Part of the Change – Chapter 3

Your role as a spiritual helper. By Neale Donald Walsch.

“Water of life” – By Gil Dekel.

The third step in becoming a spiritual helper is to:

3. ALIGN OURSELVES WITH EACH OTHER

This step goes past recognizing that the other person is “us” and raises the level of consciousness to an awareness that we all share the same desires.

Did you hear that? Did you understand the implication of that? Please don’t be offended by these questions. Every day I have to act as if I never heard that before. Every day I seek to bring myself to a new understanding of what all of that means.

Sometimes I can hear something and “not hear it,” know what I mean? And sometimes I have to say the same thing over and over again to myself to stop it from going in one ear and out the other. I’ve heard some things so often it’s like I’ve never heard them at all. I have to really focus to bring myself to such tidbits as if they were brand new.

So sometimes I sound like I’m repeating myself, but that’s not always bad. ‘Cause it gives me a chance to hear the same thing over again, and hear it “brand new.”

So let me ask you again, did you hear that?

What I SAID was…we all share the same desires.

The implication of that is enormous. Because if we see each other, if we can finally come to a place where we can really see each other, as simply Another Version Of Us, we will suddenly understand many things—not the least of which is that, since the inner agenda of every human being is identical, there must be a way to connect our outer agendas as well.

There is.

Ending the tug of war

The first step in connecting outer agendas is, in fact, the awareness and the embracing of the truth that has just been revealed: the inner agenda of every human being is the same. Knowing this and honoring this, holding this deep inside the self in a way that creates a particular nuance in our relationships with others, is the first part of the process of aligning ourselves with each other. This is not the same as Step Two, in which we agree with ourselves about each other, but it is a close cousin. It is good to notice that both of your feet are both part of the same body. Now it’s about getting them both to move in the same direction.

To be in “alignment” with each other means that we seek and find the place of harmony between all the disparate parts of us, then use our energies to expand that harmonious vibration, so that we may make beautiful music together.

The place of harmony that already exists is not an insignificant one, and not very difficult to find. It is the place of our highest aspirations and our grandest dreams. Here we discover identicality, and we learn that we are not only united with every other living thing physically, we are also united in our desires.

It is interesting that the words “identity” and “identical” are nearly the same. Our True Identity is revealed, and can only be experienced, when we see that for all of us, it is Identical. You should not miss the symmetry here. We are beings of Identical Identity.

Each human soul comes to the body with the identical agenda, and that is to uncover our identity. To UNcover is not the same as to DIScover. To discover is to find something that you did not know was there. To uncover is to reveal or expose that which we knew was always there. We do not need to find our True Identity, we merely need to reveal it. Those are two remarkably different activities. The Master is the one who knows the
difference.

We all yearn to know ourselves in our own experience. We want to express and become Who We Really
Are. Now we may not put it that way, but that is our innermost desire. All of us seek happiness, and the highest
state of happiness is achieved when we live in the fullest expression of Who We Are. It is a simple as that.

And Who We Are, of course, is love.

So it could be said that all of us seek to express and experience love. That is what all of us choose, and when we have that, all of us are happy, peaceful, and joyful. Love, peace, joy—these are the things all of us desire for ourselves and for our loved ones.

We cannot have these experiences when we see ourselves as separate from each other, because separation produces the imaginary need to compete, and competition cannot by its nature create love, peace, and joy. It does not even create love, peace, and joy in the winner, who, following his victory, then has to defend himself against the losers every time. Even in sports, you’re only the winner until the next competition, the next round, the next match, the next season. You can’t rest. You can’t have peace. In fact, the fastest way to lose peace is to be a big winner, because then everyone else is coming at you.

“Water of life” – By Gil Dekel.

As soon as we see that we all want the same things, and as soon as we realize that it is impossible for all of us to have these things if we insist on seeing ourselves as separate, we begin to sense that alignment is the next part of the process of evolution. In that moment, cooperation replaces competition. All of us grab hold of the same end of the rope, and all of us start pulling in the same direction.

The tug of war is over.

Connecting outer agendas

Once we understand that our inner agenda is identical, we begin to search for ways to use our co-created outer experience in order to achieve it. It is a circle. Alignment inwardly is a prerequisite to alignment outwardly, and alignment outwardly produces an even greater sense of alignment inwardly.

It is like two people making love. When you both want the same thing at the deepest part of your being, the alignment of your outward expression becomes easy. And when you both are moving in harmony in your outer expression, your inner desires are realized and experienced even more profoundly.

Many books have been written on connecting outer agendas. One of the best I have ever read was written well over a half century ago. How to Win Friends and Influence People was authored by Dale Carnegie.

Here is the write-up about it from Amazon.com…

This grandfather of all people-skills books was first published in 1937. It was an overnight hit, eventually selling 15 million copies. How to Win Friends and Influence People is just as useful today as it was when it was first published, because Dale Carnegie had an understanding of human nature that will never be outdated.

Financial success, Carnegie believed, is due 15 percent to professional knowledge and 85 percent to “the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people.”

He teaches these skills through underlying principles of dealing with people so that they feel important and appreciated. He also emphasizes fundamental techniques for handling people without making them feel manipulated.

You learn how to make people like you, win people over to your way of thinking, and change people without causing offense or arousing resentment. For instance, “talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.”

Carnegie illustrates his points with anecdotes of historical figures, leaders of the business world, and everyday folks. –Joan Price

If you truly wish to become a spiritual helper, the art of connecting outer agendas is one to which you will want to pay particular attention. It is not as difficult as it sounds. In fact, most people do it naturally when they are excited about something at a personal level.

The Carnegie formula works like magic, because it is simply about you causing another person to see that you both share the same interest; that you both have a vested interest in producing the same outcome.

This is another way of saying all that I have said just above. When we see that our inner agenda is identical, the alignment of our outer agendas becomes almost automatic.

Some practical ways to take Step Three

Taking this third step in becoming a spiritual helper is as simple as A-B-C.

A. Open yourself to your desires. Most people don’t know what they want. That may sound strange, but it’s true. The first part of Step Three, then, is opening yourself to your own desires. This includes:
* Your inner world desires
* Your outer world desires

B. Share your desires with others. We are not used to telling others, blatantly, what we want. No wonder it is so difficult to get it!

C. Celebrate the commonality of your agendas by replacing competition with cooperation. This single shift in our way or relating to each other can change the world over night.

Now let’s take a look at how you can do this.

Opening yourself to your desires is not that difficult, but it may require a bit of rearranging of your thoughts around worthiness and possibility. If you think that you are not worthy of receiving what you want, or that there is simply no possibility that it can happen, there is not much point in going further. You’re not likely to experience it.

The issue of worthiness can be approached very effectively by taking a look at what it is that makes you feel unworthy, and embracing that. There is a “shadow side” of all of us, and this is very often what makes us feel unworthy. It is when we embrace this shadow and lovingly acknowledge it as part of us that we begin to heal our sense of “not being okay” and not being worthy of getting what we want.

Some practical suggestions for accomplishing this: read any of the wonderful books by Debbie Ford, including The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, The Secret of the Shadow: The power of owning your story, and The Answers Are Within You: Unveiling life’s greastest secrets in the shadow of your soul. Then, sign up for Debbie’s Shadow Process Workshop. I know Debbie Ford very well. Several years ago we collaborated on a workshop that we did together. Her work is remarkable in restoring the heart and soul to its original place of love and wonder, and in repairing the mind’s idea about the Self.

To learn more about Debbie and her work, go to www.debbieford.com.

And while we are on the subject of some really healing reading around the issue of self worth, I want to strongly recommend How Good Do We Have to Be? A new understanding of guilt and forfiveness, an extraordinary book by Rabbi Harold Kushner.

Something else you can do: get coaching.

I am wanting to make sure that this booklet contains lots of practical advice and offers plenty of practical tools to make these Ten Steps to Becoming a Spiritual Helper more than just a lot of fluffy talk. Well, here is one of the most practical tools I could ever give you: If you are having a challenge with either (a) worthiness or (b) possibility thinking, find a Life Coach and begin work with that person immediately.

This is something that all of you can do at once, and many Life Coaches work right over the telephone, meaning you don’t even have to leave your house. Coaching is different from counseling. It is not the same as going to a psychiatrist or a psychologist. Coaching is not a therapeutic intervention. It is a motivating, inspiring, uplifting, and terrifically encouraging and empowering experience.

If you would like to learn more about integrative life coaching, or if you wish to work with a Life Coach right now, one place you will find what you are looking for is at www.cwgcoachingservices.com. There are other sources out there as well.

Dealing with negative thinking

Finally, here is a wonderfully practical suggestion if your challenge happens to be getting into a positive frame of mind. Get going in changing your attitude by reading some of the truly wonderful books now out there about how to get your life moving again, and, specifically, how to alter your
thinking with regard to what you imagine in possible.

The most powerful book I have seen on this subject is Ask and It Is Given, by Esther and Jerry Hicks. Also, pick up Ask and It Is Given: The Processes, an audio CD by Jerry Hicks that can lead you right through personal process work that can really change your thinking. Finally, pick up a copy of The Daily Planning Calendar: The Science of Deliberate Creation, also by Jerry Hicks and Esther Hicks. Also, back to the work of Debbie Ford, try reading The Best Year of Your Life, and then obtaining The Best Year of Your Life Kit.

And I believe that everyone should read, at least once, the book that really started it all—The Power of Positive Thinking, by the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. Other resources you may wish to consider:

The Gift of Change: Spiritual Guidance for a Radically New Life, by Marianne Williamson.
The Power of Intention: Learning to co-create your world your way, by Wayne W. Dyer.
The Success Principles: How to get from where you are to where you want to be, by Jack Canfield.
Attitude is Everything: 10 Life-Changing Steps to Turning Attitude into Action, by Keith Harrell.

As Keith says in his remarkable text, “Your attitude determines whether you are on the way or in the way.” I love that! I just love that remark, because it says it all. So let me highlight again here for you, with thanks and recognition to Keith Harrell:

Your attitude determines whether you are on
the way or in the way.

Get started in your reading and healing today.

You can begin your new life course in recreating yourself right now. All of the items that have been mentioned here are one click away at www.Amazon.com. You can have them in your home tomorrow.

In other words, there is no reason to delay in the overcoming of any self-worth and attitude challenges you may have. And, before you start feeling bad about having them, you should know that all of us have them. I have never met a person who did not at least occasionally fall back into patterns of lack of self-worth and limited possibility thinking.

It happens to me all the time. And when it does, I turn to the wisdom of others to remind me of my own. I look again at the wonderful writings of people like Marianne or Debbie or Wayne. Even if you’ve already read all of those books, keep them on your near-at-hand shelf, so that you can dive right back into them on a moment’s notice. The insights in books such as those are marvelous gifts. We are all here to remind each other. We are all here to lead each other back Home. And that brings me to my final thought about how to open yourself to your desires: Open someone else to theirs.

As I said earlier, most people don’t know what they want. Or if they do know it, they can’t admit it to themselves. Be a sounding board. Create a safe space for others to reveal themselves to you and you will find that they will reveal themselves to themselves. “You know, I’ve never told anyone that before,” will become a common thing for you to hear. Others will also say things to you like, “Gosh, I never knew that about myself until I just said that to you just now. Hmmm.”

So develop the ability to become a good listener. Learn all about how to do that. Here are some more suggestions for your library as you move into that:

• Listening: the Forgotten Skill—a self-teaching guide, by Madelyn Burley-Allen.
• Effective Listening Skills, by Art James and Dennis Kratz.
• The Lost Art of Listening: How learning to listen can improve relationships, by Michael Nichols.
• The Good Listener, by James E. Sullivan.

More practical suggestions

The fastest way to get what you want is to cause another to get what they want. And if what you want is to become more clear about what you want, help others to become more clear about what they want.

As you give, so shall you receive. Or, as the new age community puts it, what goes around comes around.

The second part of Step Three is item B above: Share your desires with others.

This, for many people, is not easy. Even people with a wonderful sense of self-worth and with a very positive attitude of possibility thinking can sometimes feel reluctant or uncomfortable about sharing their desires with others.

Yet sharing what it is that you want can be a very powerful tool in the manifestation of your desired reality. Especially when sharing is declaring.
When we share in such a way that we make a firm statement of our desires and intentions, our declaration is an extremely powerful tool in the process of creation.

Heart Circles

One of the best ways that I know to go about doing this is in Heart Circles. Joanna Gabriel, of our Conversations with God Foundation, writes about that here…

The concept of Heart Circles came to us from a member of the faculty of the Life Education Program (LEP) of the CWG Foundation, Tej Steiner, who staffs the Warrior Monk training. It is part of a training that Tej is designing for conscious community which we have found to be a profound expression of the concepts of CwG.

A Heart Circle is a vehicle for a deeper awareness of and connection with the Self. It is an out-picturing of the soul’s experience of itself through resonate connection with others.

From the time we are small children, we learn to choose our experience based on what we are “supposed to” do or not do. We choose based on what we are told is “right” or acceptable. We learn to avoid what is “wrong” or unacceptable based on somebody’s rules. Consequently, we learn early on to squelch or ignore the urge or call of our inner knowing…our heart’s presence.

CwG tells us that all of Life is vibrational energy. The more highly evolved an expression of life is, the higher or faster the frequency of vibration. Conversely, slower, denser expressions of life have a slower vibrational frequency. For example, our minds vibrate at a higher frequency than our bodies. Our Spirit vibrates at a higher frequency than the mind. You may notice that when we grasp a new concept, we will “get” it spiritually first, then in the mind, and the body will integrate it last. It’s the frequency of vibration that determines the speed of integration. (Of course, there are blocks and fears that get in the way of integration and they also vibrate at slower frequencies.) A related characteristic to this vibration of Life that we all are is resonance and dissonance. Energies that vibrate in harmony, that is, that are comfortable with or are attracted to one another, are resonant energies. Energies that vibrate in discord, or are uncomfortable with or are repelled by each other, are dissonant energies.

You are probably familiar with the experience of walking into a room and feeling very attracted to what or who is present there and you may also be familiar with walking into a room and feeling repelled by who or what is there. This is an experience of vibrational frequency. As we stated before, all forms of life are vibrating at some level of frequency that is talked of in several places in the CwG material. If you are drawn to a person, place or thing, you have a vibrational frequency commonality, harmony, or resonance. If you are repelled by a person, place or thing, there is a vibrational discord or dissonance. You can also have a feeling of neutrality. That is, you’re not drawn or repelled, which may mean that the vibration is exactly the same as your own.

We can use vibrational frequency to support our growth. CwG tells us that the purpose of Life is to grow, to choose and become the next grandest version of Who We Are and Who We Choose to Be. Both resonant and dissonant energies provide opportunities for growth. In the absence of that which we are not, that which we are, is not. So we are always growing through the choices we make. That’s why there are no
“wrong” choices. However, even as we remember that a choice cannot be right or wrong, we are still able to ask, does it serve us, given what it is that we desire to be, do, or have?

This is where conscious growth comes into the picture. That heart presence we mentioned, that connection with the All That Is, that connection with the God presence, has another name as well: Joy. When we are feeling connected with our heart presence, our God presence, the All
That Is, we feel and experience Joy. We feel Joy because we are vibrating with our true essence. It’s who and what we truly are. We are vibrating in harmony with the Universe.

All things are possible when we connect with this truth of ourselves. It’s as if we are saying, “Yes, God, be God as me.” When we make choices from what we are supposed to do, or not do, based on somebody else’s ideas, rather than from our inner knowing, or our heart place, we may miss an opportunity to experience Joy. In fact, many of us have created our whole lives around rules and expectations that have nothing at all to do with our inner knowing, or Joy. We then experience feelings of lack, loneliness, depression, fear, resentment. We’re not connected with our essence of Life, so how could we possibly feel or experience its blessings, its richness, its peace, its Joy? How do we live from our Joy? How do we allow God to be “godding” through us?

How do we create a life that is about growth with resonant or harmonious energy? We live from the heart presence. We drop into the heart to see what we feel and what we “want.” We use the word: “want” advisedly here, because we all know that CwG tells us we cannot have what we “want.” So the word here is used as a figure of speech, to indicate “desire.” We are not talking about the kind of “want” that describes a lack of
something. We are using the word to describe the desire that leads us toward our next step. It is our heart’s desire that draws us forward. It’s a lack of connection with our heart’s desire that keeps us stuck.

Many of us have rarely connected with our heart’s desire because we’ve been caught up in living a life prescribed by someone or something other than our own essence.

We have not lead with our heart. We have not used vibrational resonance to guide us forward. What am I attracted to? Does this call me? What does my heart feel about this choice, this opportunity? Am I drawn? Am I repelled? For many of us, these are strange questions to ask, and yet, these are the questions that support our growth from the essence of Who We Are and Who We Choose to Be.

Heart Circles are a wonderful laboratory for practicing leading with the heart. A Heart Circle is formed by a small group (4-6 people), the members of which are attracted to one another energetically and operate from shared agreements that all participants resonate with, or agree from the heart on. One of the shared agreements common to any Heart Circle is that the intention is to lead from the heart. Participants encourage and support each other in dropping into the heart to feel the heart’s desire. What do you want? This question instantly encourages you to drop to a deeper level of self-awareness. It takes you out of the “story” of the head and connects to the truth of the heart. In that moment you are invited to become aware of where you are resonating.

Through Heart Circles we practice conversations with the God of our own essence and we support it in each other. We practice “coming from the want” – and when there are opposing wants in the space, we practice going deeper to find a resolution or resonant point. This practice feels like a new paradigm and it is! At the same time, we are aware that this is the most natural beingness…coming from the essence of Who We Are and Who We Choose to Be…rather than recreating previous choices based on outer expectations, historical requirements, or a belief about what we’ve been told that God wants.

Heart Circles are CwG in action! You can form a Heart Circle today and it is one of the things that I believe Spiritual Helpers are going to do.

What God Wants

We also need to become aware of what causes us to want what we want, and to get what we want. To what extent are we influenced by our thoughts about with other people want as we gather our own thoughts about what we want? And to what extent are we influenced by our religious and spiritual beliefs? (In other words, how many of us “want” or “don’t want” a thing because of our understanding of “what God wants”?)

One of the most practical things you can do to determine the latter is to pick up a copy of What God Wants if you have not already done so, and read it cover to cover. But be prepared. This is a dangerous book that could challenge your most basic beliefs.

To see just how much you are being influenced from sources outside yourself as you come to clarity about what you truly want, do the Desires Process that I am creating for our personal growth and spiritual development retreats. Take out a sheet of paper and turn it the long way, so that you are writing on it horizontally, not vertically, from left to right. Now, on that paper make six vertical columns.

Label the first column: What I Want.
Label the second column: What Makes Me Want That.
Label the third column: What Has Kept It From Me So Far.
Label the fourth column: What I Think My Chances Are Of Getting This.
Label the fifth column: What Will Happen If I Give This To Myself.
And label the last column: When I Will Go For It.

Maybe it’s a love partner who really understands you and is in harmony with you and has the same tastes as you and wants the same things out of life. Maybe it’s a life work that truly reflects who you are and allows that to emerge. Maybe it’s to lose 20 pounds, or gain 20, or heal your relationship with your parents, or sell your house, or buy a house, or own a red convertible, or whatever…

Now complete the form by filling in the rest of the columns.

You will find this a fascinating process. When you are done, you may wonder why you have mortgaged so much of your life to “waiting.”

All this may bring up another question for you: How does the universe work, anyway? How can I get what I want? Is there a God? If so, does God say “yes” to some people and “no” to others, or “yes” to some requests and “no” to others? On what basis does God do this? What do we have to do to curry God’s favor? What does God want?

If you have not already read What God Wants, the latest CwG book, read it now. If you have read it, read it again, and this time take notes.

No, I’m not kidding. I mean it. This time, take notes. This is the most important book you will ever read in your life. Read it over and over again, and take copious notes in a separate notebook. Start a class. Do whatever it takes to undertake a deep study of the material. This book can liberate your forever.

Some final practical ideas

This is a long chapter, so you may have to track back a bit to figure out where we are. We have looked at some practical ways to take Step Three of the Ten Steps to Becoming a Spiritual Helper. These practical ways included…

A. Open yourself to your desires. Most people don’t know what they want. That may sound strange, but it’s true. The first part of Step Three, then, is opening yourself to your own desires. This includes:
* Your inner world desires
* Your outer world desires

B. Share your desires with others. We are not used to telling others, blatantly, what we want. No wonder it is so difficult to get it!

C. Celebrate the commonality of your agendas by replacing competition with cooperation. This single shift in our way of relating to each other can change the world over night.

So let’s look now at letter ‘C’ above…

The action suggested here is really easier than one might think, even on a societal level.

Tomorrow’s God speaks to this issue directly. My first practical suggestion, then, would be to read this book again, or, if you have not yet read it, to get it immediately and review its contents carefully. Pay particular attention to the material dealing with tomorrow’s economy, and how we will undertake commerce in the future.

Additional very valuable reading might include these two powerful books: Reworking Success, by Robert Theobald; Spirit Matters, by Rabbi Michael Lerner; Voluntary Simplicity, by Duane Elgin; and The Next Evolution: Making the world work for everyone, by Jack Reed.

You might even find it fascinating to read the extraordinary 19th Century novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887, by Edward Bellamy. This classic look at the future has been translated into over 20 languages and was the most widely read novel of its time. It tells the tale of a young Boston gentleman who is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century–from a world of war and want to one of peace and plenty. This brilliant vision became the blueprint of utopia that stimulated some of the greatest thinkers of our age.

These are powerful books that speak of a new age and a new way to conduct life on this planet, without competition.

By now you may be getting just a little ragged with book titles being thrown at you. You are right, however, if you assume that to be a Spiritual Helper you really need to know what is going on in the world, and have many points of view about that. So what I will wind up suggesting to you in this booklet is a short course in Present Time Awareness. It’s sort of a college course in what I might call Sociological Spirituality.

Getting some exercise

Now look into your own life and let’s exercise your new spiritual muscle. Take part in the Competition Elimination Process I have devised. The first part of the process is the Competition Assessment. Take a quiet, inner survey of your entire life as you are now living it. Explore every nook and cranny in your mind’s eye. Your relationships, your life work, your money situation, your sexual expression, or spiritual experience—everything.
Now, look to see where, if at all, you feel a sense of competition with anyone else—or with yourself. Make a note of that in a private notebook. It could look like….

I feel like I am secretly competing with a co-worker.

I feel as though I am in some sort of quiet competition with my love partner.

I feel competition around the experience of money—how much I have, how much I earn, how much others earn, how much I “should” be earning, etc.

I feel a sense of competition with other religions, or with other economic systems not endemic to my own country, or with other cultures or with those holding other political or social views. I sometimes find myself in a Red States/Blue States mentality. I sometimes feel it is “them” versus “us.”

Be honest with yourself about these feelings. Nobody is watching but you. Give yourself permission to tell the truth to yourself about yourself.
Now turn the page in your notebook and write an essay about what you think would happen if “they” won. What are you assuming will occur if your co-worker “wins,” or if your love partner “wins,” or if the guy over there makes more money than you do forever, or if the Blue States never capture another election…

This is where your fear lies.

And this is the heart of the matter.

CwG says that all of us come from only one of two places in everything that we think, say, or do: Love or Fear. The only way that you will ever end the competition in your life and begin the cooperation is if you change the idea that you have about yourself in relationship to all the rest of your world.

Who are you? What can hurt you? How can you be damaged or destroyed? What is required for your survival? When the answer to the last question comes up, “nothing,” you have triumphed. The competition is over. There was really only one competition all along—the competition of ideas in your mind. You have entertained competing thoughts about Who You Are, and about what Life is, and about what is going on here.

These thoughts, all of them, were abandoned by the masters. That is how they got to BE masters, and that is how they set an example for the rest of us in how we might live life anew, without “winners” and “loser” and without competition in any form. This single shift in our way of relating to each other can change the world overnight. I wasn’t kidding before. Now…how do you end competition? Simple. Place everyone at your holiday dinner table.

The secret of family.

No one sits at his dinner table at holiday time with his family beside him and hogs all the food. No one jumps up and races for the buffet table to grab the largest piece of dessert before anyone else gets to it. No one stabs the hand of the family member next to them as they reach for the potatoes.

Why?

Because everyone at the dinner table is family. Or, friends who are thought of as family. And for family, there is always enough to share, and no need to compete. There is a different attitude among the people at the holiday table. What’s mine is yours. All we have to do, then, to remove the sense of competition for our lives is to think of everyone as family.

Everyone IS family, of course. That’s the wonder of it. We don’t even have to tell ourselves something that is not true. It goes further than that. Everyone is more than family. Everyone at that table is us. And so, competition with Self is what we are talking about here.

Of course, many people compete with themselves, but when they finally stop, they begin at last to live peaceful lives, healthy lives, happy lives. So the answer here is to stop competing with yourself—your Localized Self and your Universal Self. There are two ways to do this, one of which I have just mentioned (make everyone your family). The second way is even more effective. Notice that there is enough.

This is the second principal truth of Conversations with God. In the very first book these three truths are spoken:

1. We are all one.
2. There’s enough.
3. There’s nothing we have to do.

If it has been a while since you’ve looked at that material, I invite you to review it again.

The last word on Step Three

Becoming a Spiritual Helper is easy. All we have to do is follow the steps here—and this third one is not only simple, but enjoyable. That is, it brings joy to everyone. When we align ourselves with each other, everyone has fun. I know a man, a Korean spiritual teacher named Ilchi Lee, who goes around the world sharing a very simple message: Let’s all just play together. Ilchi has it right.

It was German philosopher Frederick Schiller who said that play is the time when the whole person comes out, because play has no profit motive. The reward of play is play itself, and so the motivation to do it is pure. Think about it. Play requires nothing outside of itself to give it value. Most everything else we do in life produces its value after we are finished doing it. Play produces its value before we are finished doing it.

Indeed, while we are doing it. The process is holistic, in that Doing and the Being is experienced at the same time. This is as close as we are ever going to come to merging ourselves into wholeness in this relative experience called life on earth. Making love also presents us with this opportunity—but that, of course, is also a form of “playing”.

Schiller said:

“Only play makes the man whole and unfolds both sides of his nature at once. Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only a human being when he plays.”

The trick, of course, is to see everything in life as play. The whole thing is a dance. It is all, in some sense, “the game of the gods.” I don’t mean to trivialize the pain and suffering that life has brought to many people, but seeing our lives as the perfect “playing out” of events leading to our ultimate joy (all events lead to ultimate joy, because joy is another word for growth, and growth is the process that life IS), is the recontextualization of our experience that moves us to mastery. Every time I hear Ilchi Lee tell his audience, “All we have to do is play well. Let’s all just play together,” I am struck by the elegance of this message, and by its simplicity.

Often at this lectures Ilchi will sit down on the floor of the stage and start playing musical instruments. First the flute, then some percussion instruments, then he might just start tapping on his body. He’s up there having fun, and he invites the audience to capture the rhythm and to go with the flow of the energy, and the entire room is soon swaying and moving and finding the beat and feeling wonderful.

Then Ilchi will get up and start dancing. It’s always a silly dance, something that makes you smile, not something complex or difficult. It’s just movement. Then he leaves the stage and comes down onto the auditorium floor and he invites people in his audience to come forward and dance with him, and with each other.

He teaches them a simple dance, what he calls the Ilchi Dance, and he proposes something almost crazy, something absolutely nuts:

“If we all just did this dance with each other the minute we see each other, the minute we meet, on the street or in an office or anywhere, we would find it impossible to feel anything but good vibes, impossible to fight with each other, and we would produce world peace.”

Wow, can it be that easy? Yup. All we are doing here is the dance of life anyway. Why not dance a dance that makes us smile?

* End of chapter 3 *

Copyright © 2005 Neale Donald Walsch. Published here by Gil Dekel with Neale’s permission. 31 December 2016.

Published in 2005 by Spiritual Legacies, Ashland, OR, USA. All rights reserved.