THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM – Chapter 19

Let’s begin exploring ideas for a New Cultural Story by taking a look at what that old story we read about in Conversation 15, only with a little different twist, yes?

We’ll use that old story as a template and simply overwriting new ideas on top of it. A goodly portion of my thoughts about humanity’s New Cultural Story have come from the CWG dialogues. So I’m reaching into the many messages that I had shared with the world in lectures and in workshops and in my writing for many years, placing before us once again some ideas that I have always believed could change our world.

(Not everyone, of course, has heard my lectures or read my books, so for them these expressions will be brand new. If you’re one of those who has heard some of this from me before, I’m hoping that this reminder of what our lives could be like will be even more enticing the second time around.)

So here, following, is the parallel of the Old Cultural Story that was outlined in Conversation #16. It might be interesting for you to bookmark both places, then bounce back and forth between them, comparing the old story to this new one…

“We are born into a friendly world, created by a God who has nothing that He wants us to do and nothing that She wants us not to do, and who will never punish us for anything at all, because our new understanding of God will make it clear that God is unable to be hurt or damaged, disappointed or angered in any way.

“Our first experience in physical life is of Oneness with our mother, the source of our life, as we experience it in the womb. This sets the tone and creates the context for our entire reality, which we experience as Oneness with the Source of all life.

“We are not only One with All Life, but with everything else in life. Everything that exists, exists in unity with us, and we are One with everything else that exists. We are so happy that it is this way, because this offers us a direct experience of the most significant aspect of Ourselves. We are glad it is not otherwise, and, indeed, we strive to make sure that no one imagines for even a moment that it is otherwise, and that they are alone.

“We seek, in the living of our lives, to express Oneness with all things, and especially with each other. We know and understand why, exactly, that it seems almost instinctual, that it feels like the natural thing to do. It is because Oneness is our natural state, and it is instinctual for us to express our natural state of being.

“There is no problem even if, in a moment of confusion, there does not seem to be enough of any Other person, place, or thing to satisfy us, because by returning to our Core Value and our Deepest Truth we know that the source of everything we could possibly desire lies within us—for the precise reason that God and we are One.

“We therefore experience ourselves as always having enough of everything. We always have enough love, always have enough time, always have enough money, and always have enough of whatever it is we think we need in order to be happy and fulfilled. The moment we imagine, in a temporary confusion, that we do not have enough, we return to our Core Value and our Deepest Truth and we see the illusion.

“Since we are clear that there is ‘enough’ of whatever it is we think we need to be happy, we realize that we don’t have to ‘do stuff’ to get as much as we can get. We know that nothing is required of us to get everything, from God’s love to the natural bounty of life. Simply ‘being alive’ is enough. Therefore WE, like all the things in life, are enough.

“Because just ‘being’ is sufficient, and there’s no ‘stuff that we have to do,’ life is not a process by which the ones who do the ‘right stuff’ get to have the things that they need to be happy.

“Everyone gets to have those things…and the so-called ‘right stuff’ doesn’t exist anyway, since there is no such thing as ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ Because you don’t need to do the right stuff in the right way, you don’t ‘win’ or ‘lose’ in life, you simply live it joyously, always. Thus, no competition with anyone else is necessary. There’s ‘enough’ out there, and so we don’t have to compete for it.

“We don’t have to compete for anything, especially God.

“Life is not a competition that is tough, and our experience and purpose is not about survival, it is about expression. Specifically, the expression of Divinity in, through, and as Us, and the experience of heaven on earth.

“There is no such thing as ‘only the fittest survive,’ or ‘to the victor go the spoils.’ You cannot be a loser, and so you get to live a heaven on Earth. And after you die, you cannot be a loser in the competition for God, either, for there is no such competition. Thus, you will experience heaven again – this time forever.

“What we call ‘death’ was created by God as part of the process of evolution. It is not the end of our existence, however, but rather, a simple transformation from one life form into another, as is birth. Both are part of the everlasting and eternal journey of the soul from the Realm of the Spiritual to the Realm of the Physical and back again.

“The Western theological myth of Adam and Eve is an Origination Story created by humans who did not understand and could not explain death, and so created a tale which was both totally inaccurate and completely unbelievable. Nevertheless, many people embraced the allegory, until humanity’s New Cultural Story was at last written in the first quarter of the 21^st Century.

“Many other cultures around the world had their own Origination Stories, and most told the same tale: one of Separation from God for one reason or another, and thus, the loss of everlasting life. But now those cultures, too, have abandoned their Old Story in favor of the New Cultural Story of Humanity.

“The New Story tells us that God never took away our everlasting life, and that we don’t have to worry about breaking His rules, because She doesn’t have any. God’s love is unconditional, and so are God’s rewards.

“God loves us and would never condemn us to everlasting damnation, even if there were such a thing, which there is not. God has made it possible for all of us to return Home, and nothing can stop that process—even if we do what we call “misbehave.”

“There is no such thing as “misbehaving” in the mind of God, anymore than you would say that an innocent baby has misbehaved. We are the children of God, and God sees us in exactly this way. The New Cultural Story tells us: “If you saw you as God sees you, you would smile a lot.”

“The trick is, therefore, to not imagine that we can misbehave. We were designed to live a good life, and it is only our misguided thought about who we are and how life is that can interrupt this process. We must strive to stop mistaken thinking. For it is as Shakespeare wrote: “Nothing is evil, lest thinking make it so.”

“In order to set aside mistaken thinking, we have to know the truth about God’s desire and does not want from us. We have to know that God wants nothing at all, because God has and is Everything. What, then, could God possibly want or need from us?

“We do not, therefore, have to worry about pleasing God, we do not have to seek to avoid offending Her or angering Him. We merely have to know that there is no such thing as Right and Wrong, only that which serves, that which Works or Does Not Work, depending upon what it is we are trying to do. We have to understand the Truth about that.

“The Truth is simple to understand and easy to know. All we have to do is listen to the prophets, the teachers, the sages, and the Source and Founder of our religion. Not to those who have subsequently misinterpreted them, but to the Sources and Founders themselves.

“There is more than one religion, and therefore, more than one Source and Founder, but they all spoke the same basic truth. Because this is so, there is no way to pick the Wrong One. All religions speak truth at their core. It is the misinterpretation of their messages, and the ‘add-on’ messages, that have rendered so many of their current teachings inaccurate and misleading.

“Because all religions, at their core, speak truth, there is no way to pick the ‘right one’ and thus declare yourselves to be superior, or better than your peers, because you have The Truth on your side.

“It is now clear to everyone that this state of being ‘better’ is an illusion, which in the past allowed some people to falsely claim most of the prizes in what they imagined to be the contest of life. They declared themselves to be the Winner in a competition, ignoring the fact that competition was not needed.

“The New Story has made it clear to everyone that it is not to our benefit to give ourselves all the advantages, and to write the Rules of Life in such a way that certain others find it nearly impossible to win the really big prizes. And so, no one does this anymore.

“Because humans do not do this anymore, peace and joy is guaranteed—as rightly it should be, since no matter what our religion, our nationality, our race, our gender, or our political persuasion, we deserve to be winners in life. God has set it up to be a process with no losers.

“Because we all deserve to win and we all do win, we have no need or desire to threaten others, to fight with them, or to kill them in order to produce this result.

“There is no better way to live than to live without competition, without insufficiency, without the requirement to mollify an angry and vindictive God, without need of any kind, and with only love as our constant expression and experience. To live this way is to live as if we were Divine, and that is exactly how God designed life to be lived. There is no other thing that God has in mind, no other, larger Truth, and so there is no need to search for one.

“Everything there is to know about Life we are supposed to know, and the knowing of it is very easy. All we have to do is live inside the truth of love. All we have to ask is, What would love want? What would love do? What would love give? With these simple questions it is possible to truly know and understand God.

“God is not the Unknown Knower, but the Knower that resides within all of us, the Unmoved Mover, the Great Unseen. Therefore, we can easily know the truth of Who We Are and Who God Is. All we need to do is go deeply inside, to the Source of our Everlasting Knowing, and ask God to reveal Itself there.

“True ignorance is impossible, and is one of the Ten Illusions of Humans. All we need do is embrace what we now know—our New Cultural Story—and live its basic message of love. If we seek to do this, each according to his or her own ability, we will produce the life for which we have all yearned, and the reality on Earth of which we have long dreamed.”

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Just a start, just a beginning

I know it’s a long narrative, but hang on, because right now I’m going to break this down into groupings, each with identical categories, so that we can take a look at how all the broad-based concepts above would function in every day beliefs and every day life—after we look at how the are functioning for most human beings now.

We’ve been talking here about co-creating, with you, a New Cultural Story that could change beliefs. That is the core here; that’s the shift that must occur if we are to create a new humanity, a new way of living, a new reality; if we are to complete the Overhaul of Humanity in a way that brings an end to The Storm Before The Calm and moves us into the Calm itself.

I’m going to say it again. We have to change our beliefs.

About what?

About a lot of things…and most important, about God. And let me tell you why.

Much of our lives is wrapped up in what humanity believes about God, and about what God expects and demands and requires of us. This is true because our cultures, our customs, or morals, our social mores, our business ethics, and our codes of conduct are all built around our understandings of God.

This is not surprising in a world where the vast majority of people in every corner of the world profess a belief in some sort of Power Greater (by whatever name or description).

But it is not only our cultures, customs, morals, mores, ethics and codes that are wrapped up in our concepts of God and God’s commands. Much of our civil law from country to country is based on religious doctrines. And religious doctrines, of course, are based on human interpretations of what are considered Divine Demands.

I went to Wikipedia not long ago and looked up the origin of laws. I learned that the Roman ‎Catholic Church has the oldest continuously functioning legal system in Western ‎Europe, predating the common and European civil law traditions.‎

I discovered that what began with rules (“canons”) adopted by the Apostles at the Council of ‎Jerusalem in the 1st century has blossomed into a highly complex and original legal system ‎encapsulating not just norms of the New Testament, but some elements of the Hebrew (Old ‎Testament), Roman, Visigothic, Saxon, and Celtic legal traditions spanning thousands of years of ‎human experience.‎

You can find out this same stuff by following this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_law

…but let me save you the trouble. The encyclopedia tells us that the institutions and practices of canon law paralleled the legal development of much of Europe, and that “consequently both modern civil law and common law bear the influences of canon law.”

Wikipedia informs us that Edson Luiz Sampel, a Brazilian expert in canon law, says that canon law is contained in the genesis of various institutes of civil law, such as the law in continental Europe and Latin American countries. Sampel explains that canon law has significant influence in contemporary society.  (Italics mine.)

The most famous ancient civil code is the Corpus Juris Civilis, a codification of Roman ‎law (remember that phrase) produced between 529-534 AD by the Byzantine emperor Justinian ‎I, which forms the basis of civil law legal systems.‎

Other civil codes used since ancient times include various texts used in religious laws, such as ‎the Law of Manuin Hindu law, the Mishnah in Jewish Halakha law, the Canons of the ‎Apostles in Christian Canon law, and the Qur’an and Sunnah in Islamic Sharia law to some ‎extent.‎

Historically, “Roman law” also denotes the legal system applied in most of Western Europe, until ‎the end of the 18th century. In Germany, Roman law practice remained longer, having been ‎the Holy Roman Empire (963–1816); thus the great influence upon the civil law systems in ‎Europe.‎

Moreover, the English and North American Common law also were influenced by Roman law. ‎And Roman civil law that applied only to Roman citizens was bonded to religion. (Italics mine ‎again.)‎

I’ve gone into this in some detail here because I want you to know that I wasn’t kidding when I said that what humanity believes about God, and about God’s expectations and requirements of us, affects every person—even those who themselves do not believe in God at all.

Not the least of the ways in which we are all affected has to do with beliefs held by millions about what God has set down for human beings as acceptable behavior. I’m talking about human society’s basic ideas about “right” and “wrong.”

Let’s take a look at what many of us have been taught about that, shall we? This is going to be very instructive. Eye-opening, actually.

_________

 

POINTS I HOPE YOU WILL REMEMBER…

* We were born into a friendly world.

* We are not only One with All Life, but with everything else in life.

* God would never condemn us to everlasting damnation.

* Everything there is to know about Life we are supposed to know, and the knowing of it is very easy.

* What we believe about God and about God’s desire and demands is important even to agnostics or atheists, because our civil laws throughout the world are based in more than small measure on religious doctrines.

 

ACTION I HOPE YOU WILL TAKE…

* Write your own version of a New Cultural Story for humanity.

* Post your new story on the website at www.TheGlobalConversation.com

* Make a list of the laws where you live that you see are clearly based on religious doctrines or beliefs (Laws against gay marriage, for instance? Or forbidding stem cell research?) and begin a campaign, working with others, to repeal those laws.

9 Nov 2015.
© Neale Donald Walsch.

Prepared for publication by Dr. Gil Dekel www.PoeticMind.co.uk . Book published with permission from Neale Donald Walsch www.cwg.org .

The Storm Before the Calm: Book 1 in the Conversations with Humanity Series – by Neale Donald Walsch. Paperback published 1 October 2011, Emnin Books, Oregon, USA; ISBN-13: 978-1401936921