THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM – Chapter 22

Can you imagine a new story for all of us to live and to teach our children based on those ideas? I get so excited about it, I can’t stand it! But now I want to share with you some mechanical information. I mean, there are some mechanics in the Universe that we all need to know about if we want to put a daring new story into place.

So let me tell you now about a great secret that reveals itself in all of Life, but only upon the closest examination. And you’ll see, in just a very short while, how this relates to our entire conversation.

Should we choose to overlay the secret I’m about to tell you upon humanity’s Cultural Story, everything suddenly makes sense, and we suddenly have a formula, a mechanism, an approach to the living of human life that works.

Indeed, it is our failure to live this secret as part of our Old Cultural Story that has turned our Story from a dream into a nightmare. The revealing of this secret, and the placement of it at the foundation of our New Story, will turn our long global nightmare back into a dream again.

And no…this particular secret is not The Law of Attraction. This not-immediately-apparent aspect of life is what I have come to call The Secret of Three-in-One. It has been unveiled for us in Conversations with God.

All things are One Thing, says CWG, and everything in the One Thing is divided into three parts.

Everything.

At first glance (which is the glance that most people use when viewing the world) it looks as if everything is divided into two part. We appear to be living in a dyad. In fact, all is a triad. When we do not see it that way, we experience a distorted reality.

God is One Essence, divided into three—what certain theologies call Father-Son-Holy Spirit.

Humans are One Being, divided into three—Body-Mind-Spirit.

Time is One Moment, divided into three—Past-Present-Future.

Space is One Place, divided into three—Here-There-In Between

There is only One Place, One Moment, One Being, and One Essence. The Whole of All is Divided into Three Expressions.

What does this have to do with Humanity’s New Cultural Story?

Everything.

It is the shift we will make within our story, from a dyad reality to a triad reality, that is going to change our entire experience.

The problem with how we are living our lives right now is that we see things mostly in two’s. We see male-female, good-evil, up-down, fast-slow, big-small, hot-cold, black-white…and on and on. We see dyads where there are triads.

When we see triads—when we see male-female-both, good-evil-both, up-down-both, fast-slow-both, big-small-both, and so on—then we realize that while a thing appears to be either good or bad, in reality it is both at the same time, which is a third thing altogether. While a thing appears to be either up or down, in reality it is both at the same time, which is a third thing altogether. While a thing appears to be either fast or slow, but in reality it is both at the same time, which is a third thing altogether.

Let me repeat that, in just a little different way, because this is very, very important.

This is about seeing the dyad together, rather than as separate elements. In other words, we stop seeing either This or That, but both This and That simultaneously—which is a Third Thing Altogether. That is, it is a Third Thing…All Together.

This mysterious Third Thing is so mysterious that we don’t even have a word for it. We are so used to conceiving of our world as a dyad that we have not created a way to talk about this Third Thing. We even doubt that such a thing exists. We wonder, how can two things be a third thing called both?

Simple. Point of view.

It depends on how you look at it.

The definition of everything depends on how you look at it. Nothing is as it seems, and the moment you change your perspective you see that. Therefore, there is no such thing as Reality, there is only the reality you create by the way you are looking at something. You are creating your reality through the use of perspective.

So, it turns out that this mysterious Third Thing is really only One Thing, divided into three parts. A thing is either good or bad—or something in between. A thing is either up or down—or something in between. A thing is either fast or slow—or something in between. It is the in-betweenness for which we have no word.

Or do we?

Don’t look now, but I’ve just described the Triune Reality that is the One Thing that some of us call God.

The Roman Catholic Church teaches this exact theology. It speaks of a Three-in-One God, called The Holy Trinity. There is much in Catholic doctrine with which I do not agree, but this is one message that cuts right to the core of What Is So.

A thing is neither “good” or “bad,” it is something in between—and it is that in-betweenness that hold both “good” and “bad” in place, and make the experience of them possible. And making the experience of God possible by creating the illusion of “not God” possible, through the producing of a contextual field within which Divinity can be fully realized in relative terms, is the way that life works.

Our world of duality is created by the Triune Reality of God, so that Divinity Itself may know Itself in Its own experience.

What we have done here on earth is produce the illusion of a dyad out of the reality of a triad, and in this way we have created duality—including the greatest duality of all: Life and Death.

You see, only a triad creates the possibility of a continuum. A dyad cannot. Try to get that. Try to picture that in your mind. Draw a line that creates a dyad. You have one thing “over here” and another thing “over there.” You can only go back and forth along the line. You cannot continue going forward. You cannot endlessly move in one direction  because sooner or later you reach the end of the line. Then you have to double back. You have to turn around and go the other way. That’s the problem with dyads—and with a dyad world. It violates the first principle of evolution. Evolution moves forever forward.

Now draw a second line in your mind. Let this connect three points. Now you have a triangle. Now you’ve created eternity.

Along this line you can move endlessly forward. You will visit the same places you’ve visited before, but you haven’t gone back to them. You’ve encountered them again—and that is not the same thing at all.

This is what you do in your life. In your endless life. However, using your endless imagination, you have imagined that you can actually reach the end of a line that has no end. You call this “death.” You say you have reached “the end of the line.” But once you get there, you see that the line does not end. It merely turns. It goes up, up, up to The Third Point.

That is where we all go. And then, after remaining a while, we come down the other side of the triangle. We are, in human lingo, “on the other side.” We slip down quietly, reaching the beginning of the line, and then we travel the baseline between what we call Birth and Death all over again. Some people call this reincarnation.

The journey never ends. It never, ever, ever ends. The trick to making the journey a joy is to understand what is actually happening, to understand the nature of ultimate reality. All things are One Thing. There is only One Thing, and all things are part of the One Thing There Is.

Yet in this physical reality, this world of our illusion, we do well to think in terms of Three Things in One—the Holy Trinity. We do well to get out of our dyad world and into a triad reality; to embrace what I call The Triune Truth: a thing is neither this nor that, but a Third Thing altogether. The Third Thing that’s the One Thing.

Are you getting this? And you stringing all this together?

I hope you are, but this all has to do with our New Cultural Story, and what it will tell us and our children and our children’s children about Life and how it is. And that, my friends, will change everything.

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Opening our vision

In the new World of Three we will see that it is impossible to be only male or female, but that the reality is, we are both; only fast or slow, but that the reality is, things are both; only black or white, but that the reality is, it is both.

It has been said that when we stop seeing things as either black or white and start seeing shades of gray, we have grown up. It is said that when we stop insisting that a thing is either “this” or “that,” but that it can be “this” and “that,” we have at last matured. It is said that when we shift from an either/or reality to a both/and reality, we become masters.

This is not only how we master ourselves, this is how we master our world.

Since Conversations with God showed me this, I have taken to saying things like, “Oh-oh, this is bad…unless it’s not.”  “This is good…unless it’s not.” “This is just what I need…unless it isn’t.” “I can’t do it…unless I can.” “We’re going to be late…unless we aren’t.” “I hate asparagus…unless I don’t.”

Suddenly I found myself open to the possibilities. I mean, possibilities I never considered before. Not the least of these was the possibility that there might be something I don’t fully understand about something, the understanding of which could change everything.

I began seeing things as degrees of the Only Thing There Is. I was given, by God in the CWG dialogue, an example I could use to help explain this to others: We describe any given day as either “hot” or “cold,” whereas there in Only One Thing, called Temperature.

Throughout all of life, everything is an expression of the One Thing That Is, in varying degrees.

I suddenly began to see life in Shades of Gray.

What a growing up this was!

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The most important part of the trick

Now once again you might say, “Yes, yes, very nice, very true…but what does all this have to do with our New Cultural Story?”

And I would answer once again, “Everything.”

Then I would ask you to listen just a tiny bit longer. I would say that it would really benefit you to comprehend the implications of the fact that our dyad is not a dyad at all.

First, let me say that the way to deal with the fact that is life on earth is an illusory  experience is not to step outside of the illusion (that would defeat its entire purpose), but to live within the illusion knowing that it’s an illusion.

The idea is to continue to perform the magic, but to remember that you are doing so. Or, as we have it from a somewhat more eloquent source, to be in this world, but not of it.

When we know that this whole experience is an illusion, we can work with the biggest illusion of all—the Illusion of Duality—in such a way that the illusion serves us, rather than getting in our way, as we seek to have the ultimate experience of life on earth, both in our personal world as well as our collective experience.

For most of us our personal world—what I call our Individual Life—has been lived primarily as if we were two-part beings, made up of body and mind. Our more outward  experience—what I call our Collective Life—has been cut in two as well, with our most important and impacting group activities primarily made up of economics and politics.

Yet there’s a third aspect of our Individual Lives that complements the body/mind dyad, and there’s a third aspect of our Collective Lives that complements the economics/politics dyad.

We have not paid nearly enough attention to that Third Thing in our Individual Lives, which I am going to call the soul, and we have not paid nearly enough attention that Third Thing in our Collective Lives either, which I am going to call our culture.

Fascinatingly, this Third Thing is in both cases the most important thing of all. Why, then, have we not paid much attention to it? Because we have not understood its importance.

Only relatively recently, as the history of humankind is measured, have we begun to grasp the relevance—indeed, the critical relevance—of this Third Aspect of Individual and Collective Life. That awareness has finally come upon us only in these most recent millennia, and full force only in perhaps this most recent century, as part of our species’ long evolutionary process.

We are, on the scale of the Universe, still a very young species. A lot of people like to think of humans as highly evolved. In fact, humanity has just emerged from its infancy on this planet. In their book New World New Mind, Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich placed this in perspective in one mind-boggling paragraph:

Suppose Earth’s history were charted on a single year’s calendar, with midnight January 1 representing the origin of the Earth and midnight December 31 the present. Then each day of Earth’s “year” would represent 12 million years of actual history. On that scale, the first form of life, a simple bacterium, would arise sometime in February. More complex life-forms, however, come much later; the first fishes appear around November 20. The dinosaurs arrive around December 10 and disappear on Christmas Day. The first of our ancestors recognizable as human would not show up until the afternoon of December 31. Homo sapiens—our species—would emerge at around 11:45 P.M. All that has happened in recorded history would occur in the final minute of the year.

Did you get that? Did you feel the impact of that? Don’t let that slip past you. Read that again if you have to, to let it really sink in. You’ve got to get this. You’ve got to know where we are in the overall scheme of things. Because this explains a lot.

Early in our process of growth as a species, human beings were like children, tending only to their most basic needs: (a) getting things done that helped them stay alive (later shaped into something called “economics”) and (b) getting others in their clan or tribe to help them stay alive (later constructed as “politics”).

Having noted that, I like to think that we’re now living the last seconds of that final minute. We are approaching Midnight in the Garden of the Gods.

My dear, wonderful friend and colleague Barbara Marx Hubbard calls December 22, 2012 “Day One.” She is absolutely convinced that this is the day of our true birth into the cosmic community of evolved sentient beings—and that the time up until now has been, figuratively speaking, our species’ gestation period.

(If you would like more on this remarkable woman and her breathtaking insights into Life and Tomorrow, you will immensely enjoy The Mother of Invention, her biography, which I had the great good fortune of writing, and which is, truly, the story of us all.)

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How evolution brings revolution

Because we are now a tiny bit more evolved we are no longer devoting all of our time to our most basic needs: (a) getting things done that help us stay alive (“economics”) and (b) getting others around us to help us stay alive (“politics”). We are now becoming concerned with (c) that Third Thing: quality of life (what might loosely be called our “culture”).

And this is foundationed in our culture’s story; our most sacred and valued myths about who our God is, what our social rules are, how we live together as a community, what we believe, why we marry, how we create families…even how we make music, what we sing, when we dance, what we call art.

This is the soul of us, and when we began to discover, as we evolved, how important this was to us, we began not being very happy with living a two-level existence—either in our Outside or our Individual Lives—nor with what that two-tiered formula has produced.

And so we’ve had revolutions. And more revolutions. And then, still more after those, all over the world. And conflict not just within countries, but between countries. Because while our politics were a little different (we all wanted the same things, though we went about getting them in different ways), and while our economics were a little different (we’ve had many ideas on the earth of how economics should be dealt with, but we all have wanted the same basic results), our cultural stories have been widely, widely divergent.

From country to country we’ve all tried to use our local economic system to get us what we need to stay alive. From country to country we’ve all tried to use our local political system to produce the cooperation we need to help each other stay alive. But when came a growing awareness of the part of life that we weren’t paying that much attention to before, we saw how different we were culturally from each other, and we found ourselves unable to avoid a “clash of civilizations.”

This clash has produced flash points around the world for decades, and increasingly since the turn of the century. It was predicted in a thesis on the post-Cold War new world order originally proposed by the late political scientist Samuel P. Huntington.

The theory was formulated in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 article in the journal Foreign Affairs titled “The Clash of Civilizations?” in response to Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 text, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations)

And so we see now, internally within nations and externally between countries, the people of earth are tired of the way life is.

I mentioned very early in our conversation that we need to be clear about that. We need to understand that dissent—including violent dissent—is going to continue all around the world until things get better.

I said that what I am seeing everywhere is that the human race is losing patience with itself. We do not want the kind of world we’ve created.

Like a dissatisfied artist standing back from the canvas, we’ve decided that we’re not pleased with the picture we’ve painted. And so we’re warring with ourselves and we’re warring with each other—because we don’t know what else to do.

You see? We thought it was a political problem. Then we thought it was an economic program. Those were the only two things that we seriously considered, because we thought our Collective Life was a dyad. And it’s only occurred to us lately that it’s not about that dyad. It’s about the Third Thing that makes the triad.

And because more and more of us see this, it’s become very clear that we can’t paint a better picture by using the same brush strokes in the same places with the same colors we used before.

Something’s got to change.

It’s time to tear up the canvas and start over.

It is this awareness that is producing the Overhaul of Humanity.

It is what has happened as a result of our species maturing, and thus seeking, yearning, and demanding now to bring our culture into the equation with our economics and our politics.

It is no longer acceptable to most of us to simply be trying to make a living and get others to help us stay alive. Humans now want to make a life rather than a living. And this is making all the difference in the world.

I mean that literally. I mean, it is making all the difference in the world.

Now…my dear and wonderful friends…if we don’t keep up with that difference, with that shift in humanity’s overall priorities from survival in life to quality of life…we’re going to find ourselves at the effect of, rather than at cause in, the Overhaul of Humanity.

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POINTS I HOPE YOU WILL REMEMBER…

* All things are One Thing, and everything in the One Thing is divided into three parts.

* The journey of life never ends.

* The way to deal with the fact that is life on earth is an illusory experience is not to step outside of the illusion, but to live within the illusion knowing that it’s an illusion.

* Humans now want to make a life rather than a living. This is making all the difference in the world.

* We are approaching the day of our true birth into the cosmic community of evolved sentient beings.

 

ACTION I HOPE YOU WILL TAKE…

* Look at your world closely and see if you can identify any dyads that are really triads. When you notice one, explore in your mind what The Third Thing is, and what your experience of this item in life would be if you wrapped that Third Thing into your considerations of it.

* Decide now to become part of the process by which all of us re-write the Cultural Story of humanity. Place before our species a new set of beliefs that will produce a new set of behaviors that will bring into the equation, and bring into balance, our Culture as well as our Economy and our Politics.

10 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