I was doing a public speaking event recently and I was asked about the very first message on page 5 of the 3,000 pages of the Conversations with Goddialogue. “What does it mean?”, a member of my audience wanted to know. I gave what I thought was a pretty good answer, but I remembered that I had written about this extensively inConversations with God for Parents.I want to share that with all of you here, because this is a question that I get frequently, and it’s probably good for those of us here to look at this and discuss it once in a while.

To me the CWG message that We Are All One means exactly what it says. The conversation elaborates, telling us that All Things are One Thing. There is only One Thing, and all things are part of the One Thing there is.

This means that we are One with each other, One with all of Life, and One with God. There is no other way to interpret it, as I see it.

CWG is telling us that you are me and I am you; that we are part and parcel of Everything. We are intermingled as differing energy forms in a Larger Form that includes All That Is. And so, we are not only One with each other, but One with the Earth and every living thing upon it. One, as well, with the Universe. And One with that Divine Essence that we call God.

The implications of this for the human race are staggering. If we believed this was true, everything in our lives would change. Everything in our religions, in our politics, in our economics, in our education, and in our social constructions. And everything in our personal lives as well.

In our religions we would see the end of their seemingly endless competitions for human souls. Religions would stop insisting on portraying themselves as the One and Only Path to God. They would assist us on our own personal path, but they would not claim to be The Path. And they would cease using Fear as the chief tool in their arsenal.

They would stop teaching that unless we follow their doctrines, we are going to spend eternity in the everlasting fires of hell. They would be a source of comfort and guidance, of ever-present help, and of strength in times of need. Thus, religion would serve its highest purpose and its grandest function.

In our politics we would see the end of hidden agendas, and of power plays, and of the demonization of those with opposing points of view. Political parties would stop claiming that their way was the only way. And they would work together to find solutions to the most pressing problems, and to move society forward by seeking common ground.

They would seek to blend the most workable of their ideas with the most workable of the ideas of their opponents. Thus, politics would serve its highest purpose and its grandest function.

In our economics we would see the end of Bigger-Better-More as the international yardstick of Success. We would create a New Bottom Line, in which “maximum productivity” was redefined, and in which our endless drive for profits-profits-profits was replaced with a sense of awe and wonder in the universe, a reverence for all of life, and a dedication to creating a world in which each person can live in dignity, with basic needs being met. Thus, economics would serve its highest purpose and its grandest function.

In our education we would see the end of propaganda substituting for history, and of subject-driven curricula, where emphasis is placed on memorization of facts, rather than on the fundamental concepts of life which we want our children to understand: awareness, honesty, responsibility.

We would see a democratic school in which children have as much to say about what they are to learn and how they will learn it as teachers, and in which we do not use the environment to pour knowledge into children, but to draw wisdom out of them. Thus, education would serve its highest purpose and its grandest function.

What We Are All One does not mean is that what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine. Not in the ordinarily understood human sense of those words. The concept of Oneness does not eliminate the possibility of personal possessions or individual expressions.

We may find ourselves experiencing a higher level of desire than ever before to share our personal possessions with others when we realize that there really are no “others,” only and merely Additional Versions of the Self—yet we are not required to give our possessions away, nor are we authorized to take another’s possessions from them.

Each human expression of the Divine may experience itself exactly the way it chooses—and what we gather and what we share becomes a striking aspect of that individual expression.

We Are All One also does not mean that we are all the same, or that we do not have a personal and singular and very specific identity. The Parable of the Snowflake, which first appeared in the book The Only Thing That Matters (Emnin Books, 2012, distributed by Hay House), explains this for children in a wonderful way.

I offer it for your reading here…

Once upon a time there was a snowflake. It’s name was Sara. Sara the Snowflake had a brother named Sam. Sam the Snowflake.

Sara and Sam both lived a good life—but they feared for the day that they would die, melting away into the nothingness. Then one day the Snow Angel appeared to both of them. “A snowflake is eternal. Did you know that?” the Angel said, and then the Angel explained:

“The very first snowflakes in the history of the world are the snowflakes that are falling today. They fall from the sky as highly individualized physicalizations. There are no two snowflakes alike. There never have been, in all the history of snowflakes.

“The flakes are awesomely beautiful in their individual design. No one who watches them falling from the heavens can fail to see their exquisite splendor. People run outside when snowflakes fall, beholding their breathtaking magnificence.

“As they land, they merge with one another. People call a huge collection of them on the ground simply ‘snow.’ They don’t say, ‘Look at that big pile of snowflakes.’ They say, ‘Look at that mountain of snow.’ They see all the individual snowflakes as One. And indeed, the snowflakes are One with One Another.”

The Angel went on…

“Soon the sun comes out and the snow melts, each flake disappearing, one by one. They don’t, of course, disappear at all. They simply change form. Now they are water, rippling together in a sparkling puddle or flowing together in a little stream.

“The sun continues to work its magic, and soon the water itself disappears. Or seems to. Actually, it, too, simply changes form. It evaporates, rising into the air as invisible vapors and gathering there in such concentration that they are visible again—as clouds.

“As more and more vapors gather, the clouds become heavy with their moisture. Soon, once again, the moisture falls, raining down upon the earth. And if the temperature is just right, the falling rain turns into snowflakes again—no two snowflakes alike. Ever. In the history of snowflakes.”

Sara and Sam were never so happy in their entire lives. Suddenly, everything was what you might call . . . crystal clear.

And so, in the snow we see the Cycle of Life and the Story of You.

Glad I had a chance to share that with you here. As I said, it’s good once in a while to take a look at some of those early messages from Conversations with God. 

People, people, what are we doing to ourselves…? Has the time not yet come when we will rise up in gentleness and love, and yet with sweet and resolute determination, to say: Enough. Now that’s just enough—?

Are the people in North Carolina really going to go along with this direct legislative assault on gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people?

How much more hatred can a civil society put into actual law and still call itself civilized? Do you know what the law, passed in a rush-rush session of the legislature in North Carolina, actually does?

It is not simply legislation that makes it illegal for lesbians, gays, and transgender people to use the public restroom of the gender with which they identify — and therefore with whom they feel the most comfortable. It goes much further than that. It actually prohibits local governments from passing non-discrimination laws that would protect persons of differing sexual orientation within their jurisdiction.

But wait. It doesn’t even stop there. The so-called Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act bars all people, gay and straight, who are employed in North Carolina from suing any company that it feels has mistreated them — which until now they could do under a state anti-discrimination law that has been in place for 30 years. This little provision was snuck into the fine print of the more publicly debated “bathroom” legislation.

So now, if you live in North Carolina and feel you’ve been fired or mistreated because of your gender, your race, or your religion, you can’t do anything about it in state courts using state law, thanks to this business-friendly, poor-people-unfriendly law. (You would now have to use Federal courts and Federal law — a far more complicated, expensive, time-consuming, and thus discouraging process for low-income plaintiffs with job and housing discrimination claims.)

Why are we doing this to ourselves? Have we not yet had enough?

And what is the Big Deal about the sexual orientation of people in public bathrooms? I need to tell you something. Thirty-five years ago I traveled on assignment for Project AIDSAT (Agency for International Development/Space Age Technologies), under the aegis of the State Department. I remember my first day in Ouagadougou, the capital of what is now known as Burkina Faso, but what was then called Upper Volta. The team members working with me who were stationed at the U.S. Embassy there chuckled when I went into the restroom and came out shocked. There were men and women in there. In the same restroom. (My surprise was that I simply hadn’t expected it.)

That’s right. The public bathrooms were unisex. And this was over 30 years ago. No one thought anything of it. There were no attacks by men against women (or vice-versa), I saw no unruly behaviors, I heard no inappropriate comments, I experienced no invasion of privacy. Everybody behaved like grown-ups, simply using a public convenience to perform a natural human function.

No one thought anything of it.

The government did not have to pass a Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act. But this, of course, was an “undeveloped” nation, not the sophisticated State of North Carolina in the advanced nation called the United States of America.

We have a candidate for president of the United States who says of a protestor at one of his campaign events, “I’d like to punch him in the face.”

We have a candidate for president who says of protestors at his events, “I love the old days — you know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”

We have a candidate for president of the United States who told one of his audiences, “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. OK? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.”

Is there any hope? Are we really nothing more than a species of sentient beings run amok, blowing up H-bombs under the ground to prove our invincibility, ending criminals’ lives by injection to demonstrate our righteousness, allowing hundreds of children to die of starvation every hour as we defend a global economy that benefits one-tenth of the planet’s population?

Have we so lost our collective mind as to think that the way to stop gun violence is for everybody in the world to carry a gun?

Have we so lost our collective will as to find no way to stop the wars that create refugee crises rendering millions homeless?

Have we so lost our collective morals as to find it actually preferable for divisiveness, rudeness, insults and tasteless verbal bullying to become the hallmark of political leadership?

Is this what we have come to? Gun-toting, fist-pumping, verbal-bashing, jaw-jutting, loud-mouthed intimidators and strong-armed tyrants daring anyone to stand up for what is gentle, peaceful, and—God forbid—loving?

Just asking here.

(This is the third in a series of commentaries on Happiness, and How To Find It.)

In our last commentary here we pointed to the fact that life gives all of us the opportunity to heal an old injury, to close an old wound, to alter an old pattern, to shift an old reality, to release an old story, to change an old idea, and to create a new experience of Self. In other words, to be transformed. And thus, to be happy in and with our lives. Finally. And not just for a moment here or there, but until the end of our days.

Okay. That’s saying a lot. And you might now ask, “How is all this possible? How can all that healing and change occur?”

To see this clearly you must observe, with Gratitude. Life’s most wonderful gift: Reliable Repetition

To explain: You can depend on Life to be repetitious. Very few events or situations arising in your life will be much of a surprise to you anymore. Not in the sense of your never having experienced anything like them before. How you are going to react, then, can actually be anticipated by you, and you can reject your prior decisions about such events or situations if you wish.

And that is Life’s great secret. The greatest secret is not the Law of Attraction, but the Law of RE-traction.

This is a tool used to retract old decisions and make new ones, instantly. That is what true creation is all about.

When you bear witness to your responses to Life’s current events and immediately retract what you decided in the past about similar events, you give yourself almost unimaginable power—including the power to end struggle and suffering forever.

Buddha demonstrated this precisely, and taught it.

It is Gratitude that gives you this power. Gratitude gives you a Fresh Start. It is like being born again, and having the Mind re-set to zero. It wipes the slate clean of all prior negative judgments that you may have held about any person, event, circumstance or situation.

At the risk of a little Repetition right here, let’s review from a slightly different angle how the whole Process of Life works, so that you can see all of this even more clearly:

Within an astonishingly short period of time following your birth, you came into contact with—then analyzed, assembled, and stored—a monumental amount of data about your exterior world. You did this so efficiently that after only a few years on this planet, it became almost impossible for you to encounter any new experiences. New events, yes. New experiences, no.

This is by design.

You are not supposed to encounter new experiences. You are supposed to encounter the same experiences over and over again.

The experiences you are encountering repeatedly are inside of you, not outside of you. All experience is interior. It is events that are exterior. But events have nothing to do with your experience. The proof of this is the fact that two people can have distinctly different experiences of the exact same event.

So we see that you can encounter any number of new exterior events, but one can have virtually no truly new experiences. And the older you become, the more this will be obvious to you. Indeed, this truth will evidence itself exponentially as each year goes by.

You have already experienced this.

You have already experienced love, and you will no doubt experience it again. You have already experienced animosity, and you will no doubt experience it again. You have already experienced commitment, and you will no doubt experience it again. You have already experienced betrayal, and you will no doubt experience it again.

You have already experienced disappointment and excitement, agony and ecstasy, frustration and exhilaration, exasperation and exaltation, anger and joy, agitation and peace, loss and gain, fear and fearlessness, cowardice and courage, ignorance and wisdom, blah’s and bliss, confusion and clarity, and just about every other emotional polarity that one could describe or imagine.

The reason it was said that all experience is interior is that emotion is the sponsor of your experience, and all emotions are created within. Events are simply outer physical occurrences. It is the emotion you hold about a particular event that creates your experience of it. And there are no new emotions for you to experience at this stage of your life. There is an endless number of unique events which can and will be physically presented to you by Life, but the emotion generated by the event, and the interior experience that this emotion produces, will be one which you have encountered before. In most cases, many times before.

The Mind remembers its experiences. Every one of them.

Every.

Single.

One.

Of.

Them.

And now we see the reason for this.

Your Mind has been designed to hold in memory literally millions of experiences in order for you to notice that you are encountering conditions and events in your exterior world that are the same or nearly the same in their emotional content as you have encountered before.

The noticing of this is, in turn, intended to offer you repeated chances—literally millions of chances—to respond differently to conditions and events (both past and present) should you choose to, thereby recreating yourself anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about Who You Are.

We see, then, that a single Life offers in miniature what reincarnation offers in “maximature”: limitless opportunities to evolve.

This is the Process of Life in all its forms.

Scientists tell us that even the Universe is evolving. Do you imagine that you are not?

(This is the second in a series of observations on Happiness, and what causes it — or can cause it — in the experience of human beings.)

I am going to share with you now a device with immense power — a simple device that can transform almost any moment, almost miraculously, almost immediately, into a moment of happiness. The tool is Gratitude.

Gratitude is not merely an emotion, it is a decision.

So powerful is this decision that it becomes a definition and a declaration. It defines and declares your experience of Here and Now. And hence, your reality.
Gratitude can be a simple reaction, or it can be a magnificent creation. It is a simple reaction when your Mind is on Automatic. It is a magnificent creation when your Mind has merged with your Soul in making a combined choice about any Present Moment.

In every Moment that choice is always the same: to move into Reaction or Creation.

(You might have a little fun noticing that “reaction” and “creation” are very close to being the same word. Only the C and the R need to be reversed. When you C what you have always been meant to C, then you R what you always R—and the course of your life is reversed.)

While Gratitude may be one of the most powerful tools your Mind has ever been given, it may also be the most underutilized. This is no doubt because most people are not aware of the immense power of Gratitude to reverse a thought that is at the foundation of all suffering.

As earlier noted, the central cause of suffering is the idea that something is happening that should not be happening. Gratitude unleashes an energy that turns this idea on its head, announcing that just because something is unpleasant does not mean it is unbidden, unwelcome, or unwanted.

It should be understood that pain (both physical and emotional) can, in fact, be bidden, welcome, and wanted—for any one of a number of reasons that may serve the agenda of the Body (birthing pain, for instance, or a tooth extraction) or the Mind (the pain of the loss of a loved one, which you would choose and wish to experience…or the pain of realizing you have deeply hurt another, and that this is not Who You Really Are and Who You Want To Be).

Yet if the Mind thinks that a particular pain in “unwanted,” it will not abide it—and that is precisely what creates struggle in one’s life, and suffering.

Struggle is the result of the Mind rejecting what the Soul offers. It is the Mind deciding to go off in another direction, veering from the Path of the Soul. Suffering is the emotional product of that decision. Both struggle and suffering are creations of the Mind, which is where you reality is created.

What your Mind thinks about something is crucial in determining how you experience it—and Gratitude can cause you to change your Mind.

Yet Gratitude is not a tool with which to fool the Mind, it is a tool with which to open the Mind. It expands your normal, limited thinking to include a counter-intuitive truth: that even when something seems “bad” for you, it can actually be good for you.

Underneath this truth lies a deeper one: Nothing that ever happens is “bad” for you, or it wouldn’t be happening. Life is incapable of producing an event or condition that does not carry you to the next place in your evolution, and that is not designed for your next expression of Divinity. Since the expression of Divinity is the reason you are here, you can be sure that everything that is placed before you appears before you to serve this Divine Purpose. (In other words, your purpose.)

And so we say, Thank you, God. We give thanks for the opportunity to heal an old injury, to close an old wound, to alter an old pattern, to shift an old reality, to release an old story, to change an old idea, and to create a new experience of Self and Life. In short, the opportunity to Demonstrate Divinity — which is the reason you are here.

(In our next installment: Reliable Repetition – Another Tool Creating Happiness)

I appeared the other day on a globally broadcast panel discussion with Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith and Bishop Carlton Pearson and we were asked a series of extremely interesting questions. I thought it might be fun to share a couple of them:

1. What is the secret of happiness?
2. What is the meaning of life?

In answer to the first question I told our interviewer, “The secret of happiness is not to require it.”

My answer to the second question: “The meeting of life is the meaning we give it.”

Let’s take a look at the first of these responses here, and see if you agree.

I have learned in my dialogue with God that happiness is not something to be sought-after it is something that we are. It is our inherent nature. It is our deep identity. Is a word we have given to an energy that we feel in a certain way.

This energy is the fundamental energy of the universe. It is the primal force. It is the Essential Essence. It can be called by many names. Love is one of them. Happiness is another.

Because happiness is who we are, any effort to find it or to seek it is, essentially, on its surface a denial of our True Identity. By denying that identity, we push its manifestation further away from us.

I happen to wear glasses, and if you are a person who also wears glasses, I am sure that you and I have shared a common experience at least once in our lives. I am sure that at least once you and I have gone looking for our glasses while we were wearing them.

This is a classic example of ignoring what is true even as we are looking for what is true. It is an example of seeking that which we cannot find no matter how hard we try, because we are looking for something that we already have. We won’t find our glasses anywhere because we are looking right past them — indeed, right through them — in our effort to find them.

In the same way, we cannot possibly find happiness if we are looking outside of ourselves, because it is inside of ourselves that happiness resides ––– for the clear and simple reason that happiness is we are.

The best way to experience happiness, then, is to express it. To “express” means to push out, squeeze out, press out. It does not mean “to take in.” Happiness is not something that we gather, it’s something that we spread. And if we spread it wherever we go, we find ourselves experiencing it at a higher level than we might ever have thought possible.

Happiness is not something that comes to us, it’s something that comes through us. I know this sounds elementary, but I’m going to share it anyway. Happiness does not come from things. Proof of this can be found by simply observing the life of people who have acquired many things and are still unhappy.

As I said, I know that sounds simplistic and maybe even a little preachy, but it must be said nonetheless if we are to explore this topic. Because if we are to both learn and experience the secret of happiness, we must start at the beginning.

Happiness does not arise from something outside of us. It emerges from something inside of us — sometimes as our reaction to that which is outside of us, and sometimes as our creation of that which we would like to see outside of us.

Let me tell you about the highly New Age hot dog vendor on Coney Island. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. He goes around saying to people, “I’m the New Age Hot Dog Vendor. Let me make you one with everything.”

People smile and say, “Okay, make me one with relish, lettuce, onions, pickles, mustard, and catsup.” He does, then hands it to them. Then he charges them a crazy amount, like $7.77, so that no one can hand him precisely what he wants. When they give him a $10 bill, or two 5’s, he thanks them, turns and wheels his cart away.

“Hey!” the people inevitable say, “where’s the change?”

“Change,” the vendor announces, “must come from within.”

So must happiness. When we imagine it to be coming from  outside of us, it can disappear almost as fast as it arrives. When it originates inside of us, it remains with us much longer. Indeed, it can remain with us for a lifetime. Or certainly, for most of the moments of a lifetime.

How to experience the happiness that is naturally who we are, how to find the happiness that resides within, remains  the key question for many, many people. We’ve already supplied the answer here. Give it away.

There is a second way as well.

Gratitude. And we’ll talk about that next. I’m going to explore this topic of happiness over the next several entries here. It is intriguing and even perplexing to many. I’ve been asked by more than a few people to really dive into it.

I’m happy to do so.

I had the honor of being the master of ceremonies on Saturday at a Celebration of Life event in honor of my father-in-law. The room was packed with family and friends of my wife’s Dad, and I had the chance to share with this standing room only audience some thoughts arising from the final book in the CWG cosmology, titled HOME WITH GOD in a Life That Never Ends.

The response from those present was so positive that I feel moved to share those words with you here as well, as some of you may have experienced in recent weeks or months the death of a loved one.

What I have been told by God is this:

Death does not exist — not in the way that most of us think of it, which is as the end of life. In fact, there is no such thing as the “end of life.”

In truth, what we call death is another beginning. And those are not just hollow words. Those are words of insight into life’s largest truth: That there is more going on here than meets the eye.

So grieve when a person dies if grief is what you feel — and who does not, when we have lost a loved one?

But let yourself know that even the expression of grief in your loss is a living demonstration of the most beautiful part of life, which is love.

Then, even in our grief, we can feel ourselves honoring what is most important in life. In this life and in the Life Eternal.

From this place of love expressed, let us endeavor to see a death in our family even as we would welcome a birth in our family — for death IS but “birth in another form.”

Embrace, as best you can, the death of another, therefore, with soft celebration, even as our loved ones who have departed celebrate their Continuation Day.

And let us know and trust this truth as well: No one dies at a time or in a way that is not of their choosing.

The passage of the Soul is ended only when the agenda of that passage is complete, and not one moment before. There is no such thing as being “incomplete” on the Journey of the Soul.

Finally, tell everyone this: It is impossible to die without God. The Divine is there to greet everyone.

God will embrace you, comfort you, welcome you, and assure you that you are perfect, just the way you are.

Then you will be welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven, where you will be celebrated for Who You Are, and who you have always been. For who we all are.

I am told, this is who you are. This is who we all are…

You are goodness and mercy and compassion and under-standing. You are peace and joy and light.

You are forgiveness and patience, strength and courage…

…a helper in time of need, a comforter in time of sorrow, a healer in time of injury, a teacher in times of confusion.

You are the deepest wisdom and the highest truth; the greatest peace and the grandest love.

You are these things. And in moments of your life you have known yourself as these things.

Life invites you to know yourself as these things always.

Many people have the experience that Divinity exists, but not nearly as many have the experience that they exist as Divinity. This is not because they are not capable of experiencing themselves as Divine, it is because they do not conceive of themselves as that. This is evidence of our spiritual immaturity, not of our spiritual identity.

The days of our spiritual childhood are receding, however. We are evolving, and our spiritual growth has brought us the awareness that something has been missing from our experience. What has been called the Cloud of Unknowing is being lifted.

We know now that Life, and that each of us as a Life Form, has the potential — nay, the inherent impulse, the deep and natural desire, the urging and the yearning — to express something much grander, something much more glorious, than what we have accepted as the norm.

We are ready now to create a New Normal. And we are clear now that this New Normal will emerge only when we access and express what has always been Natural.

In the past, what is “natural” and what is “normal” has not always been the same. In fact, too often it has been “normal” to act in a way that is not “natural.” This is because we have not previously been fully aware of our true nature. We have thought that we are less than we are—and we have been acting like it.

All of that can now end.

There are those who say that the way we have been living life on Earth will not end and cannot end, that it is impossible to substantially alter our behaviors, given the nature of human beings. Yet it is possible precisely because of the nature of human beings.

Human beings are not simply chemical creatures. They are not merely biological entities with a body and a mind that emerge into physical life, live their years as fate provides, then watch helplessly as life, consciousness, self-awareness and their very beingness is stripped from them forever.

You know now that you are more than this. You can feel it. You are not your body and you are not your mind. You are a larger entity, having a body and having a mind.

You are aware now of the Larger Reality. You are clear now that there is more to this physical life that we are part of and that is all around us than meets the eye. You see now a Larger Truth—and the implications of that Larger Truth. You have brought forward your inner knowing of the True Nature of Things.

Every living cell of every living thing knows what it is doing. Plants do not turn to the sun by chance. White corpuscles do not rush to heal the wounds of the lion by coincidence. There is a form of intelligence built into the system at the cellular level that causes Life to do, at every level of physical expression, what it does naturally.

So it is that human beings do not endlessly seek unity and yearn to express oneness as a fluke. It is their very nature to do so. It is human nature.

And it is the Consciousness of human beings—the quality of being Self-Conscious—that allows us to find (indeed, to create) an answer to life’s biggest dilemmas and peaceful resolutions to life’s biggest problems (both personal and global). The question is not whether we are capable of creating such answers and resolutions, the question is whether we are willing. Do we have the will to do so ? And if not, what could cause us, individually and collectively, to have such a will?

Let that be our question of the day.

I think there are three things that could cause us to muster the individual and collective will to live our lives doing what we would do naturally, rather than what we would do normally. 

1. We would have to see and agree that what we normally do in most situations is no longer working.
2. We would have to see and agree that giving in to our True Nature, that demonstrating Who We Really Are, is the only, and the perfect, way out of our mounting human dilemmas.
3. We would have to see and agree that it is actually possible to live according to our True Nature. We would have to know that we really can express, with our thoughts, words, and actions, our highest idea of Who We Really Are. (Or as some would say it, “The better angels of our nature.”)

There is only one way that I know of to accomplish #3. We would have to try it. We would have to commit to truly undertaking the effort, knowing that if we rose to our Highest Selves even part of the time, it would be enough to make a real difference, both in our own lives and in the collective experience of humanity.

The present collective experience of humanity calls out to us. Is this who we really are? As a species, is this how we wish to see ourselves being? Are we okay with what we are seeing? If we are not, are we content with saying, “Hey, there’s nothing I can do about it! What do want from me??”

Is there truly nothing we can do about it? Is it our only recourse to simply hunker down, wait it out, hope that nothing horrible that is happening in the world touches us before the horrible stuff can be solved and made to go away? And what would solve it, anyway?

Does any of this have anything whatsoever to do with your own personal journey through life? Well, that would depend on what you felt was the reason for your own personal journey through life. Why are you here? What is your own personal journey all about? Is there a purpose? Is there an agenda? Or is your being here just a happenstance, a random occurrence, a biological incident?

What’s really going on here on this planet? In your heart, in your mind, in your soul? Do you even have a “soul”?

It’s time to start answering some questions.

No, no. It’s past time.

The world has never been in more turmoil than it is today. Individual lives have never felt more tenuous. The Human Journey has never seemed more senseless.

What is the point of all this?, human beings are asking themselves. Why bother living if it’s just about encountering saddening and upsetting, unraveling and upheaving experiences at every turn?

Are we really nothing more than a species of sentient beings run amok, blowing up H-bombs under the ground to prove our invincibility, ending people’s lives by injection to demonstrate our righteousness, allowing hundreds of the world’s children to die of starvation every hour as we defend a global economy that benefits one-tenth of the planet’s population?

Have we so lost our collective mind as to think that the way to stop gun violence is for everybody in the world to carry a gun?

Have we so lost our collective will as to find no way to stop war to this very day, creating refugee crises rendering millions homeless?

Have we so lowered our collective standards as to find it actually preferable for divisiveness, rudeness, insults and tasteless verbal bullying to become the hallmark of political leadership?

Is this what we have come to? Gun-toting, fist-pumping, verbal-bashing, jaw-jutting, loud-mouthed intimidators and strong-armed tyrants daring anyone to stand up for what is gentle, peaceful, and loving?

Apprehension and fear, uncertainty and frustration have never been more keenly or deeply felt by more people in more of the moments of their lives than they are on this day. At this writing these emotions are driving the election cycle in the United States, they are driving the violence seen the world over, and they are driving a hole though the collective heart of humanity.

Is there nothing to be done? Are our individual, personal lives to be nothing but a series of the best responses we can muster to the worst-case scenarios we encounter?

I want to suggest that it doesn’t have to be this way. I want to suggest that there is a path out of this box canyon into which we seem to have collectively trudged — or been herded.

The answer is to collectively express, to the degree that it is humanly possible, our True Identity. Life is inviting us to announce and declare, express and experience, become and fulfill the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we’ve held about Who We Are.

We are told in Conversations with God that we are, each of us, Individuations of The Divine. If this is true, our current days and times are providing us with an opportunity to demonstrate Divinity.

It will not be easy. It is not even easy in our own kitchen, in our own living room, in our own bedroom, much less in the wider arena that we call our own world. Yet we are assured that it is possible. Others have done it. And many others have moved toward it. And even the attempt to offer this demonstration — even getting one quarter of the way there…one sixth of the way there…one tenth of the way there…one one-hundreth of the way there — could change the world.

Should we accept this invitation, from this day forward the question “But what can anyone do?” can be rendered null and void. There wold then be only one question remaining. “Will we do it?”

So here we go again. Here we are once more, at the Starting Gate on a New Year. Here we stand even as we have stood before at the dawn of another Life Cycle. And these days, these times, will go by as fast as the last year has flown. Before we know it, it will be January two-thousand-seventeen. A whole year will have passed — again.

So what can we do in this blink-of-an-eye that we call a year? What can we be in this blink-of-an-eye we call a life? That is the question that Life Itself places before us. And we don’t have that much time left in which to answer it. It is as my wonderful life companion and wife, American poet Em Claire, wrote in her work entitled Precious Occurrence.

I am a precious occurrence,

and I don’t have long.

We are a precious occurrence.

And as long as we think we have,

we don’t have long.

Too much time is being spent

running

from face to face

asking, “What is my name?”

If you don’t yet know it,

or if you’ve forgotten,

then become still, go within

and answer it.

You are a Precious Occurrence:

Tell Us your name.

(From the volume Home Remembers Me
Copyright © 2013 by Em Claire)

I have learned across the span of my 72 twelve-month cycles on this planet that every year can seem like a tiny moment — and every tiny moment can seem like a year. How I experience Time depends on what I am doing with it.

I can pack more meaning, more of what is truly important in life, in five minutes or five hours of intentioned, focused activity than I can in five days or five weeks of lollygagging around. All of us have had this experience. All of us know exactly what I am talking about.

The trick, then, to making 2016 meaningful will be to make it purposeful. And the trick to making it purposeful will be to decide on your purpose for every moment ahead of time.

As I said — and I can guarantee this — 2016 will go by so fast, you won’t even know what happened. Not, that is, unless you decide right now, ahead of time, what you want to have happen. Aand why.

That is the value of New Year’s resolutions. They help us to become aware of why we want these next 12 months to be visited upon us, of how we want these next 52 weeks to be used, of wherewe want these next 330+ days to take us, of what we want these next 8,000+ hours to produce, of whether we want these next 480,000+ minutes to add anything of lasting value and spiritual importance to our lives and to the lives of others.

We have something on the order of 28 million seconds that will be gifted to us by life in these upcoming minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months. Which of these seconds will be spend on things that don’t matter, and thus squandered, and which will be devoted to the Agenda of the Soul, and thus most valuably and wondrously and Divinely used will be up to you — and is being decided by you even now; even in the moment that you are reading this.

What will you spend your time on in 2016? And why?

I want to offer one of the most important books I have even read on this subject. It is titled The Only Thing That Matters. Its begins with this:

Dear Companion on the Journey: It is wonderful that you have come here.

There is something you wish to know and something you wish to do, and Life understands this. That is why you are reading this.

Here is what you wish to know…

98% of the world’s people
are spending 98% of their time
on things that don’t matter.

You have been part of that 98%. Now you are no longer. From this day forward you choose to spend your time on The Only Thing That Matters. The question is, what is that?

Here is what you wish to do…

Find your answer to that question.

This requires a deep exploration of the Self. You are in the right place for such an important and remarkable undertaking. Trust that. If you weren’t in the right place to find your answer, you would not be here. Do not think you have come to this book by chance.

Do not think that.

Think this: My Soul knows exactly what it is doing. 

Also, think this: My Soul already knows what really matters.

So it is not a question of “finding” that answer, it is a question of remembering. It is not a process of discovery, it is a process of recovery. This data does not have to be researched, it merely has to be retrieved.

==================================

And the book goes on from there. I commend it to your reading. Especially and particularly at this moment when the New Year is beginning, I invite you to explore this book’s contents. They can change your life.  If you have an interest, you may find it here.

In the meantime, as you step off into another 12-month Cycle of Life, may God’s blessings be experienced by you and flow through you all the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds ahead. May Time be simply a measure of how much Divinity has been expressed in this Universe through the Individuation known as You.