Author Archive
A new video posted on the Facebook page of Conversation with God author Neale Donald Walsch is threatening to go viral on the Internet, having reached nearly 90,000 views in just a few days.
The video is just over six minutes long, and its script is a reading of the first chapter from the audio book of Walsch’s newest work.
Carrying the title GOD’S MESSAGE TO THE WORLD: You’ve Got Me All Wrong, the book offers an exploration of 17 statements about God that are held to be true by billions of people across the planet.
None of the statements are true, the author asserts, and the video highlights the challenges now being faced by humanity as a result. The program ends with the asking of a series of inquiries that Walsch says are the most important questions facing our species in the first quarter of the century.
The video has been shared by over 3,000 people, with the number rising rapidly every hour, according to Facebook analytics.
The Corporation For Enterprise Development (CFED) released an article on January 30 by Lebaron Sims and Sean Luechtefeld in which it placed a new light on the economy in the U.S.
In the article, the writers argued that “almost half of Americans are on the brink of financial calamity.”
Reading the news, the writers said, “it would be easy to conclude that the economy is chugging along toward full recovery.” They pointed to new government data released on Jan. 30 which revealed that the economy grew at a “healthy” 3.2% in the last quarter of 2013. “Yet,” the writers said, “ask the average middle-class American and their economic outlook is anything but healthy.
The 2014 Assets & Opportunity Scorecard, released by CFED last month, which finds that despite an improving national economy, “liquid asset poverty rates have barely budged,” the article by Sims and Luechtefeld said.
“The percentage of households in the US who lack the savings needed to weather a financial storm like a job loss or medical emergency is holding tight at 44%,” they said.
The Scorecard also found that problems like growing student loan debt and high rates of consumers with subprime credit—especially among households of color—”are to blame for Americans’ lingering inability to get ahead and build a more secure financial future for themselves and their families,” the writers said.
The article went on to report that CFED President Andrea Levere has called attention to the fact that despite 50 years of progress in the War on Poverty, Americans’ economic mobility has stagnated, while household net worth continues to decline. Part of why these measures trend the wrong direction, Mr. Levere noted, “is the intergenerational transfer of wealth and the lack of policies in place to give a hand up to those who need it the most,” the article said.
The story on its website said that the Corporation For Enterprise Development’s annual “Scorecard” has, for over a decade, been the go-to source for data on household financial security in America.
“This year, however, the Scorecard includes assessments of all 50 states and the District of Columbia on 67 different policy measures. These measures illustrate how far states have gone—and how far they still need to go—to help their residents achieve financial stability,” the story went on.
Ranging from mandatory all-day kindergarten to the establishment of a state housing trust fund, these policies offer legislators manageable and moveable ways to expand economic opportunity in their states, the CFED story asserted.
Also new to the 2014 Scorecard are Estimated Impacts, CFED said in the article by Sims and Luechtefeld, are detailed projections of what effect improvements in 16 specific outcomes would have on the citizens of each state. “For example, Massachusetts has the nation’s lowest uninsured rate, at 4.4%. If Pennsylvania’s 11.5% uninsured rate improved to match Massachusetts’, 742,971 additional Pennsylvanians would have health insurance—no small matter. With this exciting new data tool, advocates can better illustrate the power that good policy can have on the lives of individuals and households,” the article said.
The CFED’s Scorecard offers tools for anyone wishing to look more closely at the U.S. economy as they “make the case to policymakers, community leaders and funders for asset-building strategies that create pathways to economic opportunity,” the internet story declared.
The entire story may be read here. Persons interested in a close-up look at the U.S. economy and its implications may follow the conversation about that on Twitter using #CFEDscorecard.
A statement on its website says: “The Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), a national nonprofit 501(c)3 organization, empowers low- and moderate-income households to build and preserve assets by advancing policies and programs that help them achieve the American Dream, including buying a home, pursuing higher education, starting a business and saving for the future. As a leading source for data about household financial security and policy solutions, CFED understands what families need to succeed. We promote programs on the ground and invest in social enterprises that create pathways to financial security and opportunity for millions of people.
DON’T MISS, IN THIS ISSUE…(click on the headline to link to it):…..If you could make only one more statement to the outside world before you died, what would it be?….Is “advertising” making us forget Who We Really Are?….AND…How you can do something now to slow down the Alzheimer’s scourge.
EMERGENCY…EMERGENCY…
EMERGENCY!
Your personal intervention is desperately needed at this very moment in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan’s devastation across the Philippines. Food and clean water still has not gotten to thousands in devastated areas. CNN’s Team Impact has been looking for ways that everyone can help. Please look at this list, and click on one or more of these links. We place this here with sincere acknowledgement of and deep thanks to CNN, which we hope and trust will not mind our republishing the list from their website, in the interests of humanity.
- American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
- Americares
- CARE | Catholic Relief Services
- Convoy of Hope | Direct Relief
- Habitat for Humanity
- International Medical Corps
- Philippine Red Cross
- Samaritan’s Purse
- Save The Children
- ShelterBox
- UNICEF
- World Food Programme | World Vision
Click here to link to the CNN site if you would like more information on this heartbreaking but important biggest news story of the day.
Please read Naomi Klein’s recent article in New Statesman…How Science Is Telling Us All To Revolt… on the reason why human life on the planet is in deep danger that must be addressed immediately.
Her article contains this observation…
The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilizing life on earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes. And increasing numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity in Balcombe; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (at tremendous personal cost); taking tar sands operators to court for violating indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of resistance large and small. In Brad Werner’s computer model, this is the “friction” needed to slow down the forces of destabilization; the great climate campaigner Bill McKibben calls it the “antibodies” rising up to fight the planet’s “spiking fever”.
It’s not a revolution, but it’s a start. And it might just buy us enough time to figure out a way to live on this planet that is distinctly less f**ked.
The entire article can be found here…
And would you then please read the proposed Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (the ESRA) at www.tikkun.org/ESRA and read the Spiritual Covenant with America at www.spiritualprogressives.org? These present a strategy for dealing with the issues raised by Naomi Klein.
In practical terms, the ESRA is a major step toward reversing what Naomi Klein is describing in her article.
Unrealistic? No, what is most unrealistic is to not take these kind of major steps before it is too late to save life on earth. Can it pass? Well, the Equal Rights Amendment (the ERA) never passed, but the struggle for it changed public opinion dramatically and took feminism from being a side-show to mainstream acceptance.
That is what the ESRA is meant to do for the idea of seriously challenging corporate power by establishing democratic control or review of their impact on the environment and on the values of the society.
It is actually evolutionary, but at least it speeds things up enough so that more complete steps at global restraints on corporate destruction of the environment can be taken seriously.
One part of it, the “Money out of Politics” clause, not only overturns Citizens United but goes much further by requiring that state and federal elections must be publicly financed and no other source of money (from corporations OR from individuals) will be permitted; thus the ESRA democratizes both the political system and a major part of the economy.
We are inviting you to come to our Transformative Activist Training so that you can have the skills to bring these kinds of ideas into the public sphere. For info: www.spiritualprogressives.org/training. Please join us.
Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, Tikkun and co-chair, The Network of Spiritual Progressives
NOTE: Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, now out in paperback. Her earlier books include the international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (which has just been re-published in a special 10th Anniversary Edition); and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002). To read all her latest writing visit www.naomiklein.org. You can follow her on Twitter: @NaomiAKlein.
Thank you very much for your show of interest by clicking through to this page. It will take you approximately eight or nine minutes to read what I have written here. I know that seems like a lot of time, but over the course of your life you will see it as really very little. Would you grant me the favor of giving me those few minutes? I think it could make a real difference on our planet.
I would never ask you if I did not think that when you’re finished reading this Information Page, you will be excited and ready to answer the call to join with me and others around the globe in doing something constructive, meaningful, and effective to help our world at this present critical juncture on our evolutionary path.
Let me begin by making the case for why to even bother…may I?
Right now, none of the systems we have put into place to make our world a better place are working. Not our political systems, not our economic systems, not our ecological systems, not our educational systems, not our health systems, not our social systems, and not our spiritual systems.
None of them—not one of them—has produced the outcomes for which it was designed, and for which we have collectively yearned. In fact, it’s worse. They have produced exactly the opposite. They have generated outcomes we say we don’t even want.
Our political systems are creating nothing but disagreement and disarray. Our economic systems are actually increasing poverty. Our ecological systems are generating environmental degradation. Our educational systems are failing to educate enough people in enough places to bring our species anywhere near the reaching of its full potential. Our health care systems are doing little to eliminate inequality of access to modern medicines and health care services. Our social systems are known to encourage disparity, prejudice, and injustice. And, perhaps most dysfunctional of all, our spiritual systems are producing intolerance, righteousness, anger, hatred, and violence.
The great sadness is that we imagine we can’t change any of this. The great happiness is that we can. All it takes is a shift in consciousness—and that is easier to bring about than most people think.
All change in consciousness is created by people who have already changed their consciousness, when they actively, excitedly, and expansively talk about their ideas and describe the possibilities that a New Consciousness places before humanity.
Let me share something here from Margaret J. Wheatley, author of Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future (2002).
This is a globally known consultant on organizational behavior. She received her doctorate from Harvard University, holds an M.A. in systems thinking from New York University, and has worked on every inhabited continent in virtually every type of organization. In other words, Meg Wheatley knows her way around. Here’s what she says:
“There is no more powerful way to initiate significant social change than to start a conversation.”
I couldn’t have paid her to say something better suited to make the point I wish to make here. In a 2002 article in Utne Reader Ms. Wheatley observes that “…true conversation is…a timeless and reliable way for humans to think together. Before there were classrooms, meetings or group facilitators, there were people sitting around talking.
“We can take courage from the fact that this is a process we all know how to do. We can also take courage in the fact that many people are longing to converse again…We are awakening an ancient practice, a way of being gathered that all humans intimately understand.”
Having said that, Ms. Wheatley offered a powerful concluding comment:
“Change doesn’t happen from someone announcing the plan. Change begins from deep inside a system, when a few people notice something they will no longer tolerate, or when they respond to someone’s dream of what’s possible.”
That is precisely, to the letter, what the Evolution Revolution is all about. It is a call to people everywhere, gathering in small groups of spiritual activists around the world, to ignite a global conversation (I call it The Conversation of the Century) that will sow seeds of sanity, producing at last the civilization of
Civilization.
We say that our civilization is civilized, but, of course, it is not. We can see that with even a casual glance. No civilization that allows over 600 of its children to die every hour of starvation is civilized. No civilization that kills people to demonstrate that it is wrong to kill people is civilized. No civilization that systematically makes life difficult and challenging and simply unfair for any of its members who happen to be black or female or gay—or belong to any minority group—is civilized. And no civilization that threatens and uses force (economic, social, or political), employs physical violence, and commits mass murder as a means of resolving differences is civilized.
Such an ongoing scenario could only be put in place—and then continually supported—by a race of beings so primitive as to declare barbaric behaviors normal and savage solutions unavoidable. Yet the movement from primitive thinking to advanced contemplations, the shift from lower to higher levels of consciousness, need not take millennia to materialize. Such a shift can occur spontaneously and instantaneously when effective alternatives to clearly undesirable, unworkable, and unprofitable approaches to creating our communal life are offered.
The problem is, none are widely being offered.
This is where YOU come in!
If we are going to make any kind of difference in our world in 2013 and beyond, we are going to have to do two things: (1) Enter (indeed, ignite) a conversation about what needs to be accomplished and how to accomplish it; (2) Get about the business of creating change not only in the things we do, but in the way we think.
This can only be accomplished by doing something revolutionary. Perhaps it is not so revolutionary at that. Science and Medicine and Technology have produced many breathtaking advances by doing it consistently. But in the area of most critical importance to the every day person—our social, cultural, political, and religious beliefs—the majority of human beings have been stubbornly resistant to doing it. And what is it that Science, Medicine, and Technology does that most humans in every day life staunchly refuse to do…?
Question the Prior Assumption
Everything begins, of course, with some sort of original information—and it is that very information that few people wish to question—even if the information is creating disaster.
Humanity has for centuries tried to solve its problems at every level except the level at which those problems exist. It continues to do so today.
We approach our problems as if they were political problems, open to political solutions. We talk about them, we hold debates about them, we pass resolutions about them. When nothing changes, we seek to solve our problems through economic means. We throw money at them, or withhold money from them, as in the case of sanctions. When that fails we say, aha, this is a problem to give to the military. We’ll solve it with force. So we drop bombs on it. That never works, either, if a long-term solution is what anyone is looking for, but do you think we would learn?
No. We just simply the cycle all over again. It’s back to the negotiating table for more talks, then back to the bank for more money, then back to the bombs for more clout.
The reason we keep running like a mouse on a wheel is that no one dares to look at the cause of the ongoing conditions we seem fated to endure. Either we truly don’t know, or we are afraid to admit, that our biggest problem today is not a political problem, it’s not an economic problem, and it’s not a military problem.
The problem facing humanity today is a spiritual problem,
and it can only be solved by taking a long, hard look
at what it is we all believe.
Once this is understood, the solution becomes obvious. Until it’s understood, the solution escapes everyone.
It’s what people believe that creates their behavior. Therefore, it is at the level of belief, not at the level of behavior, where conduct can most profoundly be modified. For decades we’ve been talking in psychology circles about behavior modification, or Behavior Mod. What we really should be talking about is Belief Mod.
Ah, but here we go. Oh, boy. Watch out. We’re talking now about the most sacred part of people’s underpinnings. Many people would rather die for their beliefs—or kill others—than change them.
It doesn’t matter whether the beliefs are functional. It doesn’t matter whether they are actually working, in the sense of making people happy and producing a better life.
Many people would rather be unhappy doing what they believe than happy doing something else. They are actually happy being unhappy. Under this convention, suffering is a virtue. It makes one a worthy person in the eyes of God.
So the spiritual understandings of billions of people on this planet are not insignificant in all of this. You cannot change social conditions by trying to change the conditions themselves. Do you know how long it has been since we’ve been trying to eradicate simple hunger in this world? Do you know how many non-profit organizations have been, and continue to be, undertaking that task? This is just one example of our utter impotence. There are others. The eradication of cruelty to women. The elimination of political persecution for anyone holding views opposite to those in authority. The list goes on and on…and on.
Social conditions can only be changed by changing
the beliefs that produce such conditions.
And that, my dear companions on the journey, is what we now have an opportunity to do. And the wonder of it is that we can do this as part of the process of our own individual evolutionary voyage. We can do it by allowing the evolution in our own personal beliefs to become part of an Evolution Revolution on Earth.
Most of you reading this already agree with what’s been said here. The trick is to get others to agree. In large numbers. “Nothing,” Victor Hugo famously said, “not all the armies in the world, can stop an idea whose time has come.” But first, the idea must be put “out there.” That’s what The Conversation of the Century is designed to do. It is designed to put evolutionarily revolutionary ideas into circulation.
You can ignite such a conversation in your community. And I will join your group, by telephone conference call, in your explorations and in designing your action plan to expand, at last, Humanity’s Cultural Story, offering people around the world a new idea of who we are, why we are here, what it can mean to all of us if we inspire another way to be human.
I am inviting and encouraging all of you to create Evolution Revolution Focused Activities around the globe, including meaningful discussions which can be ignited, and action plans which can be designed, in response to all that we see taking place in our world. These groups would seek to place into the world a compelling invitation for people everywhere to explore how an application of the concepts of a new kind of spirituality could create a planet with far less suffering and turmoil and much more joy and peace for all.
Helpful in this regard might very well be the document found at this link: One Thousand Words That Will Change the World, These are the 25 Core Messages of Conversations with God, and they are not intended to be placed before others as the Be All and End All of answers to our challenges, but as a viable starting point for discussion.
What we are suggesting here is nothing less than a Civil Rights Movement for the Soul, freeing humanity at last from the oppression of its beliefs in a violent, angry, and vindictive God, and releasing our species from a spiritual doctrine that has created nothing but separation, fear, and dysfunction around the world.
It is time for human beings to begin replacing this dogma, finally, with an ethos of unity and cooperation, understanding and compassion, generosity and love. Yet this will take a change of mind and a change of heart. And courage. The courage to reject every notion, every idea, every teaching of a God who would reject us.
The world has contrived to fill ours head with those notions, these ideas and these teachings since we were children. Now, because of the speed of worldwide communication over the Internet, we have a golden opportunity to invite, create, explore and adopt a New Thought about all of this, a thought that runs counter to virtually everything we’ve ever been told or heard about God, about each other, and about Life and what it is really all about.
Here at The Global Conversation internet newspaper we have reserved this section to provide you with discussion group ideas, topics, questions, and action items to use as tools in facilitating your own Evolution Revolution activities in support of the Civil Rights Movement for the Soul. That is the name we have given to a global movement which has been put into place around the world by Humanity’s Team to help our species write and live into a New Cultural Story on our planet — a story based on a new spiritual awareness that could alter forever for the better the way we experience life on Earth.
I envision a Berlin Evolution Revolution Activity Group, a Toyko Evolution Revolution Activity Group, a Buenos Aires Evolution Revolution Activity Group, a Los Angeles Evolution Revolution Activity Group, and similar activity groups all around the world as outgrowths of the Spiritual Sphere of the global action plan of Humanity’s Team.
If you believe it is time to ignite an Evolution Revolution, create an activity group in your community. And here is how I can become part of your group: If you gather at least six people on a regular basis in your home to explore these critical topics, I will join you on a regular basis, electronically and in real time, for an ever-expanding global group discussion that could alter humanity’s future—just as other vital and passionate conversations have changed the course of human history in the past.
To learn more about how you, your family and friends may participate, write to neale.donald.walsch@HumanitysTeam.org.
So where do you begin?
1. Join and support Humanity’s Team: This is a global organization that I created, now with members in 73 countries, that is sponsoring the Evolution Revolution as part of its Twelve Spheres of Life Initiative. You can enroll as a member as part of your participation in this dynamic spiritual outreach.
2. Create a local Evolution Revolution Activity Group and commit to meeting on a regular basis—once a week or once or twice a month, depending on your time availability.
3. Use our website as a tool to facilitate your pod by using the questions and action items we post here as part of your discussions.
You may want to consider opening your first gathering with life’s most critical question, taken from the pages of The Storm Before the Calm. (That book can be read on this website. You’ll find a direct link to it in the lower right hand column of our home page.) The question with which you can initiate your group exploration:
How is it possible for 6.9 billion people to all want the same thing—survival, safety, security, peace, prosperity, opportunity, happiness, and love—and to be unable to produce it, even after thousands of years of trying?
Here are more Evolution Revolution discussion topics…
Month #1
1. What, if anything, could cause all the people of the world to feel happy, safe, and secure?
2. What understanding or spiritual message do you believe could have a positive effect on seemingly intractable global situations, such as the continuing conflict in Syria, the internationally tense political “standoff” between North Korea and the United States in the Spring of 2013, the latest revolution in Egypt, and other global crises?
Here is an Evolution Revolution Action Item
Month #1
The Global Conversation will soon be offering a Resource Center that will provide our visitors the e-mail addresses and contact information for some of the world’s most influential leaders and politicians. As well, the mailing list of major global media outlets—newspapers, magazines, television networks, etc.—that help form and shape public opinion.
As your first action item, we invite your Evolution Revolution Activity Group to collaborate on the writing of letters that can be distributed globally, sharing your thoughts, your ideas, and your opinions about what is taking place in our world, and how we can create changes that will benefit all of humanity. If you had the opportunity to spend five minutes with someone who is in a position to influence significant change, what would you say? Put it in a letter. When enough such statements start appearing in Letters to the Editor columns around the world, on the Internet, and yes, in the mailboxes of world figures, change begins to happen.
If you would like your letters to be considered for publication and shared with our global audience here on The Global Conversation, please e-mail them to Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.
Thank you!
Thank you for giving me these few minutes to lay all this out for you.
I hope you will join me in creating something
that can bring even greater meaning to your life and healing to your world.
You can begin immediately by sending an email right away to
neale.donald.walsch@HumanitysTeam.org
Just say, “I’m in.”
You’ll get a letter back leading you through
the Start Up Process.
Let’s ignite an Evolution Revolution.
A revolution with a new kind of leader.
The old kind of leader said, “follow me.”
The new leader says, “I’ll go first.”
ON THE FACEBOOK PLATFORM there is an excerpt-by-excerpt posting of The Only Thing That Matters, the newest book in the Conversations with God cosmology. Here is the latest of those entries…
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It is time now to enter into deep, honest, self-examination…I need to ask myself some questions. Some important, even pointed, questions:
Are my minutes fulfilling? Are my hours ringing with satisfaction? Are my days overflowing with contentment? Are my weeks and months teeming with accomplishment of my Soul’s agenda?
Are my years brimming with spiritual radiance and soulful, Divine expression and experience? Or do I awaken on milestone days—birthdays, anniversaries, times of celebration—with a vague feeling of how fast time is passing and how slowly I have progressed at what I came here to accomplish—and how difficult it is to accomplish it . . . ?
For that matter, have I always been clear that there is something specific that I came here to accomplish? If so, have I known exactly what that is?
I guess I should not be surprised or embarrassed if I have not. It turns out that 98% of the world’s people do not. And it’s not their fault. And it’s not my fault if I find myself even now, at least from time to time, among them. Because nobody told them, and nobody told me, what really matters.
Oh, they’ve tried to tell us. Some people have tried to convince us. And many, many of us listened to those people, because to know something for certain—as religions and politics allow us to think that we do—feels better than to not know.
But the more I listened the more I knew that what others were “buying into” of what still others were telling them couldn’t possibly be true. So I moved away from all of their agendas. I may not have known where I was going, but I knew what I wanted to get away from.
The result is that I am spending less time these days in that larger group. And right now I am not even in it . . . or I would never have this book in my hand. It is wonderful that I am not among that 98% now, and that I spend less and less time there, because there’s nothing worse than spending most of one’s life on things that just simply don’t matter.
No, wait, yes there is. It would be worse to not know what does matter. It would be worse to not know that what I am doing here is taking a Sacred Journey, fulfilling a Divine Purpose.
================================
All of the excerpts so far posted on Facebook may be accessed here.
In your opinion should employers tell their employees that if they don’t vote for a particular candidate in an upcoming election, their jobs will be threatened?
Why do you think it has been so difficult for women to achieve equal status with men, even after thousands of years of humanity looking at this issue?
