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:
- Re-identification
- The Basic Principles of Life
- The Law of Opposites
- Changing Emotion
- 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.”
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