THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM – Chapter 7

It will take courage because the only answers people can offer are unsettling—no matter what those answers might be. The questions themselves are just simply upsetting.

(Unless they’re not. They’re upsetting to folks who don’t want things changed, or even challenged. They’re not to those who are now ready to say, “Enough. Enough already with the way things are. There’s got to be another way.”)

Okay…I assume you’re “all in” because you’re still here.

Nice.

I mean, really. Nice going.

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The Greatest Revolution

We’re talking here about questions and answers that could spark the biggest revolution ever to hit this planet. And that’s saying a lot.

A search on Wikipedia under the word “revolutions” brings up a virtually endless catalogue of uprisings, beginning with the popular revolt in the Sumerian city of Lagash that deposed King Lugalanda and put the reformer Urukagina on the throne in 2380 B.C., ending with the revolutions that overturned governments in the Arab world in 2011.

Let me just give you part of this list, just to take a quick look at how people have been responding on this planet to how they’ve been governed…

We have seen literally hundreds of uprisings and revolutions across our history, including the Fall of the Roman Empire, the First of the Wars of Scottish Independence, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the revolution in India, the Boer Revolt, revolutions all over South America, the European Revolutions of 1848, the revolutions in modern Hungary, in Yugoslavia, in Haiti, the dissolution of the Soviet Union by 1991…

…take my word for it. This is a tiny portion of a list that goes on and on and on…and ON. We’ve been “revolting” since the beginning of our gathering together in clans and tribes and then, nations.

What is this all about, do you think?

What do you imagine has been causing all of this? Why do you think it never ends? And what do you think could make it end?

I can tell you what it’s about. And I can also tell you how to make it end, with One Final Revolution. Indeed, that’s what The Storm Before The Calm is all about. What has been causing all of this for so long is that…

Human beings have been clear for a very long time that the way life has been constructed on this planet by those in power is not the way it was intended to be lived.

And so, since forever—for centuries and millennia—people on every spot on the globe have been agitating. They’ve wanted a new way of life—a new way of being human; a way that they know it was intended for them to be human.

Their agitations have continued right up to this present day. Even as this is being written, people in many places on earth are still saying No! to the way things are, and are demanding change.

They’re prepared to die for it. They have been dying for it. They’re dying right now, as you’re reading this.

But we are ready now, as a global community, for that dying to stop. We’ve had it. We’re done. There’s got to be a better way. We wonder, why don’t those who seek to govern us get it? But they don’t, so now we’re seeing what I have been calling here the Overhaul of Humanity.

This is a revolution that will not ask people to die, but will simply ask people to inquire. It will invite people to make inquiries of themselves and others that could change everything in such a huge way that, finally, future violent revolutions may never again be necessary.

So let’s look at these seven “dangerous” questions.

I like to place them into two groups. For me, they’re easier to grapple with that way. So I’ve divided them into what I call the Three Persistent Questions and the Four Fundamental Questions of Life.

These are not I got’cha questions, designed to trap or trick anyone into anything. They are genuine inquiries, being asked (and you must ask them) sincerely, with purity of heart, not out of righteousness, not out of argumentativeness. And they are placed here gently, softly, for I recognize that most human beings, for all the reasons given earlier, are not comfortable discussing these things.

The power structure on our planet is very happy about that, because real, honest-to-goodness exploration of these questions could lead to real honest-to-goodness examination of what we’re doing right now on the planet—and that could just possibly result in a real honest-to-goodness shift in the way we are doing it…and in how we choose to be human.

Should that happen, as far as the power structure is concerned The Game is Over. Life as we have been living is history, and this will be the end of it.

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The Seven Simple Questions

The following inquiries, made in the depth of our own soul, and used by us to invite others into their own soul searching, could change the world.

The Three Persistent Questions

1. How is it possible that 6.9 billion people can all claim to want the same thing (peace, security, opportunity, prosperity, happiness, and love) and be singularly unable to get it?
2. Is it possible that there is something we do not fully understand about life, the understanding of which would change everything?
3. Is it possible that there is something we do not fully understand about ourselves, about our own life and its purpose, the understanding of which
   would shift our reality and alter our experience for the better, forever?

These are powerful questions. They deserve answers. They at least deserve being asked. Yet are great numbers of people asking them? Are politicians? No. Presidents and prime ministers, kings and heads of state? No. Religious figures? No. Educators? Not many. Military generals and admirals? No. Leaders of business and industry? No. Ordinary people at their dinner table? Well, yes, possibly. Beginning now. Perhaps. Beginning now.

Ordinary people like you and I will now be asking these questions all over the planet. And when we finish asking the first three, we’ll then move to…

The Four Fundamental Questions of Life

1. Who am I?
2. Where am I?
3. Why am I where I am?
4. What do I intend to do about that?

I do not believe that one can ignore these questions and rapidly evolve. None of us can. We must end any personal confusion we may have around these questions (there are many other questions in life, but these are foundational), or we will go through our days and nights having no idea what we’re doing or why we’re doing it.

This is the situation with most people on the earth today. And that is the reason why the world is in the condition that it’s in.

I did not move forward in my life until I answered the Four Fundamental Questions of Life. (And by the way, I answer them daily. Sometimes during the day as events transpire. Used in this way, these questions are not only informative, they are transformative.)

And the first of these four is the real key. It unlocks everything. It invites us to look deeply at the biggest mystery, the mystery of our own identity. By that I don’t mean, of course, our name. I mean our identity in the cosmos.

There is no “right answer” to this question, there is only the answer you give.

The second question seems simple, but its answer may not be.

Where am I?

Where do you conceive of yourself as being? That is, what is this place in which we experience our existence? How do you conceive of it? How do you hold it in your reality?

I am speaking here of how you hold it conceptually, yes? I’m not talking about your physical description of this place (“I live on the planet Earth. It is the third rock from the sun…”, etc.), I am referring to your conceptual understanding of this space. Is it a place of learning, a school?

Do you experience it as a place of testing, an examination room? Is it a place of proving or contesting or competing, like a giant racetrack or an athletic field, where some are winners and some are losers?

Do you have no conceptual reference point for this space, and truly conceive of it only as a physical location in a larger system of planets whizzing around a star?

What is this place in which we find ourselves? The mind begs to know…Where am I?

Again, there is no “right” answer to this question. Yet until I gave it some answer, I had no conceptual framework within which to hold my life’s experience. And absent such a framework, those experiences themselves felt essentially meaningless. No different from those of a fly or an ant. I felt that I was simply a more sophisticated life form. I had a life expectancy and, barring unforeseen circumstances, I knew I would be here for x amount of time, but what is this place?

And then, the next question looms: Why?

Why am I where I am? Why am I not somewhere else? Is there a “somewhere else”? What is the purpose of my being in this time and place? Is there a purpose? Who would give it one?

I don’t know how a person advances in their evolution without giving some thought—and eventually, some sort of answer—to these questions.

Many people respond to these questions with a curt “I don’t know” and let it go at that. I couldn’t do that. And I don’t encourage any true student of life to do that. If they truly don’t have an answer, I encourage them to create one. That is, decide what their answer is, out of pure intention. In this way they live their life from Intention rather than living their life by default.

A life lived by default is a life lived according to the Default Responses of the majority of people on the earth. I hope that none of you ever again chooses to live your life like that. Most of us have lived at least portions of our lives in this way, but we never have to again if we do not want to.

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The last inquiry

This leads to the final question. Not just the final question in this series of seven, but what could be, metaphorically, The Final Important Question of Life: Having given your answers to all the other questions, you are invited to decide, What do you intend to do about that?

This is always the final question in life. In every situation, in every circumstance, in every moment that our experience presents, the question always and forever is: What do I intend to do about that?

Life proceeds out of your intentions for it. This is the fuel that drives the engine of creation in your life.

It is important to understand that life is nothing but energy. It is energy organized. And who does the organizing? We do. Surprisingly, the answer is…us. Life is pure energy that circles back into itself. That is, life is a self-fueling, self-sustaining, self-determining, and self-creating process. It depends on itself, relies on itself, looks to itself to tell itself what the next expression of itself shall be.

This is true universally, it is true globally, it is true nationally, it is true locally, and it is true individually. It is merely a matter of proportion. And so we see the Universe deciding about itself in this way, our planet deciding about itself in this way, our nation deciding about itself in this way, our own city or community deciding about itself in this way, and our own person deciding about itself in this way. Life informs Life about Life through the process of Life Itself.

Life’s information creates life in formation. At the most personal level, your information creates you, in formation. You are constantly forming and reforming yourself, shaping and reshaping yourself, creating and recreating yourself anew. Indeed, the function of life is to recreate yourself anew in each golden moment of Now, in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about Who You Are.

That’s all of it, in a nutshell. That’s what’s going on here. All of humanity is engaged in this process. We are doing it politically, we are doing it economically, we are doing it culturally, we are doing it racially, we are doing it socially, we are doing it sexually, we are doing it spiritually. This is all we are doing and we’re not doing anything else.

This is what God is doing. God is recreating Itself anew in the single and only moment called Now—and life is God, doing this. Life is God, expressing Itself in an endless multiplicity of forms. You are one of the forms of God. You are, all of you, God’s information. And thus, Gods…in formation.

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POINTS I HOPE YOU WILL REMEMBER…

* The Seven Simple Questions are unsettling. That is their power.

* Revolutions are a way of life on this planet.

* One Final Revolution is all we will need to end such societal upheaval forever.

ACTION I HOPE YOU WILL TAKE…

* Read the Seven Simple Questions over and over until you can recite them verbatim.

* Ask yourself these questions and search deeply within your soul for your answers.

* Write your answers in a notebook, so that you may be very clear what your responses are, and so that you may refer to them over time—such as a year from now—to see what, if anything, has changed in your perceptions.

* Be prepared to offer the answers you have come up with as you explore these questions with others.

8 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