What is the role of spiritual activism in the world? Does God stand aside from “real life” and have nothing to do with it? What do you think?
I have been exploring that question this week here in the blog. Below is the final entry in this series…
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(NOTE: This weblog creates, for us all, a chance to meet at the interaction of Life and the New Spirituality. It is written by the author of Conversations with God, the worldwide best-selling series of books. The “New Spirituality” is defined by the author as “a new way to experience and express our natural impulse toward the Divine without making others wrong for the way in which they are doing it.”)
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A letter from a CwG reader brings up a recurring theme, and I so want to comment at length on it in this blog…This observation and opinion is from a writer whose name we will change to Madolyn, in order to protect her privacy.
Dear Neale…When I read CwG it changed my life. I had never felt so free. I was always guilty, scared of the devil, angry. I hated every religion because they all told me how to believe in God. I love him and he loves me and our relationship is very simple but strong and that’s all I need but no one could ever leave me alone or accept that. It had to be hard. Life had to be a trial. CwG changed all that for me.
Want to know the scary thing though? Every week I read your newsletter and every week I want to cry afterward. This isn’t freedom. This is just another organized religion disguised as freedom. Seminars in Australia, Q and A, weekly bulletins telling us the plan to change everyone’s mind about God. What’s next? Preachers? Confession?
I don’t want to change anyone’s mind about God. God can do that if he wants. I tell people my beliefs when they ask, but rarely before. It’s like being a lady: if you have to say you are, then you aren’t.
If all of us ReCreationists (I’m not calling it anything else…I don’t even like that it has a name) have to go around talking about it and changing people and basically farming for converts and acting so pretentious, then what kind of revolution is this? One that is false. One that is arrogant and show off-y. This is not love in its highest form. This is not pure truth.
Let’s not Doomsday here. God is spectacular! We are Magnificent beings! Including the Baptist in Tennessee and the atheist in NYC. All magnificent.
I really don’t care what anyone does. How they love God or themselves. It doesn’t matter to me. But I would prefer it if the “religion” I belong to didn’t act like we are so much better than anyone. We are not. Nothing is better than anything and we all know it.
Madolyn
NEALE’S RESPONSE…
My dear friend….Oh, Madolyn, do I disagree with you! I will go further. May I say with all due respect that this point of view is exactly why the so-called New Thought community has been so utterly impotent in creating the world it says that it desires to experience.
God helps those who help themselves, Madolyn.
I am going to do something here, Madolyn, that I rarely do. I am going to respond to your email one statement at a time—because I believe that we are hitting upon, RIGHT HERE, the REASON WHY WE ARE HAVING ZERO EFFECTIVENESS IN CHANGING OUR WORLD.
God works through US, Madolyn. WE ARE THE GOD YOU ARE TALKNG ABOUT HERE. And when WE do nothing, then GOD is doing nothing!
Let’s take a look at your letter, paragraph by paragraph.
When I read CwG it changed my life. I had never felt so free. I was always guilty, scared of the devil, angry. I hated every religion because they all told me how to believe in God. I love him and he loves me and our relationship is very simple but strong and that’s all I need but no one could ever leave me alone or accept that. It had to be hard. Life had to be a trial. CwG changed all that for me.
My heart went out to them. I felt like I was sitting in a corner with a million dollars in a canvas bag and everyone around me was starving. After a while, after I heard actual crying and moaning and angry shouts at God, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I knew I had to do something with what I knew, with what was given to me.
The first thing I did was seek to have my personal notes—the handwritten transcripts of my conversations with God—published. I am glad I did this. Had I not done this, we would be discussing nothing here, Madolyn. Had I not become a spiritual activist and decided to turn my personal notes into books, we would be discussing nothing here. I hope that you see that. The wonderful experience that you say you have had, you would not have had.
You’ve said that CwG changed your life. I am so happy about that, Madolyn. And what is true right now for me, Madolyn, is that I am not willing to have it stop there. I am not willing to have it stop at Madolyn, to call a halt at Madolyn. I want to make sure that the whole world has a chance to be touched in the way that your life was touched.
But I digress. Let’s get back to your letter…
Want to know the scary thing though? Every week I read this news letter and every week I want to cry afterward. This isn’t freedom. This is just another organized religion disguised as freedom. Seminars in Australia, Q and A, weekly bulletins telling us the plan to change everyone’s mind about God. What’s next? Preachers? Confession?
No, Madolyn, what’s “next” is an all-out push, full bore boogie, petal to the metal, to make sure that the freedom-giving message of CwG gets past Madolyn and out into the whole world. That’s why we are planning seminars in Australia, Madolyn. Because people in Australia have been begging us to. They have written to the Foundation asking us, “PLEASE, can you bring this message in person to us, and create programs here like the ones you have in the U.S.?”
Of course, Madolyn, we could say “no. Let God do that. If God wants this message to be taken to Australia in person, God will make that happen.” OR….we could see ourselves as Who We Really ARE….Gods and Goddesses in human form….and use our lives to do God’s never-ending work in the world—which is OUR never-ending work of recreating ourselves anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are.
Yes, we do a Q&A and send out Weekly Bulletins…you bet we do. The Q&A is our way of answering questions that are sent to us, Madolyn, and helping other people who may have the same kinds of questions. And the Weekly Bulletin does not “tell” us to plan to change everyone’s mind about God…it INVITES us to. What’s next? Preachers? Confession? No. Just an all-out effort to help the world see God in a new way, to see Life in a new way, and to see Each Other in a new way, so that Conversations with God will not be just the latest hot read, and then, “yesterday’s ice cream,” but will be a message meant for all of humanity that truly changed the world.
Yes, Madolyn…we seek to change the world. Not because the world is “wrong” in what it is doing, but because CwG tells us that every act is an act of self-definition, and the world as it now IS does not accurately define Who We Are. There will be no “preachers,” Madolyn, but there will be study group facilitators, lecturers, and program presenters. Is that okay with you? Is it okay if we even talk about this message of the New Spirituality in any organized way?
Because I will tell you one problem with the world today, Madolyn. One problem with the world today is that the “civil” are not organized…and the organized are not “civil”!
I don’t want to change anyone’s mind about God. God can do that if he wants. I tell people my beliefs when they ask, but rarely before. It’s like being a lady: if you have to say you are, then you aren’t.
My wonderful Madolyn….this very statement, right here, tells me that you may very well have missed the whole point of the books that you say changed your life. When you say, “God can do that if he wants,” who is this God you are talking about? And what do you imagine that this God “wants”?
Have you read What God Wants? It makes it very clear that God wants nothing more and nothing less than WE want, because GOD is US. Yet your statement makes it sound as if you think God is “over THERE” and we are “over here”.
Do you think that God is separate from us, Madolyn? And if you don’t, then if God wanted to change people’s mind about God, that could only mean that WE wanted to change people’s mind about God, because what God wants, we want, and what we want, God wants. (CwG Book 1: “Your will for you is My will for you.”)
And if this is our desire, God would have to do that through US, would She not?
I tell people my beliefs when they ask, and rarely before, too, Madolyn. We do not send our Weekly Bulletin or our monthly newsletter to anyone who does not ask for it. We take our workshops and retreats to places where people are asking for them. Our worldwide outreach is in response to the worldwide reaction to Conversations with God from its seven million readers.
We do not go door to door, we do not proselytize, we do not seek “converts,” but we certainly DO make the message of the New Spirituality available to those we are actively seeking an alternative viewpoint about God and Life—and we do so with energy and enthusiasm, because we believe this message can change the world, not just your life, Madolyn. You see, we don’t want to stop there.
If all of us ReCreationists (I’m not calling it anything else…I don’t even like that it has a name) have to go around talking about it and changing people and basically farming for converts and acting so pretentious, then what kind of revolution is this? One that is false. One that is arrogant and show off-y. This is not love in its highest form. This is not pure truth.
Gosh, Madolyn, you and I just have a very real and very basic disagreement here. No revolution in the world ever got off the ground without people talking about it, for heaven sake. Talking about it does not make it a “false revolution.” NOT “talking about it” would make it a NON-revolution in a hurry.
(“Hey, guys, there’s this incredible new point of view about God and about our world in this wonderful series of books….but I can’t talk about it, because that would make it ‘false.’ Sorry. We can’t hold retreats about it, or give talks. In fact, we barely got away with publishing the BOOK. If it had been a TRUE revolution, the book would have published Itself. But, well, this guy went ahead and published it…but that’s it. That’s all he’s allowed to do. He’s not going to say a word about it to anyone from now on! Otherwise it would be a false revolution.”)
uh…okaaay, if that’s the way you think the universe makes something “true” and not “false”…but, uh…hmmm….perhaps a program of education, with retreats and newsletters and question-and-answer columns might be all right, don’t you think….? Is “going around talking about it” not “love in its highest form”? Should, for that matter, none of us say “I love you” anymore? Does talking about it make it “not pure truth”?
Let’s not Doomsday here. God is spectacular! We are Magnificent beings! Including the Baptist in Tennessee and the athiest in NYC. All magnificent.
This brings up a very, verrrry important question, Madolyn. Is it “doomsday-ing” to say that the train in coming and that we are standing in the middle of the tracks? God IS spectacular, Madolyn! That’s what makes it possible for God to create miracles…like telling us THROUGH us to get off the railroad tracks when the train is coming.
I totally “get” that we should not be focusing mainly on negative news and negative energies and all the “bad stuff” that is going on around us, Madolyn. But do you think it’s okay to simply mention it? To observe it? And to seek to do something about it?
The next time your child has a cold, is it okay to notice it, to mention it, to do something about it? Is it okay to help your child heal the cold? Or should we just do a New Age Bypass and pretend the cold is not there…? Is ignoring what we are creating the True Revolution? Is that what the New Spirituality is all about?
I am not interested, Madolyn, in Ostrich Spirituality. I am clear that burying my head in the ground is not going to make what I don’t want to see go away.
I really don’t care what anyone does. How they love God or themselves. It doesn’t matter to me. But I would prefer it if the “religion” I belong to didn’t act like we are so much better than anyone. We are not. Nothing is better than anything and we all know it.
“I really don’t care what anyone does” is an extraordinary statement, Madolyn. I DO care what others do, because I am clear that the very idea of “others” is a fiction. There is no one else but ME, in differentiated form. We are All One, Madolyn. We are not separate from God and we are not separate from Each Other. Your statements throughout this message to us, Madolyn, seems to speak of Separation Theology all over the place.
You say you don’t care how others love God or themselves. It doesn’t matter to you. Well, it does matter to me, Madolyn. If “how others love God” is by flying airplanes into buidings, or by dropping bombs on innocent civilians, killing thousands of people, then I DO care, Madolyn. And they ARE doing this out of love for God, Madolyn. THAT’S WHAT SOME PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO LOOK AT. People are doing what they are doing because they believe themselves to be doing the Will of God.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about one thing you said, my friend. You said that you would prefer that the “religion” you belong to does not act as if we are so much better than anyone. That is why the CwG message is and has always been, “Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.” You are right. Nothing IS “better” than anything…but that does not mean that we may never, ever again announce a CHOICE about ANYTHING. Surely we can choose the red sweater or the green sweater without being accused of making the green sweater “wrong.” Sure we can choose chocolate over vanilla without being accused of making vanilla “wrong.”
Life is about Choice, Madolyn. And by our choices and actions we define, announce, and demonstrate Who We Are.
The only spiritual truth that has ever CHANGED the world is spiritual truth that has MADE the world LOOK at the world and say, “Is this how we really want it to be?”
Jesus did not change the world by going around saying “Everything is beautiful just the way it is. I don’t care what anybody does. To each his own, I always say. God will handle the rest.” Jesus changed the world by saying to the world, “Wake UP! Are you seeing what is being created here? Wake UP!”
Moses did not change the world by going around saying “Everything is beautiful just the way it is. I don’t care what anybody does. To each his own, I always say. God will handle the rest.” Moses changed the world by saying to the world, “Wake UP! Are you seeing what is being created here? Wake UP!”
Muhammad did not change the world by going around saying “Everything is beautiful just the way it is. I don’t care what anybody does. To each his own, I always say. God will handle the rest.” Muhammad changed the world by saying to the world, “Wake UP! Are you seeing what is being created here? Wake UP!”
Mother Theresa did not change the world by going around saying “Everything is beautiful just the way it is. I don’t care what anybody does. To each his own, I always say. God will handle the rest.” Mother Theresa changed the world by saying to the world, “Wake UP! Are you seeing what is being created here? Wake UP!”
Gandhi did not change the world by going around saying “Everything is beautiful just the way it is. I don’t care what anybody does. To each his own, I always say. God will handle the rest.” Gandhi changed the world by saying to the world, “Wake UP! Are you seeing what is being created here? Wake UP!”
Martin Luther King Jr. did not change the world by going around saying “Everything is beautiful just the way it is. I don’t care what anybody does. To each his own, I always say. God will handle the rest.” Martin Luther King Jr. changed the world by saying to the world, “Wake UP! Are you seeing what is being created here? Wake UP!”
Many of these people made others—the regular folks living in their day and time—so angry by what they were being made to LOOK AT that those others killed them.
KILL THE MESSENGER! KILL THE MESSENGER! That’s usually the best idea…
Don’t fix the problem. Don’t even look at the problem. Kill the messenger. Abandon the messenger.
So here’s what I want you to know, Madolyn. The world needs to wake up.
The trick is to stay positive in the face of negative information. See every negativity not as a tragedy, but as an opportunity, and embrace the opportunity joyfully as your next chance to experience who you really are, and then to recreate yourself anew
So the trick is not to ignore the fact that the train is coming, but to get off the tracks, get on the train, and tell it where you want it to go.
Whew!
That’s my point of view, Madolyn. And thanks for bringing this all up, and letting me share my thoughts with you.
Love and hugs always….neale.
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