In Part III of this series I said that in Part IV we would explore the civilizations of Highly Evolved Beings, and the model we can use on Earth, should we choose to change humanity’s current trajectory from self-destruction to self-recreation and self-realization.

I have turned to the third book in the Conversations with God series for my information about this. In its description of Highly Evolved Beings (there are many such species, we are told, living on other planets in our vast Universe) we see that there are major differences between how “HEBs” (as they are called in the dialogue) organize and live their lives, and how humans do.

As one example: In highly evolved cultures, children don’t raise children. Offspring are given to Elders to raise.

This doesn’t mean that new offspring are torn from those who gave them life, taken from their arms and given to virtual strangers to raise. It is nothing like that. In these cultures, Elders live closely with the young ones. They are not shuffled off to live by themselves. They are not ignored, and left to work out their own final destinies. They are paid homage and held close, as part of a loving, caring, vibrant community.

When a new offspring arrives, they are not expected to learn about the basics of life from beings who are still learning about the basics of life themselves. In HEB societies, offspring always know who their “parents” are (the closest term in their language would be “Life Givers”) — and they love, honor, and revere their Life Givers — but it is the Elders who organize and supervise the learning process, as well as housing, feeding, and caring for the children. Offspring are raised in an environment of wisdom and love, great, great patience, and deep understanding.

The Young Procreators within the species are usually off somewhere, meeting the challenges and experiencing the joys of their own just-beginning adult lives. They may spend as much time with their offspring as they choose. They may even live in the dwelling of the Elders with the children. But it is the Elders who do the raising, who take the responsibility for the emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual development of the progeny.

It is all a very unified, integrated experience. And it is an honor for the Elders, for upon them is placed the responsibility for the future of the entire species. In HEB societies it is recognized that this is more than should be asked of Young Procreators.

And this is just one of the differences between the societies and cultures of Highly Evolved Beings and of Human Beings. Here’s another: Highly Evolved Beings don’t compete. They realize that when one loses, everyone loses.

Highly Evolved Beings, therefore, do not create sports and games that teach children (and perpetuate in adults) the extraordinary thought that someone “winning” while another is “losing” is entertainment.

Highly Evolved Beings also share everything. When another is in need, they would never dream of keeping or hoarding something they had, simply because it was in scarce supply. On the contrary, that would be their very reason for sharing it. In Human society, the price goes up for that which is rare, if humans share it at all. In this way humans ensure that, if they are going to share something they “possess,” at least they’ll be enriched by doing it.

Highly Evolved Beings are also enriched by sharing rare things. The only thing that is different between HEBs and Humans is how HEBs define “being enriched.” A HEB feels “enriched” by sharing everything freely, without needing to “profit” beyond the feeling and the full experiencing of their True Identity.

Not all human beings feel they need to profit from sharing, of course. Still, as a global culture, this is the predominant behavior.

It is for precisely this reason that over 650 children die every hour — every hour — of starvation on a planet where there is more than enough food for everyone. It is for precisely this reason that 3 billion people live on less than $2.50 a day, and that billions have no access to health care. (Some 19,000 children die each day from preventable health issues, such as malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia.)

It is for precisely this reason that 1.7 billion people lack clean water, that 2.6 billion live without basic sanitation, and that 1.6 billion people have no electricity.

It was in 1752 that Benjamin Franklin conducted his experiments on electricity. The English scientist William Gilbert was working on better understanding and describing the phenomenon in 1600. And today, 400 years later, a quarter of humanity still has not experienced the benefits of it.

There is a way to change all this, and that is for us to change our thinking. About just about everything. About Who we are and Where we are and Why we are where we are, and finally, about What we are invited to do about that.

Just exactly what is the experience we’re having on Earth right now? It is what I have called the overhaul of humanity. It is what I have called The Storm Before the Calm. An entire book has been produced about this, and it is printed in its entirety right here on this website. Have you read it? It offers solutions to the challenges and problems facing our species right now. And it doesn’t even cost anything to read it. It’s offered right here, for free.

The series of commentaries of which this is the final entry was meant to open up a larger exploration, a larger discussion; to ignite a deeper desire; to stimulate an immediate determination not to solve the world’s problems, but to solve our own. Not to meet the world’s challenges, but to meet our own. Not to overcome the world’s obstacles, but to overcome our own.

For until more of us overcome our individual obstacles, whatever they are, to embracing, expressing, and experiencing our True Identity; until more of us understand our Real Nature and commit to demonstrating and exemplifying it; until more of us on this planet become clear that the most important objective in every moment is not survival, but REvival of our Forgotten Selves and our Only Reason for being, we will change nothing in our collective experience, but only repeat it.

Our evolutionary invitation is to advance from residing in and functioning from our reptilian brain to our mammalian brain to our human brain to our supernal brain. Our evolutionary opportunity is to graduate from a tribal culture to a global culture to a universal culture. Our evolution process is to raise the vibratory frequency of our love from philia to eros to agape.

There are ways to do this, and it starts in the human heart, in the human mind, in the human soul. And in the individual human heart, mind, and soul.

In other words, it starts with you.

It seems that these days, perhaps more than ever before, the tide of events in human lives — both globally and individually — is turning against us. War and unspeakable violence plagues the planet. Fires rage across the landscape, ravaging hundreds of miles and displacing thousands. Verbal bullies and insulting demagogues run for office and find the support of cheering millions, leading others to wonder: Is this what we’ve come to?

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 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 aggression that creates 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, really and truly, 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?

Those who have read Conversations with God know what God has said in that dialogue: “The good news is, you don’t have to go through hell to get to Heaven.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, you can’t prove it by me,” some of us may be tempted to say. But it’s true. And there are those among us who have proven it.

We can be among those. That is the promise of The Divine.

Those are the words I used to end Part II of this extended series of commentaries. Now I would like to explore this: If there really are those among us who have proven that life does not have to be a hellish experience, how are they doing it? What is their secret?

Of equal urgency, is there any way to apply their secret to the affairs of the world at large, so to change the seemingly impossible-to-end collective experience of violent conflict between humans and utter disregard for the caring of humanity’s home planet?

The answer to the second question is yes, but what it will take is a shift in global consciousness. That’s so obvious that I’m almost tired of hearing myself say it. It seems so trite that it’s almost embarrassing to speak it. It sounds, even to my ears, utterly simplistic. Yet it remains immutably and undeniably true.

But how to achieve this? That’s the question. Or perhaps more to the point: Is it even achievable — soon enough to do the world any good?

Do we have to destroy our entire way of life, and hope that the few who survive our human-made global calamites will see, finally, at long last, what we have done to ourselves, admit that we have done it by our abject stubbornness in refusing to accept our role in it all, and raise our collective awareness sufficiently to determine that it is our individual and collective consciousness that must be changed before our collectively created outcomes can be?

Evolution may take care of things in the long run, but do we have to wait another 5,000 years before we “get” what we need to “get” in order to create what we say we want to create as a way of life on this planet? The question is urgent, because, of course, there are scientists and sociologists who tell us we may not have as much as 50 more years, much less 5,000, before our present way of living brings an end to our present way of living — if not to living at all — on this earth.

So what is the trick here? What do those who have found a way to take the hell out of their lives know that we do not know; what do they do that we do not do?

The answer: They know how to live as Highly Evolved Beings. They no longer choose to live as children. They have spiritually matured.

Spiritual maturation is not a process that requires time. It requires commitment. It can occur instantaneously with a deep commitment to Remembering. A Highly Evolved Being simply remembers what is already known, but has been forgotten.

The tree outside the window has had to learn nothing to become a mighty oak. All that it needs was encoded in the seed from which it emerged. And if God so loved the world as to encode in this way the seed of a tree, would God not all the more encode you?

Indeed. In this way, and even more. For what God encoded in all sentient beings is Consciousness. That is, the ability to know — and to know that they know, through remembering — all that is encoded in the seed itself. Thus are sentient beings able to experience their Totally Remembered Identity instantly, through the process of Spontaneous Demonstration.

Children spontaneously demonstrate their knowledge of who they are — until they’re talked out of it. The challenge before the adults of our species is to talk themselves back into what they knew at the beginning, before they were persuaded to deny, sublimate, or simply forget it.

Remembering what they knew at the beginning, and demonstrating it, was the process and the product of Lao Tzu. It was the process and the product of Buddha. It was the process and the product of Moses. This was the process and the product of Mother Mary. This was the process and the product of Jesus. (Remember how, at the age of 12, he taught the Pharisees at the Temple, who asked, marveling: “How does this child come to know these things?”)

This was the process and the product of Beatrice of Nazareth. This was the process and the product of Catherine of Genoa. This was the process and the product of Muhammed. This was the process and the product of Hildegard of Bingen This was the process and the product of Bahá’u’lláh.

This was the process and the product of all the Great Masters, male or female, ancient or contemporary, who moved through the world, and who do so today, in such a way as to make it unnecessary for them to “go through hell” in order to experience Heaven within.

When whole groups of people do this at once, they create an entire society of Highly Evolved Beings. We are told in Conversations with God that such civilizations exist in our Universe, and our species on this planet can turn itself into such a cosmic society also.

Having said all of that, the key question has still not been answered. What could cause, what will it take to create, a shift in global consciousness? The answer is: Observation. Individual, and group, observation. That is the commitment for which we must push.

We must push each member of our species to commit to engaging in continuous, quiet, fully attentive Observation. Some spiritual traditions call this “Presence” or “Mindfulness” or “Awareness.” CWG uses a new word in this context — observation — to bring freshness to its description of this way of being.

The differences between human cultures and highly evolved cultures, CWG says, is that Highly Evolved Beings:

1 Observe fully
2 Communicate truthfully

When you observe fully, you see things plainly. When you communicate truthfully, you say things plainly. You see and say things like this:

If your objective is to live a life of peace, joy, and love, it is observable that violence does not work. This has already been demonstrated.

If your objective is to live a life of good health and great longevity, it is observable that consuming dead flesh, smoking known carcinogens, and drinking volumes of nerve-deadening, brain-frying liquids does not work. This has already been demonstrated.

If your objective is to raise offspring free of violence and rage, it is observable that putting them directly in front of vivid depictions of violence and rage for years does not work. This has already been demonstrated.

If your objective is to care for Earth, and wisely husband her resources, it is observable that acting as if those resources are limitless does not work. This has already been demonstrated.

If your objective is to discover and cultivate a relationship with a loving God, so that religion can make a difference in the affairs of humans, it is observable that teaching of a god of punishment and terrible retribution does not work. This, too, has already been demonstrated.

All you have to do is be keen in what you observe, and then tell the truth about it. Observation is First Cause in changing Consciousness, and Observation is First Cause in changing Behavior. Observation is what changes both.

There are these who say that Behavior is changed as a result of changes in Consciousness. Others suggest that Consciousness is changed as a result of changes in Behavior. This produces a variation of the age-old inquiry: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

If Behavior is changed as a result of changes in Consciousness, what caused the changes in Consciousness? Conversely, if Consciousness is changed as a result of changes in Behavior, what caused those changes in Behavior?

Startlingly, the answer is the same for both questions: Observation.
Yet what causes Observation? What makes us observe one thing and not the other? The answer is, desire. We desire to look at what we need to see in order to do what we are trying to do.

If what you are trying to do is get across a busy interaction unscathed, you only need to look at what is coming your way from all sides, front, and back. You needn’t look at what birds are in the sky or how many buildings are nearby. You’ve quickly learned to know what to look for when you know what you are seeking to do. And if what you are seeking to do is “survive,” your observational skills can be quite acute.

Yet what if Survival is not your main objective? What if survival is not even being considered, but only what brings you pleasure, only what gets you what you want, only what serves your momentary needs? Well then, you’ve got a mess, because you’ve done no long-term thinking about the outcomes of your short-term actions.

Yet only children do that. Or a very, very young species that cannot see — or simply refuses to look — beyond the end of its nose.

That’s us right now on the Earth. Yet long-term thinking about the long-range impact of short-term choices is not the only way to reverse this headlong dive into the abyss. A complete and total change in thinking — that is, a new way of thinking, a different kind of thinking — could also produce a global transformation and stop the young species on this marvelous planet from obliterating itself.

What if you believe that your survival is guaranteed, that you will and can never “die,” and that what you are seeking to do has nothing to do with survival at all, but everything to do with knowing, through demonstration, your True Identity and your Actual Self?

What if you’ve discovered that the “basic instinct” is not “survival” after all, but rather, the impulse to embody, express, and experience Divinity? Could it be that this is the reason why are here? Could it be that this is the purpose of all of life, everywhere present, in whatever form it manifests?

If this is your deep inner knowing, if this is your awareness, what you observe will change. And as what you observe changes, your Consciousness and your Behavior will change — and not necessarily in that order. If fact, they may both change simultaneously. Spontaneously.

This is what I call Spiritual Maturation Acceleration. It is when you remember instantaneously what you’ve always known, what you were encoded to understand, what you’re capable of doing and demonstrating when operating at maximum capacity.

An example of this on a physical level is the person who does not know how to swim, but who instantly “remembers” how when spontaneously jumping out of a boat to save the baby who’s fallen into the water. Or the child who has never had a piano lesson and sits down to play a piano concerto — perfectly. Such instantaneous remembering can occur spiritually as well — and does for many people.

The question is, what can cause us to remain in that State of Remembering? And the answer is, remaining in the State of Knowing what we are actually trying to do here during our life on Earth. Then, remaining in the State of Observation that is sponsored by that knowing.

Everything arises out of what you are trying to do; what you understand your species to be trying to accomplish. Motive is everything. Objectives determine outcomes. Life proceeds out of your intention. Your true intention is revealed in your actions, and your actions are determined by your true intention. As with everything in life (and life itself), it is a circle.

Highly Evolved Beings see the circle. Humans do not. Highly Evolved Beings respond to what is so; humans ignore it. Highly Evolved Beings tell the truth, always. Humans too often lie, to themselves as well as others. Highly Evolved Beings say one thing, and do what they say. Humans say one thing and do another.

This is what the members of a society created by Highly Evolved Beings do. In Part IV of this series we will look deeply at Highly Evolved Beings, how they live and how they love, how they function and how they fulfill their greatest desire — and how we can do the same. We will explore the civilizations of Highly Evolved Beings, and the model we can use on Earth, should we choose to change humanity’s current trajectory from self-destruction to self-recreation and self-realization.

For now, consider what I call the Burning Building Moment. Imagine that a man is walking down the street and sees a burning building, flames shooting out of the upper windows and through the roof. And imagine that in one of the lower windows he suddenly notices a woman holding an infant and crying out, “Please, please, help us!” The man immediately rushes into the building, races up two flights of stairs, finds the woman and child and leads them back down and out before the flames reach them.

By now the fire trucks are on the scene, along with the news media. They are calling the man a hero, but as the TV stations interview him, he denies it. “No,” he says, “I did what anyone would do.” And he’s right. Ninety per cent of the people would do exactly what he did. They wouldn’t even stop to think of their own survival, because their first instinct is not survival, but the impulse of Divine Love, which thinks not of itself at all. Humanity’s fundamental urge is to demonstrate Divinity, and all we have to do to change the world overnight is to think of every moment as a Burning Building Moment.

This is, in a sense, how Highly Evolved Beings think. They think not of themselves first, but of the Other. Always, of the Other, and of the Collective. In this, they are thinking of themselves first. They simply have a much larger definition of Self.

All of this is described in wonderfully illuminating detail in the final four chapters (18 through 21) of Conversations with God – Book 3, in case you want to peek at what’s ahead in the coming installment of this series.

Many of the mornings on many of the days in the lives of many of the people on this planet, it’s not very easy to find a very good reason to throw back the covers and get out of bed.

Life feels like a struggle mentally, physically, and emotionally from morning to night, with no letup in sight, no relief on the way, no abatement on the horizon. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another…and the challenges don’t seem to be getting smaller, but just the opposite.

What’s the point of it all?, we ask…and it’s a fair question. It all ends in death? That’s it? We’ve gone through all of this for nothing?

We might as well make the best of it while we’re here, because there’s nothing more to it than that? The entirety of our Journey is the experience we’re having right here, right now — added to the experience we’ve had from our birth to this point, and that we’re going to have from this point until our death?

None of it has any implication or reason, purpose or function, consequence or ramification beyond that, and none of it has any significance or meaning except that which we, ourselves, invent (or what we allow our culture to convince us is “true”)?

Really?

I mean, really…?

Well, let’s see here. We’re told by many, many people that this is not the way it is. Our lives are more than meaningless meanderings through days and nights of aimless moments and purposeless existence, they say. There is a reason we are here, there is a point to it all, and that is what gives us the motivation to throw back the covers in the morning and lumber out of slumber to venture into The Adventure once more.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…

I love Shakespeare, because he was more than one of the world’s most prolific, powerful, and poetic writers. He was a metaphysician of the first rank. He deeply understood the deeper aspects or the deepest reality we call Life. So I quote Shakespeare often, and sometimes, with a fond knowing that I have his total blessing, I may paraphrase or even ever so slightly alter his words to reflect my application of their present-day meaning.

Shakespeare wrote those words in Henry V, Act III, Scene I. The king was encouraging his soldiers before attacking an enemy. And while these are words before going to war, I know that Shakespeare meant them as more. As with all of his writing, they were replete with multiple meaning. Thus, this passage has been quoted for centuries as it may apply to each of our own “inner wars” — the internal struggle in which every human being engages as we rise up with courage each morn to face whatever onslaught the day may bring.

And so here is my own offering, with some abbreviation and tiny modification, when I quote this passage in the context of our daily battle with the human mind’s greatest enemy: a misunderstanding of what is occurring, why it is occurring, and what this entire life is really about:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…
…in peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
as modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of life’s struggles blows in our ears,
then imitate the action of the tiger. . .
…now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
to its full height. On, on, you Noblest One…!
…Show us here the mettle of your pasture; let us swear
that you are worth your breeding;
for there is none of you so mean and base,
that hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
straining upon the start. The game’s afoot;
follow your spirit…!

Ah, yes, my lovelies…the game’s afoot. But what, exactly, is the game? That becomes the question of the day.

It has been the question from Day One. And now comes the answer, yet one more time, from one more source, in terms so clear, and words so simple and direct, that it cannot be misunderstood anymore.

We have heard the answer before, for sure. But from so many places and in so many ways, we no longer know what to believe.

Our more traditional religions tell us that the “game” is getting back to Heaven; returning to God; finding our way to Paradise; obtaining our Eternal Reward.

Some philosophies tell us it has nothing to do with “eternal” anything, and that our life is about exactly what we are experiencing here and now, making the most of it by giving the most to it, and being satisfied with that — which can be more than enough in a life well lived.

Some spiritual movements say it need not be an Either/Or proposition, but can be Both/And…plus, possibly, a great deal more.

In the first view — that of most of the more traditional religions — we are spiritual entities having a body and a mind, and there are rules we have to follow, things we have to do, things we have to make sure we do not do, and particular and specific ways we must accomplish all of this, in order to get back to God’s Spiritual Kingdom, from which we are told we have emerged. We are told, as well, that if we do not follow these rules, do not do these things, do not avoid these other things, and do not accomplish all of this in a certain and particular way, we will not get to God’s Spiritual Kingdom, but will be sent to the everlasting fires of hell, there to languish forever and ever in unremitting pain and unfathomable suffering as payment for our earthly transgressions — one of the most serious of which may be to have simply belonged to the wrong religion.

In the second view — that of the non-religious philosophers — we are simply (while admittedly highly sophisticated and complex) physical life forms, moving through the biological process of the Cosmos in which we are born, we live, and we die, ceasing to exist in any conscious form whatsoever thereafter, but having the ability while we are alive to affect not only the lives around us, but of those members of our species who follow us, in ways that cause us to be long remembered — and thus to give our lives meaning beyond our here-and-now existence.

In the third view, an amalgam of the first two, we are more than our biological sum and substance — and more, as well, than spiritual entities who live as obey-me-or-else subjects of a cosmic monarch laying down the requirements for us to get back to a kingdom we can’t understand why we left in the first place.

The text we have been given in the 3,000+ pages of the Conversations with God dialogue addresses that word “more.”

If we are spiritual entities who never wanted to leave the Kingdom of God in the first place, then why did we leave? Is it possible that our Souls left that celestial location on purpose? Could we have done so not only willingly, but excitedly and joyfully?

CWG answers these questions and more, joining a long list of other sources, both ancient and contemporary, in telling us that there is a very special reason we are here, that our having been birthed was not a mere happenstance within a cosmic-wide biological process, that our lives have a purpose that stretches far beyond the end of our present-form physical/chemical expression, and that the very essence and energy of which we are comprised is identical to, and an extension of, the Essential Essence and Purest Energy of the Universe Itself, parts both seen and unseen — or what some of us have called God.

The purpose of this massive and endless process that we have chosen to call “life” is for that Essential Essence and Purest Energy to express Itself in such a way that it would know Itself in its own experience, at the same time expanding the awareness of the knowing of Its individual aspects, elements, and individuations.

Put in somewhat simpler terms, every expression of life is an expression of its Source, experiencing, displaying, and demonstrating aspects of that Source in singular and individuated form.

This means that all that lives (and if we define “lives” as that which is in motion, this would include everything) is an expression of the Divine, and the goal of all sentient beings is to become aware at higher and higher levels of the unlimited aspects of Who They Are, so that Adonai, Allah, Brahma, Elohim, God, Jehovah, Krishna, Rama, Vishnu, Yahweh, or by whatever other name our various global cultures have used to refer to that Ineffable Essence we understand to be The Divine, may experience Itself in, as, and through those beings.

That is our reason for throwing back the covers and getting up in the morning.

Is the reason enough? Is God experiencing God reason enough for some of us to experience hell? (Or what we have called “hell”?) That depends on how we are engaging with the events and circumstances of our moment-to-moment encounters. Conversations with God tells us that “the good news is, you don’t have to go through hell to get to Heaven.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, you can’t prove it by me,” some of us may be tempted to say. But it’s true. And there are those among us who have proven it.

We can be among those. That is the promise of The Divine.

And we’ll look at this in Part III of this series.