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
This week’s message: THE NEW GOSPEL
I been asked many times about the Conversations with God body of work — a group of 10 books, the last of which was published in March of 2006. What, I have been asked, is the point of the books, what is the message?
In Friendship with God — an excerpt from which appeared in this space yesterday — we begin to see for the first time what I like to call God’s Larger Agenda.
From the beginning of the Conversations with God experience (once I actually understood what as going on) I knew that there was more happening here than meets the eye. For one thing, I began to sense as I moved through the dialogue that these messages were not meant only for me.
Then, even further into the conversations, I saw a pattern developing—a movement and a progression. God was sending a message to the whole human race, opening with a beginning understanding of life’s purpose and function, and ending with a whole set of new revelations about God, about Life, and about Death, that could change the world.
Along the way God kept doubling back over ground already covered, repeating over and over again—so that they could not be missed, misunderstood, or forgotten—the main points that God wished to make. Creating, if you will, what Hollywood scriptwriters call a through-line. Establishing a larger context within which the smaller, individual messages of CwG could be more fully and easily understood.
The statements “There is no such thing as the Ten Commandments,” “There is no such thing as Right and Wrong,” “There are no victims and no villains,” for instance, are virtually impossible for many people to encounter without almost immediate rejection, taken out of context. So, too, all of the main messages of Conversations with God. And so, it was important to create a context within which such paradigm-smashing ideas might be weighed, might at least be examined and explored, to see if there could be anything to them, anything in them of value to humankind.
Yet even as each book doubled back over old ground, I could feel the excitement of moving forward in the content and complexity of the Message for Humanity that God was sending.
Book 1 introduced basic spiritual concepts regarding our individual lives. Book 2 introduced societal concepts regarding our collective lives. That is, some startling ideas for on-the-ground application in physical life of the metaphysical principles raised earlier. Book 3 of the original Trilogy took the exploration outward, broadening the scope of the discussion and creating a universal context within which it might continue.
In Friendship with God we returned to the highly personal, this book rolling out as a sort of autobiography. We came “down to earth,” bringing the universal life principles that we were given in the original CwG Trilogy back to the level of our individual lives to see if they were relevant to our day-to-day experience. While this book was essentially a review, it placed the original messages into a vividly new context, using the year-to-year, day-to-day, moment-to-moment experiences of a single human being to illustrate the power and applicability of CwG’s guiding spiritual principles.
Friendship with God also introduced more new concepts to us consider, not the least of which was what God labeled (with characteristically challenging language) The New Gospel. True to form, this cryptic 15-word, two-sentence gospel contained one previously stated principle and one new idea.
The New Gospel:
“We are all One.”
“Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.”
This little utterance is deceptive in its power and enormous in its implication. Were this simple two-sentence message embraced and adopted as an Operating Philosophy by all of humanity, life on this planet would change forever, instantly.
The next book in the With God series was Communion with God, by far the most complex and sophisticated of all the works. It contained a breathtaking extrapolation of the statement in Book 1 regarding the Ten Commandments. Not only is there no such thing, it said, but it wouldn’t matter if there was, because we are not living them anyway. Worse yet, not only are we not living the Ten Commandments, what we ARE living is the Ten Illusions.
The book then describes with striking clarity the Ten Illusions of Humans, laying out the basis for the entire experience of life on earth as we have known it. And it goes further than that, outlining the purpose of these Illusions, and telling us how we can live with them, but not within them, seeing them not as what life is, but as tools with which to create what life is for us.
Once more, God’s method in terms of the way the messages are being given to humanity is consistent, for the next book in the series, The New Revelations, reverts once more from these lofty discussions to a look at the day-to-day experience of humans now upon the earth. We are shown in undeniable terms what we have created in our collective lives on this planet, and how our beliefs have created our behaviors—behaviors that work against, rather than for, the stated objective of humanity.
The conclusion here is inescapable: what the human race would most benefit from right now is a larger understanding of God and of Life that would expand its present beliefs and thus enrich its present experience. Indeed, without this larger understanding, our present experience may no longer be possible to sustain. All the progress, all the development, all the achievement of humanity may wind up being for naught, as our continuing to operate on belief systems of the past is now threatening our species’ survival. Beliefs are just another word for spirituality, and the old spirituality is no longer working.
What, then, shall we invite ourselves to explore, examine, and embrace as our New Spirituality? That discussion is had, and given as a gift to all humanity, in Tomorrow’s God, the next in the With God series of books, published in the Spring of 2004.
I see now the progression. I see now the amazing consistency of not only the message, but the process by which the message has been delivered: through a series of interweaving, interconnected conversations with God, heavy with review and repetition, yet edging forward, always edging forward, into new ground, then bringing the message back home, showing, seeing and watching how the message applies to the every day life of humans, and then, once more, striking out for new territory.
Tomorrow’s God will offer humanity its most amazing look yet at this new territory; a detailed description of what life could be like in the very near future if only homo sapiens could step away, at last, from their past, rather than continuing to doom themselves to repeat it.
What God Wants came next. This is an amazing little book that summarizes the entire CWG body of work to that point. It is the perfect book to give to another who wants to grab a quick understanding of the entire cosmology and its message.
Finally, in Home with God, the message is complete, allowing humanity to know how to cope with and deal with and confront and move through, with love and joy, the wondrous experience of our transition into the New Life which awaits us—the next stage on the path of our soul’s evolution. This extraordinary document has been called the spiritually deepest of the CWG books, discussing the Three Stages of Death, the Path of the Soul, the Realm of the Spiritual, and God’s Ultimate Question.
The process of this message delivery has taken a full ten years—a blip on the radar screen of Life, less than a breath in the breathing in and out of the Universe, a blink of the Eye of God—but, nonetheless, a significant portion of one life of one human being. I shall devote the rest of that life to the sharing of this message with others, for I believe that it can truly change the world.
And the world could use some changing right now, make no mistake about that. That is, it could use changing if what we as a species choose is to preserve the wonder of life as we have known it on this planet, to enjoy it with our loved ones, to gift it to our children.
The New Gospel places into 15 words the One Message that God wishes to send to humanity right now. No other words are needed to heal the human race.
“We are all one” is, of course, the first message of the first book in the With God series. It is the first message of CwG because it is the Prime Message of CwG. And to act according to this message is what Gene Roddenberry would call the “prime directive.”
Its meaning is clear, its implication is enormous. If we are all one, then what is good for you is good for me, and what is bad for you is bad for me. What I do for you, I do for me, and what I fail to do for you, I fail to do for me. It is really quite as simple as that, and there is no reason to make it more complicated—though the whole world has tried, and most of it has succeeded.
If all human beings on the planet act as if we are all one, right now, there would be an immediate end to war, an immediate end to crime, an immediate end to hunger, an immediate end to social inequality of any kind, an immediate end to economic disparity, an immediate end to abject poverty and the suffering that goes with it, an immediate end to racial and gender and age and sexual orientation discrimination of every kind, an immediate end to ruthless competition and “power-over” paradigms that permeate worldwide corporate business, international politics, and global religions.
In short, the world would change overnight.
Yet the phrase “we are all one” contains more meaning than the merely statement of humanity’s unity. It is important to remember that the statement was made by GOD to HUMANS. To consider it outside of that context would be to lose its main and most powerful message.
God is saying to US: “We are all one.”
This means not only that we humans are all one with each other, but also that God and WE are one. And THAT statement has DEEP implications. For if we are one with God, then all the power, all the might, all the glory, all the wonder, all the joy, all the love of That Which Is God is part of that which is us. Yet can this be true? How is it, then, that our lives are the way they are?
It is because we have forgotten that we are all One that our lives are the way they are. The remembering of this changes everything.
Yet if we move into remembrance of this Divine Truth, if we begin to realize and experience in the moment-to-moment of our lives, that we are One With God, we could if we are not careful fall into imagining that we are in some way superior to those who do not remember this truth, and thus do not live it. That is why the second portion of this New Gospel is so important.
“Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way” is the ultimate statement of those who have surrendered to unity, for the simple reason that A Thing Cannot Be Superior to Itself. Yet we have imagined ourselves to be separate from each other, even when we have thought ourselves to be connected with God. This has created the complication of the world’s exclusivist organized religions, and the beliefs they have brought to humankind—beliefs that are killing us.
Conversations with God invites us to ponder, what would it be like if our way of doing things, I way of thinking, our way of being in the world was not a “better” way, but simply another way?
And how would it feel, how would human beings react to and interact with one another, if we thought that the path we have taken to get back to God was not a “better” way, but simply another way?
The embracing of such an idea would require us to release, to absolutely let go of, any thought that God has a preference in the matter of how we come to Her—much less than we understand what that preference is and that nobody else does.
In fact, in order to embrace this idea of there being no “better” way to God, we may have to let go of any preconceived notions that we may have about God altogether. And that is the whole purpose of the CwG series of books. It is to invite us to let go of all of our previous ideas about God and try on some new ones. Then, to see how life works if we adopt these new thoughts as our working model, as our operating philosophy.
Alas, letting go of the idea of our own superiority is not going to be easy. Superiority is the most seductive idea ever visited upon the experience of Man. It is seductive and attractive, pulling us in to its cycle of fear—for the idea of superiority creates fear, and it is the only thing that does, or can.
If you think deeply about it, you will see that it is true.
Only the idea that something or someone is superior to us can create fear in the hearts of humans. And only the idea that we are superior to something or someone else can place fear into the heart of another.
It is as simple as that. Inequality creates fear, equality eliminates it. If we think that we are equal to God, we cannot then be afraid of God. That is why religions which preach that we are to “fear God” preach a sermon of servitude, a message of misalliance, putting us into wrong relationship with God—wrong in the sense that it is not working, and can never work, if what we say we wish to experience is a life of peace and joy and harmony.
And so we are invited by CwG to go forth now, even unto all the world, and preach a new Gospel. The gospel of our own oneness, and hence, of our utter and holy lack of superiority to any other one or any other thing. For all of Life is a Unified Whole, and nothing within it is any less sacred or any less valued or any less important than The Whole Itself.
When we live that simple truth, we alter our experience forever. We escape our Alice-in-Wonderland world. We recreate ourselves anew. We begin to assume the Image and Likeness of God.
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