{"id":239,"date":"2008-03-08T05:50:18","date_gmt":"2008-03-08T05:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/conversationswithgod\/2008\/03\/heading-off-the-systems-collap.html"},"modified":"2008-03-08T05:50:18","modified_gmt":"2008-03-08T05:50:18","slug":"heading-off-the-systems-collap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/conversationswithgod\/2008\/03\/heading-off-the-systems-collap.html","title":{"rendered":"Heading off the system’s collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you want to head off the collapse of the entire system that has produced such inequities in your world you will explore the possibility of bringing a New Spirituality to the planet sooner, rather than later. Because the problem here is spiritual. It is not economic and it is not political. And it certainly is not military. It has to do with what people believe about each other, about their relationship to each other, about God, and about Life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\nNOTE: Saturday is Prose & Poetry Day here on the blog, a time to take a moment once a week to relax the mind, open the heart, and access the soul through the gift of prose from one of the many books of The New Spirituality, and through the poetry of m. Claire, author of the forthcoming volume, Openings.<\/em>
\nThis week’s prose…an excerpt from Tomorrow’s God<\/em>…
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But you will create critical mass around the idea of changing things if, and only if, you \u201cget\u201d that not to change things is creating critical mass in another direction\u2014a direction that you may not wish to take.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, we had better change things, or things are going to change for us, in ways that we do not prefer.<\/p>\n

In fact, as you yourself just said, they are.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And when these changes that we do not prefer start to really mount up, we will change. We will change our ideas about Life, if only as a means of survival.<\/p>\n

Not \u201cif only.\u201d Primarily.
\nPrimarily as a means of survival, you will change.
\nIf your survival is directly threatened, you will do what you have to do. You will even change your most sacred and long-held beliefs about yourselves, about God, about Life, about everything, if you have to.
\nYou will always choose survival, make no mistake about that. You are encoded to do so. This instinct is, as I said earlier, \u201cbuilt in.\u201d Life is functional, adaptable, and sustainable. Always.
\nAnd if you have to choose just exactly what it is that is going to survive\u2014your species or the beliefs of your species\u2014you will choose your species and abandon your beliefs.
\nYou would abandon those beliefs that are killing you, that are impairing your ability to survive, right now, but the negative effect of most of your most damaging beliefs is so insidious, is so slow in showing itself, that you do not recognize them as being damaging.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I suppose if aliens were attacking the earth, as in some of those science-fiction films, we would change our ideas fast. We would change our ideas about being separate from each other and we would change our ideas about competing with each other and about how important it is that we believe in God in different ways.
\nVery little of this would matter to us. We would see Life as the prime value, and instinctively Serve Life First. We would join together to do what we could do to ward off the invaders. We would share our most secret technologies in a heartbeat, so that we could continue to have a heartbeat, and we would forget our differences rather than let them get in the way of our Serving Life First.
\nIf we were thrown into that kind of fire, we would get out fast. But we are not in that kind of fire. We are as lobsters in a cooking pot. The water is heating, but oh, so slowly, and the lobsters do not know enough to crawl out\u2014they do not even attempt to\u2014until it is too late.
\nPerhaps it would be better if unfriendly aliens attacked us.<\/p>\n

You do not need unfriendly aliens to attack you. You are acting as unfriendly aliens with each other, and you are attacking yourselves. You have thrown yourselves into the flames of your own fire. It has been ignited by the basic misunderstandings of humans about God and about Life, fallacies that have placed fear in the mind and hatred in the heart of humanity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And these fallacies are explained with such wonderful clarity in The New Revelations, so I don\u2019t want to go into enormous detail here. But can we just list them? What are the biggest fallacies about God and about Life that do the most to produce crisis, violence, killing and war in our human societies?<\/p>\n

Your biggest fallacies about God are:
\n1.\tGod needs something.
\n2.\tGod can fail to get what God needs
\n3.\tGod has separated you from God because you have not given God what God needs.
\n4.\tGod still needs what God needs so badly that God now requires you, from your separated position, to provide it.
\n5.\tGod will destroy you if you do not meet God\u2019s requirements.
\nThese fallacies about God are destructive enough, but they completely overwhelm humanity when combined with the fallacies about Life to which they have given birth. Many human beings\u2014most, actually\u2014believe that\u2026
\n1.\tHuman beings are separate from each other.
\n2.\tThere is not enough of what human beings need to be happy.
\n3.\tTo get the stuff of which there is not enough, human beings must compete with each other.
\n4.\tSome human beings are better than other human beings.
\n5.\tIt is appropriate for human beings to resolve severe differences created by all the other fallacies by killing each other.
\nHumanity\u2019s major fallacies about God and about Life make for a deadly litany of error that has created, and continues to create to this very moment, a world of deep anger, brutal violence, terrible loss, unrelenting sorrow, and unremitting terror.
\nYou think you are being terrorized by other people, but in truth you are being terrorized by your beliefs.
\nThese are what you must change if you are ever to realize your dream of a world living in peace, harmony and happiness.
\nIf you wish to sustain life as you know it\u2014if you wish to have something to pass on to your children and to your children\u2019s children\u2014you will have to pay serious attention to giving birth to a set of beliefs, a new human theology, a New Spirituality.
\nNot a replacement for the old, but an enhancement of it. Not an abandonment of your present religions, but a revitalization of them.
\nYou are going to have to revitalize religion if you are going to revitalize Life and sustain it in its present form. For religion\u2014which is just another word for what you believe\u2014is the bedrock of your civilzation. Your beliefs create your behaviors, and, I repeat, that is true whether you believe in what you call \u201cGod\u201d or not.
\nFor these reasons I have come to you now. For your world waits in silent apprehension, its people living in fear of the next great devastation, the next outbreak of war, the next fast-spreading virus, the next ecological disaster, the next terrorist attack, the next upheaval\u2014as if the struggles of day-to-day survival were not enough.
\nI have come to you at this critical juncture in your species\u2019 history to bring you news of Tomorrow\u2019s God, of the kind of faith that humanity will create, of the kind of beliefs that humanity will embrace, in its future\u2014and to invite humanity to create that future in the Present Moment of Now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\nIf you liked Conversations with God<\/em> you are going to love Happier Than God<\/em>, the newest book from Neale Donald Walsch. Described as “a Master’s Guide to Spiritual Awakening,” this extraordinary new work has just been released and is available now. Click on the Happier Than God icon at the right of this blog page for more info, and enjoy the most empowering book you have read since CWG-Book 1!
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\nThis week’s gift of poetry<\/em>
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\nIt is rare, that my mind allows me to write about Things.
\nThe grapes, for instance, beginning their short life
\noutside the window, on their wickered vines.
\nThey are still green, tight; dusted.
\nThen You,
\nmoving about your day perhaps
\nlunching, or speaking on the phone
\nor lifting a slender hand to your chin
\nto think.
\nIt\u2019s rare that a breeze comes up mid-day in August.
\nThe heart-shaped leaves flutter and fan
\nthe new clusters of grape, and lightly tap
\nagainst my window.
\nThen You,
\ntaking the stairs, maybe one by one,
\nraising a leg, a foot, all
\nthoughts on how next
\nto save the world.
\nThe bright of the neighboring house causes me to
\nshade my eyes as the August sun tops the sky,
\nurging every young grape to shift, and yearn.
\nI wonder at which point in the day you
\nthink of me,
\nand move a white hand to your heart.
\n(Think Of Me – m. claire – copyright 2007 – all rights reserved)
\nFor more of the work of this new poetic voice you are invited to visit www.mclairepoet.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you want to head off the collapse of the entire system that has produced such inequities in your world you will explore the possibility of bringing a New Spirituality to the planet sooner, rather than later. Because the problem here is spiritual. It is not economic and it is not political. 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