. Call Will at 352-442-2244 to find out how. (A hint: bring two others and you get in for only $100…. OR bring 3 others and get in for free).
This is the only 5 day retreat I am doing on the East Coast this year, so if you’ve been thinking of doing a CWG event, now is the time to save on airfare! The Sheraton has special rates for those attending this retreat also.
So, come on. You do deserve it. It is time to take care of yourself. Or maybe you know another person who is going through some challenges right now and would never forget you for the rest of their life if you gave them a gift of this retreat…
Call Will, who can answer all your questions and also register you. Will’s number is 352-442-2244. Call now…because you and I have had a date to meet personally for a very long time, remember? You’ve been telling yourself about this for years, and now can be that moment.
Now, let’s take another peek into that new book, coming out in a few weeks. Here’s another excerpt…
Let’s look at two of the Three Brands of Truth: Apparent Truth and Imagined Truth. It’s important that we do, because this is the key to everything.
Most people live in their Imagined Truth when things change, having been held down there by their past. This Imagined Truth births a thought, out of which arises an emotion, which produces an experience—which seems to them to be reality. As it turns out, it is a Distorted Reality.
This gets us back to where you might be right now.
Because of what has just happened to you, this huge change that has been visited upon you that is not something you would have chosen, that is something that just came down out of the blue, out of thin air, you’re angry, or sad, or frustrated, or disappointed, or disillusioned, or “all of the above”… all because you are afraid. And you are afraid…all because you are in love. You’re in love with yourself (even though you don’t think you are) and you’re in love with life (even though you say you hate it right now).
You’re afraid of trading in a past that you knew for a future you do not. Afraid of what might happen. Afraid of how things could be. And afraid that you may never find this kind of situation again (this kind of job, this kind of person, this kind of home); that you may never have this kind of experience again.
Well, you may never find this kind of situation again—but you may very well have this kind of experience again. (For instance, you may never be with the same mate again, but you may very well have the same experience—the experience of joy and happiness—with another mate. It all depends on what you buy into: your Imagined Truth or the Apparent Truth.)
Remember that the experience of happiness has nothing to do with a given situation. This is hard to accept because we are absolutely certain that it does. Yet there is no connection between exterior events and interior experiences, except in your head.
Your capacity to know joy is not connected to this one person or to that place of employment, for instance. You just think that it is. The Apparent Truth and the Imagined Truth are not identical. Ever.
Ever.
Events do not have meanings. Events are events, and meanings are thoughts. Nothing has any meaning save the meaning you give it. And the meaning you give to things does not derive from any event, circumstance, condition or situation exterior to yourself. The Giving of Meaning is entirely an internal process.
Entirely.
(More in upcoming weeks, as we print other excerpts from When Everything Changes, Change Everything. Note: This book may be pre-ordered from Amazon.com. It is scheduled for publication in May.)
Love and Hugs,
Neale.
The CwG Reader
Further explorations of the Conversations with God material from the author
Neale Donald Walsch through the years has given hundreds of talks and written scores of articles revolving around the messages he received in his Conversations with God. Now, every seven days, we will present in this space a transcript or reprint of those presentations. We invite you to Copy and Save each one of them, creating a personal a collection of contemporary and uplifting spiritual thought which you may reference at any time. We hope you will find this a constant source of insight and inspiration.
This week’s offering: The Five Attitudes of Godliness
THE FIVE ATTITUDES OF GODLINESS
When I was a child I had a deep fascination with God. What was He like, I wondered? Where did He live?
I know now that my ideas about God as a man living somewhere in the sky were the products of my childhood upbringing in a Roman Catholic family. I know that God is not limited to being a “he” or a “she,” but that God shows up in every form in which Life Itself displays itself.
Still, I hold onto this idea that there are some attributes of God. I ask myself sometimes, if God chose to show up as a human being, what would that be like? What kind of personality would God have?
My questions about this were answered in the Conversations with God dialogue, in which I was given the Five Attitudes of God (CwG – Book 1, pg. 65-66).
“In the moment of your total knowing (which moment could come upon you at any time), you, too, will feel as I do always,” God said to me. And what way is that? Said God: “totally joyful, loving, accepting, blessing and grateful.”
This is, I found out later in the Dialogue, the way the soul always feels as well. That is because the soul of humans and the essence of God is one and the same thing. So our soul is always totally joyful, loving, accepting, blessing and grateful. The trick is to bring our body and our mind into alignment with that deep inner nature of our being.
The soul is always joyful because Joy is what the soul (and what God) IS. God IS that which we would call, for lack of a more technical or clinical description, “pure joy.” I am come to understand that God is pure energy, of course. The energy that we call Life Itself. But what does this energy feel like? That’s the question. And the answer is, pure joy. The energy feels like pure joy. Ultimate happiness. Or what some Eastern mystics have call “bliss.”
Because the soul is always in a state of bliss, or pure joy, it is always loving. As is God. God loving everything, because God is so excited with Itself! There is nothing that exists outside of God, nothing that is “not God,” and so, everything that God is happy about and excited about exists within God — and precisely because it does exist within God, God is happy about it!
And so, God is eternally loving. God is loving everything about Life, because God is Life Itself, expressing. If you were totally joyful all of the time, you, too, would be totally loving. There is no way you could not be.
Yes, you might say, but how can anyone be totally joyful all of the time? Look at the world around us.
The trick is to see the world as it is — as it really is — and not as it appears to be. (To learn more about this please read Communion with God, which outlines in wonderful detail the Ten Illusions of Humans.) This is how God sees the world, and so God is always totally joyful, and that causes God to be totally loving.
Because God is totally loving, God is totally accepting — for pure love is the rejection of nothing. Pure love is unconditional. In fact, all love in unconditional. Anything less than that is not love, but some counterfeit version of that.
Because love is unconditional, it accept everything. It does this by making no value judgments whatsoever. It does not call one thing “good” and another thing “bad.” A thing simply “is.” This is what CWG calls the “Isness,” and Isness has no goodness or badness to it.
Where we get into trouble in our lives is by attaching goodness to badness to a thing. We make value judgments, and those judgments create enormous difficulty for many reasons — not the least of which is that we keep changing them. One day we call a thing “good” and the next day we call the very same thing “bad,” depending on whether the thing we are judging serves our purposes or not.
Let me give you a simple example.
Rain.
One day we call rain good, the next day we call it bad. It all depends on whether it’s raining on our crop or raining on our parade.
Killing is another example. We think we have an absolute Right and an absolute Wrong around this, but the truth is, we can’t make up our mind until we know and understand what the killing is for. Killing in self-defence, as an example, may not be called “good,” but most people and societies agree that it is not “bad.” So we find a third word. It may be, we say, “necessary.”
That means it is required in order for us to do what it is we want to do.
It is because of this reasoning that we call all attack a “defense.” In this way, we can morally justify it.
Yet what if nothing in the world had to be morally justified? This is the State in which God lives. Because God does not feel the need to morally justify (or condemn) anything, God can be totally accepting. But how can God be in such a place? Easy. Since God is the All in All, nothing can hurt, damage or destroy God. And since nothing can hurt, damage or destroy God, God has no need to judge it.
Therefore, is the experience of God, a thing simply “is.” So, to, is it in the experience of Godliness. (Author and teacher Byron Katie makes this exact point in her astonishing book Loving What Is. Her latest book is referenced below.)
If we truly want the experience of what it is to be Godly, we will begin by removing our judgments from everything. Now this will be difficult for us to do as long as we are living inside of the Ten Illusions of Humans. The only way to escape our judgments is to escape our illusions.
Communion with God gives us the entire process by which we may do this. That’s what makes it such a powerful book.
Once we become, as God is, totally accepting, we move to the next level of Godliness, which is to become totally blessing. This is where God resides all of the time. God not only accepts what “is” in every single moment, God blesses it.
To bless something means to give it your best energy. Your highest thought. Your grandest wish. You send a thing good energy when you bless it — and this is something physical that you are doing, not merely something conceptual or philosophical.
Life energy can be moved around, manipulated, and we do this all the time with our thoughts. We also do it with our words and actions. Thought, word and action are the Three Tools of Creation (CwG Book 1). With these devices we create, and co-create with others, our individual and collective experience. We are literally producing the world around us.
That is why The New Revelations says that all behavior begins with beliefs — and that it is beliefs we must change if we really want to change the world. Interestingly, no one who says they want to change the world — international political leaders and worldwide religious leaders — talks very much in these terms. Political leaders don’t talk about beliefs at all, and religious leaders talk in terms of other people changing their beliefs, but insist that they, themselves, have all the right beliefs. Then they deny that this is precisely what causes the world to be such a dangerous place.
Now the true Master blesses all of this, she does not condemn it. And in so doing, the true Master transforms it, for the impact of his blessing energy shifts the energy of the condition itself. That is why blessing, and never condemning, is the greatest spiritual secret. It is why all Masters have said, each in their own way and their own words, “judge not, and neither condemn. For that which you judge, judges you, and that which you condemn, condemns you, and that which you bless, blesses you.”
Finally, God is always totally grateful, for thankfulness is the experience of God recognizing Itself. To recognize means to “re-cognize,” that is, to “know again.” When God knows Itself again (which God does in every single golden moment of Now), God once again becomes joyful and the glorious Cycle of Life which is Life Itself continues, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
These are the Five Attitudes of God, and they are the five attributes of the human soul. When we allow these characteristics to fill our minds and our hearts, we become Godly. Our whole lives change, as do the lives of those around us. For life around us cannot help but change when we fill it with God Stuff. And Joy, Love, Acceptance, Blessing, and Gratitude is God Stuff indeed.
The wonderful thing about these Five Attitudes of Godliness is not only that one produces and creates another, but that they can be run in reverse. That is, one start with Gratitude just as easily as one can start with Joy. Either way, if the feeling is fully expressed the first domino falls, and all the rest follow.
I have tried to overlay these Five Attitudes of God on my daily life. For me it is sometimes easier to begin with Gratitude. Sometimes when I first wake up, or during my day when I encounter some very unwelcome news or moment, it is hard for me to “get into joy.” I just can’t seem to go there, no matter how much I try. But Gratitude for me has been a real key. I can move into Gratitude, even for moments or events that I do not particularly welcome, because I know that all things lead to my highest good.
Nothing that happens in my life happens without good purpose. Everything is perfect, and when I can “see the perfection” (as CWG invites me to do), I see the hand of God, and I know that there is a higher reason and that all things are good and that everything is bringing me to my highest expression of Who I Really Am.
Think of it as a scientist does in his laboratory. There is nothing that happens in that laboratory that is not a success, not a good outcome. Even so-called bad outcomes are good outcomes, in that they lead the scientist closer to the truth and to the outcome that is desired.
We are all Celestial Scientists, creating something utterly magnificent in the laboratory called Life. We are creating our Selves. And there is no way we can wrongly do that. Nor is there any way that we cannot ultimately get to where we wish to go — which is back to total union with All That Is. That is, back home to God.
When we know this, when we deeply believe it and completely embrace it, we find the grace to move through our lives — and any moment in our lives — with joy, love, acceptance, blessings, and gratitude. And when we do that, we change our lives and change the lives of those whose lives we touch. And in this, we truly change the world.
I want to recommend a book that I believe you are going to love if you see any workable insights in the above commentary. It is Byron Katie’s book, A Thousand Names for Joy.
In it this wonderful lady, who has created what she has called The Work, talks about exactly what I am describing just above. She talks about tripping and falling on the floor and seeing it as “perfect.” She talks about a man putting a gun to her stomach and saying “I’m going to kill you” and seeing it as perfect. (She looked the man straight in the eye and said, “Thank you for doing the best that you can.” He stared at her for a long second, then simply walked away.) She talks about a diagnosis of cancer and seeing it as “perfect.”
Katie, however, would not even call it “perfect.” Because the very idea of “perfect” means that there must be something that is IMperfect. And both “perfect” and “imperfect” are nothing more than figments of our imagination, creations of the mind, ideas that we slap on things which cause us to experience happiness and joy or sadness and upset. Katie simply calls the fall on the floor, the man with the gun, the cancer diagnosis “what is.” It is what is happening, it is what is going on, it is reality, and there is no sense, Byron Katie says, in arguing with what is going on, because it is going on, and that’s what’s so.
Werner Erhard, creator of est, used to put this in his own unique way. “Obviously,” he said, pointing at something or referencing something, “this is What’s So. Not so obviously, it’s also So What?”
Neal Donald Walsh
NOTE: The Weekly Bulletin is sent free of charge to anyone who asks for it. It is a publication of the ReCreation Foundation, a non-profit organization undertaking the work of sharing the message of Conversations with God with the world. That message is that the purpose of life is to recreate ourselves anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are.
The CwG Weekly Bulletin is prepared by Neale Donald Walsch, m.Claire, Geek Squared, LEP Graduates and other friends.
