People talk about a consciousness shift on the planet, but is it happening fast enough to really help humanity? That’s the question facing our species today, and in the years immediately ahead.
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Sunday is Message Day on the blog. Monday through Friday we look at contemporary events and day-to-day occurrences at the intersection of Life and the New Spirituality…but on Sunday, we reserve this space for a specific teaching derived from the material in Conversations with God

Through the years I have given hundreds of talks and written scores of articles revolving around this material. Every seven days we will present in this space a transcript or reprint of one of those presentations. We invite you to Copy and Save each one of them, creating a personal collection of contemporary and uplifting spiritual thought which you may reference at any time. We hope you will find this a constant source of insight and inspiration.
This week’s offering: The fourth in a series of excerpts from an interview with Neale Donald Walsch first appearing in Spiritual Growth Monthly
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Matt: How do you see the messages of Conversations with God applying to life “on the ground” in the world today?
Neale: The message of God is very simple, direct and clear: We are all one. There’s only one of us, and the idea of separation and what God calls “separation theology” is what is creating the largest number of our problems in the world, and nearly all of our conflicts as well. This is because separation theology produces separation sociology, which ultimately produces separation pathology; that is, a pathological behavior that causes us to treat each other different from how we would treat ourselves.
If we make that one, single shift in consciousness and we’ll heal the world virtually overnight. And that’s something that most people are aware of, at some level, but don’t seem to be able to know how to apply as a functioning, practical truth in their day-to-day lives.
What is needed, therefore, is a new kind of spirituality, and the message of Conversations
with God is that such a new spirituality could now be very beneficial on the earth. I am talking about a new understanding of God and of what God wants; a new understanding of life and what life really is; a new awareness of ourselves, who we really are, and what our right relationship is to each other, to God and to all of life…
Those new understandings, generated by a new spirituality, could change the world. It would be impossible, to put it another way, for the people in the world to treat each other the way they’re treating each other, if they thought that they were treating themselves in that way. But they don’t. They see the so-called “enemy” as “other” than themselves. In fact, in some cases, they see their enemy even as sub-human, or as not human, as the infidel, as the apostate, as the person who deserves to be killed or eliminated
because they’re not even human in some ways.
So a fundamental shift must take place, this the Conversations with God books make very clear. We must shift our consciousness and create…

…a new cultural story that redefines ourselves and who we are in relationship to each other, to life and to the thing that we call God, Allah or Brahman or Yahweh, or whatever it is that we choose to give as a name for All That Is.
Matt: Yes, it seems to be happening. A lot of people talk about a huge shift in consciousness that’s going on.
Neale: Well, it better happen much faster and on a much broader scale. I know that it seems to be happening, but I think that what has to occur now is a speed-up in that process, an exponential increase in this whole process. If we don’t see that, if we don’t create it, then life as we know it on this planet could well be eliminated before we can put the solution into place.
There is a great force now in the universe that is a working—it is the extremist force, on the extreme left and the extreme right of all the political, social, economic and
spiritual questions of our time.
These are extremists whose views are not merely unusual or revolutionary, but in fact, extreme, and these are people who believe that violence is an appropriate means to resolve the differences that exist across the spectrum of human thought.

It is these extremists that have created much of the terror that we find in the day-to-day lives of our world.
Matt: When you face that kind of extremism, it’s difficult to know what to do. How do you face that when you come across it?
Neale: We have to get uncomfortable again. The comfortable are the damned, in a sense. That’s an old saying and I think it’s true…the comfortable are the damned.
That is, they are condemned to lives of mediocrity. It is a sad truth that most people live
unexceptional lives because they’re so comfortable; that is, most people, at least in
certain parts of the world. It’s not true of the largest number of people on the planet, but it is the uncomfortable who agitate, and always will. And it is the extremists among the uncomfortable who will take that agitation to extreme lengths in order to make the comfortable uncomfortable.
So what we have to do is get uncomfortable without being made uncomfortable.
That is to say, we need to be uncomfortable right now without having to have violence forced upon us in order to become uncomfortable. It’s a sad observation that not enough people are uncomfortable with the fact that 400 children die an hour of starvation on this planet. Not enough people are uncomfortable with the fact that 500,000 people have been killed in Darfur, and over two million have been forced out of their homes. It’s a sad fact that not enough people are uncomfortable with the oppression of the masses, with the prejudice that occurs in all parts of the world.
With the way things are, we are just too comfortable and we do not look at the suffering
in the world, and we have become wildly self-indulgent and self-congratulatory and comfortable.
So the solution is going to have to be, for those who are comfortable, to find a level of
discomfort sufficient to motivate them to get up, walk across the room and actually do something, rather than simply think or talk about it with regard to the people in the world who are not comfortable. Otherwise, the uncomfortable will become extreme in their reaction, and will change the world very quickly into a kind of place where none of us are
comfortable any more, ever again. That’s the place where we are right now in our world.
All that will change that is a new outlook, and then a determination to do something about it, not just “om” ourselves to death or sit in front of a candle, breathe deeply and
play nice, soft music and talk about how nice the world really is, but actually to get out on the street where the rubber meets the road, and start making on-the-ground alterations and changes in our day-to-day life.
That’s where it’s going to have to happen, because that’s where the terror is happening.