I have been serializing here an updated version of a small booklet that I wrote a while ago addressing questions being asked by people all over the world in the aftermath of events in Beirut, Paris, Mali, and elsewhere across the globe, and I have added to that document a word-for-word copy of the statement I issued the day after the 9-11 attacks on the United States.

I feel during this period exactly the way I felt on Sept. 11, 2001. Sad. Determined. Re-committed. I knew then that people all over the world who have read Conversations with God would ask: How does this fit into the ideas in your books, Mr. Walsch? How does this fit into the CWG invitation to see the perfection, or its statement that there are no victims and no villains in the world, or its assertion that there is no such thing as Right and Wrong — to say nothing of all the other messages of these texts?

Those are fair questions. Very fair questions. I ask them myself when things such as this occur. And they are occurring now with more frequency than ever before, around the world. So I have updated a small booklet that I wrote a while ago addressing these questions, and I have added to that document a word-for-word copy of the statement I issued the day after the 9-11 attacks on the United States.

It is my desire that as many people as possible have an opportunity to read this material, so I will be excerpting it in a series of passages in this space over the days ahead. Those who do not wish to wait to finish the document as each new installment is posted here may access the document in full, downloading it here at no cost.

Here is the third installment:

A WORLD IN TURMOIL: How we can respond – Chapter Three

This then, is the first step in understanding the turmoil in our world. It is being created by humanity for humanity. Why? As I will explain in more detail later, we are creating a Contextual Field within which we may experience what we came to the earth to experience.

I know, I know, this may sound “way out” to you if you have not previously read the Conversations with God material. But for now, I invite you to consider, if only as an hypothesis, this idea: Human beings are more causal than we might imagine in the events of our world.

This cannot be understood or easily embraced if one is thinking in the short term. The human race did not collectively decide one morning to create simultaneous calamities “for its own good.” That is not how the system works.

How the system works is that all of life—including human life—creates together over an extended time span to jointly produce the right and perfect circumstance in every single moment allowing evolution to proceed to the next level.

Let me give you an example of long-time-span causal actions.

A man lights a cigarette and inhales it deeply—in 1968. It is the 20^th cigarette he has had that day, among the hundreds of packs he has smoked that year, during the 14 years he has indulged his smoking habit. Not a problem, He is perfectly healthy.

In 2011 he is diagnosed with emphysema. In 2012 he dies from this illness.

Was he at cause in the matter of his illness? Or did it “just happen” to him? Did he determine the manner of his own death, or was it just “fate”?

Okay, that one was easy to see. Let’s try another.

Human beings treat Earth and her environment in a particular way. They subject the planet to underground nuclear tests, widespread atmospheric contamination, pollution of its waters, etc., as already related. No problem, people say. Stop being an alarmist, people say. Everything is perfectly fine.

Fifty years later, everything is not fine.

Did we have anything to do with this? Because we did not cause it two days ago, or two years ago, does that mean that humanity has had no part—not any part whatsoever—in causing it at all?

Is humanity, at any level, at cause in the matter, or are we all at the effect of a life over which we have no control?

Which is it?

Is it possible—we must insist on continuing to ask—that we are at least partly responsible for producing outcomes, consciously or unconsciously?

I am here to suggest that the answer is yes, and that we are working together at all levels to collaboratively produce circumstances in which humanity might have the opportunity to evolve.

Present choices, future implications
We are involved in a process here. It is a process far more profound and far more complex—with present-moment choices and decisions having far more long-range implications—than most of us assume or seem to understand. When we do understand, we will alter our short-term behaviors urgently and immediately, I promise you.

The process through which we are moving is call Evolution, and the biggest mistake we humans make is imagining that we have nothing to do with it; that ours is to simply stand by and watch it occur, with little or no control over how it is occurring.

Yet just the opposite is true. We have total control over how we are evolving, and what we are evolving into, as a species.

Highly Evolved Beings (referred to in Book Three of the Conversations with God series as “HEBs”) understand this. The Highly Evolved Species in our Universe are clear that they became highly evolved when they took control over the way in which they evolved.

The human species is just now maturing to the point where we see this clearly as well. The events of our current days and times are forcing us to move to this clarity as a matter of survival. We cannot continue as we have been, this we know.

We cannot continue to live with anxiety about gathering in large groups anywhere for fear of being massacred by terrorists. We cannot continue to watch 653 of our children die every hour of starvation because we haven’t found a way or the will to share all of the world’s abundance with all of the world’s inhabitants. We cannot continue to ecologically despoil our planet through a hundred different choices every day and go on pretending that what we are doing to the environment is not in any way related to what the environment is doing to us, forcing us to watch it transmogrify from a place that was once a paradise to a place that is increasingly unwelcoming—and that may, sooner than we think, actually become uninhabitable.

No, we cannot continue on in this way. We’re becoming clear about that. Yet how to stop the train? That has become the question.

And here is the answer.

We must change the conversation
Each day, each moment, we are being invited by the process of Evolution to raise the level of humanity’s discourse, to elevate our concerns far above and beyond what we want or imagine ourselves to need in any given moment in order to be “happy,” and to respond to life’s far more important—indeed critical—questions.

There are only four questions in life, really. Everything else is our response to them. Sadly, we have been responding to them without even being aware that Life is asking them.

The Four Fundamental Questions of Life are:

1. Who am I?
2. Where am I?
3. Why am I where I am?
4. What am I doing about that?

The time has come now when each of us must look very closely at these questions, and answer them, if we are to find a roadmap out of the confusion that today’s events place before us regarding what is going on now in our world—to say nothing about how we might best respond.

In a bit I will offer my own answers to these questions, but let me make it clear that there are no “right” answers, only the answers that each of us give. Still, each of us must give some answer—and this we are not now doing consciously, although many of us are doing it unconsciously.

That, of course, is the problem.

We must now, each of us, consciously decide some things. Some basic, some very basic, things. And after we do so individually, we must invite our species to do so collectively. And here is the Great Formula for producing our collective transformation: Only in doing so individually can we and will we create the power and the momentum to instigate, ignite, inspire and incite a global movement to do so collectively, producing what history will call an Evolution Revolution.

Life is either a mish-mash of random happenings—a roll of the cosmic dice, if you please—or it is a sophisticated sequencing of events arising out of a Cause and Effect relationship, and having Function and Purpose that relates directly to the very reason for anything existing in the physical universe.

Likewise, we are either a mish-mash of random biological happenings, or we, too, are a far more sophisticated creature, resulting from an evolving and quite deliberate sequencing of events having Cause and Effect, Function and Purpose.

If you choose the mish-mash theory, there is really not much more purpose in your continuing your reading here. What I have to share will have little relation to your thought system, and little application to your day-to-day life.

If, on the other hand, you choose the Sophisticated Sequencing Theory, we have much to discuss. Stay with me here. You’re going to be glad you picked this up.

Our invitation
The narrative here, the philosophical basis of this booklet, is, as I am sure you must know, centered in the messages of Conversations with God, an extraordinary series of nine books covering 3,000 pages published over a dozen years beginning in 1995.

Those books boldly announce themselves to be a direct dialogue between Humanity and Divinity. Later in the document you are now reading you will be provided with a summary of all nine of those texts. For now, simply know that everything you find in this discoure is firmly grounded in the CWG cosmology.

It is Conversations with God that invited us to notice more clearly that “every act is an act of self definition.”

If this is true (and it is), then it is true of acts that we undertake consciously, as well as those in which we engage semi-consciously, or unconsciously.

(Like underground nuclear tests or upper atmosphere toxic overload, or the clear cutting of millions of trees—which would normally assist the oxygenation of our planet—in order to make way for open grazing land for the raising of cows for us to eat…the eating of which is doing nothing to improve our health, and is said by some nutritionists to be damaging it…and the methane gas from which is doing nothing to improve our atmosphere, and is said by some scientists to be damaging it.)

With every act being an act of self-definition, the invitation extended to the human race is to define itself consciously, rather than by default, to experience itself deliberately rather than accidentally, and, on an individual level, for each of us to show ourselves to be Who We Are as a result of powerful intention rather than dismaying inattention.

Once we firmly establish, in our own minds, our full and true identity, then we can explore and examine how to make life work within that context.

That is why Re-Identification is the first important and powerful tool in moving humanity to a place where it can respond with something other than utter impotence to the events of these days and times—both the “man-made” events, as well as what we have chosen to call “acts of God.”

Your identity choices
You have a couple of choices when it comes to establishing and embracing, with deliberateness and intention, your personal identity.

Choice #1: You can conceive of yourself as a Chemical Creature, a “Logical Biological Incident.” That is, the logical outcome of a biological process engaged in by two older biological processes called your mother and your father.

As a Chemical Creature you have no more connection to the Larger Processes of Life than any other chemical or biological life form. Like all the others, you are impacted BY life, but can have very little impact ON life.

You certainly can’t create events, except in the most remote, indirect sense. You can create more life (all chemical creatures carry the biological capacity to recreate more of themselves), but you cannot create what life does, or how it “shows up” in any given moment.

Further, as a Chemical Creature you have very limited ability to create an intentioned reaction to the events and conditions of life over which you have no control. Some of you might even say that you have no such ability at all. You are creatures of habit and instinct, largely, with only those resources that your biology brings you.

You have more resources than a turtle, because your biology has gifted you with more.

You have more resources than a butterfly, because your biology has gifted you with more.

You have more resources than an ape or a dolphin (but not all that many more), because your biology has gifted you with more.

Yet that is all you have in terms of resources. You are dealing with life day-by-day pretty much as it comes, with perhaps a tiny bit of what seems like “control” based on advance planning, etc., but at any minute anything could go wrong—and often does.

Choice #2: You can conceive of yourself as a Spiritual Being inhabiting a biological mass—what you call a “body.” You have powers and abilities far beyond those of a simple Chemical Creature; powers that transcend basic physicality and its laws.

These powers and abilities give you Cause-and-Effect control over certain aspects of the exterior elements of your individual and collective life, and complete control over the interior elements—which means that you have total ability to create your own reality, because your reality has nothing to do with producing the exterior elements of your life and everything to with how you experience the elements that have been produced.

As a Spiritual Being you are made up of three distinct parts: Body, Mind, and Soul. Each of these parts or aspects of you has a purpose and a function, and when they are engaged co-jointly in a collaborative effort, they can exert tremendous influence over the course of exterior events in your life—and they create completely your experience of every event.

Also, as a Spiritual Being, you are here (on the earth, that is) for a spiritual reason. This is a highly focused purpose and has little or nothing to do with your occupation or career, your family and friends, your income or possessions or achievements or place in society, or any of the exterior conditions or circumstances of your life.

Your purpose has to do with your interior life—yet how well you do in achieving your purpose may very often have an effect on your exterior life. For the interior life of each individual cumulatively produces the exterior life of the collective. That is, those people around you, and those people who are around those people who are around you.

Making your decision
Who are you, then? It is time to make your decision. Now is the Moment of Your Choice.

As you consider this, remember always: you are who you say you are, and your experience is what you say it is.

Your choosing is thus at hand. Who do you choose to be? How do you choose to live? As a Chemical Creature or as a Spiritual Being?

You may choose either, and live as either. No one will judge you for your choice, and no one will praise you. It is simply a matter of personal preference. But of this I can assure you: your life will be a demonstration of the choice you have made.

Now let me relate all that I have just said to the turmoil in our world.

The process called Life has produced, as it always does, the right and perfect circumstance allowing you to recreate yourself anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about who you are. This is true for every human being on the earth. The tumultuous events in our world today are the impetus. They are the motivators. They are the wake-up call to a sleeping species.

For it is clear that we need to be shaken from our slumber, and will not awaken through the quiet arrival of the morning alone.

What is coming
The dawn of a new day for all of humanity is just now peaking over the ridge of a distant horizon, and we are roused by the turn of events of our still-lived-in darkness reality to arise quickly, that we may ready ourselves for the brightness of the sun.

Throughout human history we have come to this precipice; across the span of time have we approached this border; and once again our choice is clear: Enlightenment and Paradise or Anarchy and Chaos.

Our options lay before us in sharp contrast: We can move creatively and joyously into the possibility of a brighter tomorrow, or we can huddle fearfully as we wallow in the expectation of inescapable misery.

We can press forward into the splendor of A Future More Wondrous, or we can fall backward into the wretchedness of A Past More Depraved.

We can elevate to our highest hopes or gravitate to our lowest expectations.

What we think and do and say in the days ahead will add to the rapid collection of energy that is producing our destiny.

This I tell you because it is true.

People the world over are upset, nervous, on edge, wondering: will there ever be safety on the globe again?

Mali declared a 10-day State of Emergency and three days of national mourning after gunmen rushed into a Malian hotel shouting “Allahu akbar” while spraying bullets on people gathered at the hotel restaurant for breakfast. The terrorists then roamed the rest of the hotel, shooting at others. Nineteen innocent people were killed.

Brussells — the entire city — is on lockdown as I write this. Police and soldiers, all heavily armed, now walk the streets, and all soccer games have been canceled. The Belgian government raised the capital’s terrorism alert level to its highest status, declaring “serious and immediate threat.”

Over 40 people lost their lives to a terrorist attack in Beirut, Lebanon days before 130 were killed by terrorists in Paris.

This litany could go on. Is this the New Normal? Shall humans never know peace and tranquility again, anywhere on the planet? Is there is be no refuge whatsoever?

As I wrote a week ago, I feel today exactly the way I felt on Sept. 11, 2001. Sad. Determined. Re-committed. I knew that people all over the world who have read Conversations with God would ask: How does this fit into the ideas in your books, Mr. Walsch? How does this fit into the CWG invitation to see the perfection, or its statement that there are no victims and no villains in the world, or its assertion that there is no such thing as Right and Wrong — to say nothing of all the other messages of these texts?

Those are fair questions. Very fair questions. I ask them myself when things such as this occur. And they are occurring now with more frequency than ever before, around the world. So I have updated a small booklet that I wrote a while ago addressing these questions, and I have added to that document a word-for-word copy of the statement I issued the day after the 9-11 attacks on the United States.

It is my desire that as many people as possible have an opportunity to read this material, so I will be excerpting it in a series of passages in this space over the days ahead. Those who do not wish to wait to finish the document as each new installment is posted here may access the document in full, downloading it here at no cost.

Here is the second installment:

A WORLD IN TURMOIL: How we can respond – Chapter Two

What I would like to offer here are five tools with which you will be able to both clearly understand and effectively deal with what is going on all around you on our planet today.

These tools are:

1. Re-identification
2. The Basic Principles of Life
3. The Law of Opposites
4. Changing Emotion
5. Gratitude as an Attitude

With these tools I am hoping that you will be able to:

* Assume a new, fuller, and more accurate personal identity—and thus, a deeper awareness of your role in the creation of things.

* Understand “why bad things happen,” and know better exactly how to carry them in consciousness even as you deal with them “on the ground.”

* Produce a new context within which to hold the events of our day and design the events of our tomorrow.

* Shift away from fear forever.

* Discover and use with enormous effectiveness The Greatest Tool Ever Devised for dealing with “unwanted events.”

Tool #1: Re-identification
We’ll begin by coming to a deeper understanding of who and what we really are, and the role that you and I play in the occurrences of our lives.

The first step in moving to this awareness is an understanding that…

Events on the earth are not created by Unseen Forces.

We are not here subject to the whims of the gods, or, as William Shakespeare put it, suffering “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

Even in the case of geophysical events, we are not entirely at the mercy of the elements. It may seem as though we are, but we are not.

Take global warming, for instance. It is real, it is occurring, and it is something that we are at some level creating.

Take earthquakes, for instance. They are real, they are occurring, and they are something that we are at some level creating.

Take hurricanes and tornadoes and typhoons and tidal waves and tsunamis. They are all occurring, and they are all something that we are at some level creating.

Or, for that matter, take the incredible and rapid spread of bacterial diseases sweeping across the earth, to the point where medical scientists are now seriously worried about the possibility of certain bacteria becoming so immune to antibiotics that there is no way to stop the diseases they carry from spreading—creating a world ripe for cataclysmic spread of illness and death the likes of which we haven’t seen since before the creation of antibiotic drugs. This nightmare is now developing on the earth, and it is something that we are at some level creating.

The key words there, of course, are the words “at some level.” Are we creating these events consciously, intentionally? Of course not. No one sits around deciding to produce an earthquake that will kill thousands of people and impact millions.

Could we be creating these events unconsciously? Absolutely. Through our unconscious (that is to say, our unthinking or short-sighted) behaviors.

Acknowledging our role in
the scheme of things
It is important to understand that human beings are more than passive observers of the rollout of life.

For instance, how many underground nuclear weapons tests can we conduct before the massive explosions we induce dislodge the interconnecting plates that form the substructure of the planet’s undergirdment?

How many unclean particulates can we emit into the upper atmosphere before we block out enough of the rays of the sun to create significant warming of the planet, such that the rising temperatures of its massive waters produce geothermal conditions generating wind variations violent enough to call them hurricanes and tornadoes?

And listen to this, from the April 2011 issue of Scientific American:

“For more than 50 years microbiologists have warned against using antibiotics to fatten up farm animals. The practice, they argue, threatens human health by turning farms into breeding grounds of drug-resistant bacteria.

“Farmers responded that restricting antibiotics in livestock would devastate the industry and significantly raise costs to consumers.”

Who do you suppose won this debate?

“Although even the proper use of antibiotics can inadvertently lead to the spread of drug-resistant bacteria, the habit of using a low or subtherapeutic dose is a formula for disaster,” the magazine article goes on.

“The treatment provides just enough antibiotic to kill some but not all bacteria. The germs that survive are typically those that happen to bear genetic mutations for resisting the antibiotic. They then reproduce and exchange genes with other microbial resisters.

“Because bacteria are found literally everywhere, resistant strains produced in animals eventually find their way into people as well. You could not design a better system for guaranteeing the spread of antibiotic resistance.”

Hospitals around the world are now reporting the sudden appearance of severe, and in many cases fatal, illness caused by bacteria that no drug now on the market can stop or kill.

Now I am fully aware that there are those people who roundly reject the notion that human activity has anything whatsoever to do with any of this, but I am here to declare (along with the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists, geophysicists, and medical researchers) that geophysical, environmental, and human activities are intertwined, and that we live in an interconnected world where one thing leads to another, and in which humanity is no more immune from causality than any other element of life itself.

To put this simply, we are at least part of the problem.

That is good news. Because if we are part of the problem, we can also be part of the solution.

If we are not part of the problem, then we have naught but to endure it. Yet if we are part of the problem, and can admit that we are, then we are not utterly at the mercy of Unseen Forces.

With regard to human affairs, this is also true—and perhaps more obviously so. Concerning the geopolitical upheavals of humanity, we are completely at cause in the matter—even though here, too, many people would like to relinquish responsibility, saying that while our global political turmoil is not caused by Nature, it is the result of human nature—which, some people claim, is equally uncontrollable.

Looking at the truth
Is this true? Are human beings “just the way they are,” with certain proclivities so “built in” that there is nothing they can do about their more violent, competitive, or survival-oriented nature?

That is something we are now about to decide. As a group, I mean. As a collective called Humanity, in the days and weeks, months and years, decades and century ahead.

We are about to decide who and how we are as a species—and to announce our decision through our thoughts, words, and actions. It is these choices that will be our declarations to the Universe; it is our demonstrations that will be our manifesto.

One thing is becoming clear: we can no longer move forward, advancing our own evolutionary process as a species, by demonstrating the behaviors of the past several centuries and all the previous millennia.

Something has got to change.

Yet if we hold that what has got to change is unchangeable—that the basic nature of our species is simply what it is, and there is no altering that—then we are surely doomed.

The doomsday predictors will be proven to be absolutely accurate and correct. There is nothing for us to do but to cut and run, hoard and hide, surviving as best we can while the world falls apart around us.

Yet for what? For the simple purpose of surviving? As a snake recoils in preparation for attack…simply to survive? As a lion roars and angrily claws the air…simply to survive? As living creatures of every kind gird their loins and bare their teeth and anxiously glance this way and that…simply to survive?

Is this the only course of action left? Is this our only path?

It is if we insist that what must be changed is unchangeable. It is if we believe that no behavioral shift is possible; that we are on a runaway stagecoach, with no driver and the horses’ reins flapping in the air, hopelessly and heartbreakingly unreachable.

Another option
On the other hand, if we renounce the Doctrine of Impossibility, if we reject the notion of our impotence, if we abandon the thought that we have no control over our collective behavior because of our nature, a New Future opens to us; a New Tomorrow beckons. It can be the Future of Our Preference, the Tomorrow of Our Chosen Creation.

This is the Future that it was intended for us to experience. This is the Tomorrow that we were all along designed to produce. But the first step in the manifestation of this Grander Eventuality is the embracing of a grander truth about Who We Are and Why We Are Here upon the earth.

We must decide if Life is something that is happening to us, or something that is happening through us.

Yes, even with regard to geophysical conditions and events on our planet, we must decide if we have a collaborative role to play in how those occur and affect us, or are simply helpless bystanders.

The Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 is a remarkable example. Even if we accept that we as a species had no role whatsoever in this calamity (a position that I, personally, am not prepared to take), there is not a one of us who can deny that humanity definitely had a role in the nuclear disaster—the leaking of the nuclear power plant—that followed within hours. This is what I mean when I talk about how the planet’s geophysical conditions occur and affect us.

So that is the decision and the choice that is directly in front of us. The question is not, “Oh, my gosh, what are we going to do?”, but rather, “Oh, my goodness, when are we going to see that we are doing much of this to ourselves—and who are we going to be in response to it?”

In the face of our present condition, in the moment of these current events, in the time of our circumstance, who are we going to be?

This decision must be preceded by another choice, a far greater choice, a much deeper one. Who are we to begin with? What is our true identity?

Once we decide this, the question becomes: Shall we step into the full expression of that Here and Now?

It is, in the end and after all, exactly as William Shakespeare posed it:

“To be or not to be, that is the question.”

And so, again.

Paris again. Terrorists again. A world in turmoil again.

When I heard the news about the events in Paris on Nov. 13 I felt exactly the way I felt on Sept. 11, 2001. Sad. Determined. Re-committed. I knew that people all over the world who have read Conversations with God would ask: How does this fit into the ideas in your books, Mr. Walsch? How does this fit into see the perfection, and there are no victims and no villains in the world, and there is no such thing as Right and Wrong, and all the other messages of CWG?

Those are fair questions. Very fair questions. I ask them myself when things such as this occur. And they are occurring now with more frequency than ever before, around the world. So I have updated a small booklet that I wrote a while ago addressing these questions, and I have added to that document a word-for-word copy of the statement I issued the day after the 9-11 attacks on the United States.

It is my desire that as many people as possible have an opportunity to read this material, so I will be excerpting it in a series of passages in this space over the days ahead. Those who do not wish to wait to finish the document as each new installment is posted here may access the document in full, downloading it HERE at no cost.

Below is the first installment:

A WORLD IN TURMOIL: How we can respond – Chapter One

IT HAS BEEN A VERY LONG TIME since the world has been in the kind of turmoil that humanity is facing today at nearly every turn.

The document you are reading is being updated in the days following the horrific and highly coordinated multiple terrorist attacks on the city of Paris, France on November 13, 2015 in which scores of people were randomly killed in restaurants, at the city’s largest concert hall, and elsewhere.

This deeply saddening incident was just the latest in a string of events reflecting major geopolitical upheaval occurring simultaneously across the globe, coincident with deep social unrest, growing financial instability, and even near-epidemic threats to human health—all of this throwing the Earth’s inhabitants into a state of rapid sequential shocks and unremitting worry.

Even as the world’s governments and its non-governmental non-profit helping organizations scramble to collect their resources and respond to these occurrences, people everywhere are beginning to ask: “Is this the beginning of the end? Is this the start of the termination of life as we know it on this planet?”

As many people know, it has been predicted for a very long time that precisely during this period in humanity’s habitation of the Earth, simultaneous calamitous events would occur, both political and environmental, that would engulf the planet.

So…is this where we are?

Yes. I believe the answer is yes.

Is there nothing we can do but gird ourselves for ongoing and ever-increasing disaster?

I believe the answer is no.

I believe that what is happening right now is part of a Larger Process. It is a process by which humanity is being invited to re-define itself. Indeed, to recreate itself anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever our species held about Who We Are.

I believe that futurist and visionary Barbara Marx Hubbard has said is right. What we are seeing on the earth is a birthing of our species into the cosmic community of sentient beings.

Metaphorically speaking, humanity has been in its gestation period for hundreds of thousands of years. That may seem like an unfathomably period of time, but measured against the age of the Universe it is less than the blink of an eye.

A lot of people like to think of humans as highly evolved. In fact, humanity has just emerged from the womb of the cosmos. In their book New World New Mind, Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich placed this in perspective in one mind-boggling paragraph:

Suppose Earth’s history was charted on a single year’s calendar, with midnight January 1 representing the origin of the Earth and midnight December 31 the present. Then each day of Earth’s “year” would represent 12 million years of actual history. On that scale, the first form of life, a simple bacterium, would arise sometime in February. More complex life-forms, however, come much later; the first fishes appear around November 20. The dinosaurs arrive around December 10 and disappear on Christmas Day. The first of our ancestors recognizable as human would not show up until the afternoon of December 31. Homo sapiens—our species—would emerge at around 11:45 pm…and all that has happened in recorded history would occur in the final minute of the year.

Knowing that we are among the infant species of the Universe renders our behaviors perhaps more understandable. It certainly renders our future more hopeful.

As in every birthing, there is the potential of both danger and joy in the process. Yet we can dissolve the danger, eliminating it from our experience, by simply understanding what’s going on here.

In our movement towards maturing we can create the best of times, not the worst of times. It may not look that way now, I know. Indeed, it may seem to some, on many levels, to be almost hopeless. Yet there is a way you can join in creating the best of times, advancing your own personal spiritual evolution and assisting in the same forward movement for all those you love, for all others whose lives you touch, and, by extension, for the whole human family.

I consider no message more important to the future of humanity, and therefore to the teaching of our children, than the four-word statement that the world was given in the first chapter of the first book in the 3,000+ page Conversations with God series…

We are all one.

But what does We Are All One mean?
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, as I’ve already said, 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
We Are All One does not mean 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.

The discussions here have become quite lively, and I have enjoyed them very much. Glad to have you all on board, and spending your time engaging your Mind, whatever you believe. I happen to believe that what I believe creates my reality. I could be wrong about that, but my experience over a lifetime has proven the opposite to me. So I’m going to stick with my current beliefs unless and until proven otherwise to me.

I believe in God, and what I believe about God has become the central focus of a life that without this belief would feel meaningless. I choose not to believe in a life of meaninglessness.

I was offered this observation by Conversations with God: “Nothing has any meaning, save the meaning you give it.” That has been my on-the-ground experience for sure. I hope that all of you are served mightily and lovingly by the meaning you have given to the experiences in your life. I hope you take care of yourself in this way.

Now with this entry I want to talk about beingism.

I am coining this term, I am using this made-up word, to describe a way of moving through the world. It is a giving up of how you think you should be, or would like to be, or imagine how others are expecting you to be, in any given situation. It is a surrendering to what I believe to be your True Nature, a giving in to what I believe to be your Highest Self. And it is something you do most often without thinking.

That is the whole point of it. The point is to stop Thinking and start Being.

When you are Thinking, you are caught in the Mind. When you are Being, you are freely expressing the Soul. When you are expressing your Soul you are experiencing Who You Really Are. When you are caught in your Mind you are experiencing who you imagine yourself to be — or to have to be in order to meet the expectations of others.

I was in a hospital years ago visiting my father. There was a guy in the next room. This man was calling out and moaning. He was obviously in pain. The nurse was not coming fast enough. He was in distress. He was moaning, “Oh God, oh, my God, I can’t take it.” My dad was nowhere near that. He was just laying there feeling perfectly fine.

I said “Hey, I have got to go over there. I have got to go see what’s going on next door.” He said no. He said, Son, leave it alone, leave it to the nurses. I said “No, I’ve got to go. I can’t let that guy just lie there.”

Instantly when I went in there, compassion was called forth. Now listen very carefully to what I just said. I didn’t say, “Compassion was called for.” I said, “Compassion was called forth.” This “calling forth” is a process in which the Mind, analyzing a situation, opens an immediate pathway to the Soul. The soul pours forth its Essence—the true Essence of its Being—and that Essence expresses through you, as you. This manifests without effort because it is, in fact, who you really are.

We have all been in situations similar to that, whatever the circumstance, where compassion is called forth. Or patience is called forth. Or kindness, or understanding, or immense generosity, or just plain love…is called forth. This particular version of our Essence just bubbles up. It just comes up in us. We do not think about it. We do not decide, I think I will be compassionate here. The highest callings are sent out automatically. It is merely a question of whether we will respond to them.

I went in and talked to the guy. I rubbed his forehead. I held his hand. He was an older man, about 80 or 85. He was having a terrible time. His meds had run out. His pain had come back. I do not know what was going on with him, but I just talked to him quietly. He did not even care who I was. He did not even care. I could have been a doctor. I could have been a nurse who hadn’t put his scrubs on yet. I could have been a psychiatrist who’d been called down from the seventh floor. He had no idea who I was and he did not care. Someone was a witness to his life. That made it all a little easier. Someone was bearing witness…

Years later I experienced myself feeling these words as my innermost reality: “Your victories are my victories, your travails are my travails. Your risings are my risings, your fallings are my fallings. You have not experienced a part of you that I have not experienced as a part of me. I stand as not only a witness to your life, but as a liver of it, through my Oneness with you. Inwardly I celebrate your joys, and inwardly I share your burdens. And I will have it no other way…because We Are All One, and I will not turn from you in this hour. For what I do for you, I do for me. And what I fail to do for you, I fail to do for me. I shall not separate myself from you when just the opposite is called for, if I am truly here to heal the world by healing my Self of any false thoughts I ever held about Who I Really Am. First I must see Who You Really Are — and this I choose to do now, in this self-same moment.”

I didn’t tell that story to make myself look good. I told it to illustrate something. As I said, we’ve all had moments like this. We’ve all experienced “showing up” in life in a very big way, in a very wonderful way. We may not even have seen it as that, but it was that, I can tell you, in the life of another.

This is what I mean when I talk about beingism as a tool for an individual. This is what I mean when I speak of beingism as an engine for an entire society. Imagine what a world we would have if we all simply decided to be “compassion.” Or to be “understanding.” Or—dare I suggest it?—to be “holy.”

To be “holy” is to be One With Another. It is to be One With ALL Others. To be “holy” is to be Whole.

Amen, and amen.