Monday September 15, 2008
By Neale Donald Walsch
There are those who say we are on the verge of a major, major economic collapse in this country and around the world. Today's events with one-time financial giant Lehman Brothers declaring bankruptcy, together with last month's government bailout of Fanny and Freddy, make it clear that the world is teetering at the edge of such a collapse.
And so once more we have to ask, as we did on Friday with regard to Hurricane Ike....Is this the will of God?
I raise the question -- again -- because in the past several weeks we have been talking here in our Sunday School All Week program (26 weeks of blogs on God and Life) about the idea, as advanced in the New Spirituality, that we are all creating our own reality -- both collectively and individually.
God says in Conversations with God that this is true; that humans have the power to create their own reality, and are doing so every day, every moment, either consciously or unconsciously. The book Happier Than God describes in detail how the Power of Personal Creation works...and how it has created the global conditions that affect our world today. You may wish to order this book (there is an icon at the far right of this page) and give it a read to learn more about this Mechanism of Creation.
Now some folks have posted comments at this site saying that it is not true, we do not create our own reality. God is "in charge" here, and it is arrogant and blasphemous for us to assert that we have the deciding role to play in the creation of human events. Yet that raises a question -- the same question I asked Friday with regard to Hurricane Ike: Is the present condition and circumstance with regard to global economics (and their possible imminent collapse) a manifestation of God's Will? Or is all this the result of human folly? (Which is simply another way to say, our own creation?)
Where does God stand in all of us? Does God want this to happen? Did God want Lehman Brothers to go under? Is God 'punishing' America for her hubris? Will God bring the United States to its knees, humbling it before the world, reducing it to a third class member of the community of nations?
Can prayer change any of this? If we pray to God, begging God to spare us, and to end or avoid the suffering of millions who could soon be caught in mortgage foreclosures and other fallouts of the financial crisis, will God answer our prayers? If we pray that no more horribly destructive storms hit the Gulf Coast, will God answer our prayers? If we pray that our candidate wins the November election for president, will God answer our prayers?
Does God intervene in the day-to-day life of Man? Does God assert His Will on the day-to-day affairs of the human race? If so, how? If not, why not? Why does God allow such horrible things to happen? Or is it possible that we, ourselves, are creating these outcomes, entirely unwittingly, as a result of our own way of thinking (and therefore of behaving)?
Tomorrow, the answer. Today, I'd like to hear yours. Is God the creator of our moment-to-moment reality? Or are we? Or is it neither? Are we all -- God included -- simply subject to "the sling and arrows of outrageous fortune?"
What is the process by which things happen? What is the mechanism that causes things to occur? IS there such a mechanism? If that popular movie The Secret is correct about the awesome power of the Law of Attraction...are we are attracting these calamities that are now besetting us? If God is truly The Creator, is God creating all this? Or, as I asked on Friday, is it God's way to simply create the heavens and the earth, and then sit back and watch the whole thing unfold, doing nothing?
C'mon folks. If ever there was a need for greater clarity on God's Role in the World's Life, this is the time. It is said that a million people a day hit on this Beliefnet site. Now is the time to have your voices heard...and to add some energy to the Process of Life Itself, however you believe that process works.
Filed Under: Conversations with God, economic crisis, Fanny Mae, government bailout, Ike, Lehman Brothers, Neale Donald Walsch
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NDW’s follow up to the above blog post:
Who is 'in charge' here?
Wednesday September 17, 2008
We in the U.S. are about to decide who is 'in charge' here, by electing our next president in just a few weeks. But who is 'in charge' here on the whole earth? Is it God?
That is the question I have asked in this space in the aftermath of two calamities in one 7-day period: Hurricane Ike and the financial crisis on Wall Street.
Is all of this God's Will?
I believe not. Not in the classic sense that people understand the use of that term "God's Will." In the larger sense of the term, it IS God's Will...because God's Will is our will -- that is, the will of humanity, expressed collectively and individually through all of our thoughts, words, and actions.
I believe that there is no separation between Divinity and Humanity; that God and we are One. I believe that we are all Divine, and that some of us do not know it, do not experience it, do not believe it, do not accept it.
So how does that make it 'true' that we humans 'created' Hurricane Ike, and all its devastation, and the deaths it caused? How does that make it 'true' that we humans created the economic crisis now hitting Wall Street?
I believe it is like this: Certainly no one could claim that we are doing all this to ourselves deliberately. So we can eliminate from this discussion any idea that this is a conscious creation. It must, therefore, be an unconscious creation. It is something we are doing without knowing we are doing it, without being aware of the consequences of our thoughts, words, and actions.
To make the case regarding Ike, I believe -- and weather experts are now telling us -- that the ever-increasing savagry and power of our earth's tropical storms is the direct result of global warming, which, the experts tell us, has raised the temperature of the more shallow waters on the earth (such as along the Gulf Coast of the U.S.), which, in turn, increases the whirl of storm winds moving over these areas, turning them into hurricanes of incredible, and increasingly greater, force.
Climatologists tell us that we can expect stronger and stronger, more violent tropical storms on the earth from now on because of this thermal effect.
This is one outcome -- and only one -- of global warming. And who created global warming? I believe that we did. Unconsciously, to be sure. Unwittingly, for certain. Innocently, absolutely. But in any event most certainly.
Now half the human race is in denial of this point -- which is exactly how we created the situation to begin with. It is like tobacco smokers who deny, deny, deny that their smoking has any damaging effect on their bodies whatsoever -- and then come down with lung cancer. I have known such people who, even as they are dying of the cancer, sit in their bedrooms smoking.
In my mind there is no question that our human activities upon the earth have created the global warming crisis. In our arrogance we declare that we've had nothing to do with it. We haven't even contributed to it. We have had nothing to do with it at all.
This is the statement of many human beings today. We cannot and will not take responsibility for our own actions and choices. And that is too bad. That is remarkably sad. I can only hope that Al Gore and others on the same mission can wake up humanity fast enough for us to do something about all of this.
Similarly, it is greed, and nothing less, that has produced the crisis on Wall Street. Says USAToday in the lead story of today's edition written by reporter John Waggoner: "In staggering succession, some of Wall Street's biggest and oldest firms have been seized, failed outright, or merged into other companies." The paper then quotes Steve Romick, manager of FPA Crescent Fund, as saying, "It's the worst news out of Wall Street since I've been alive."
The choice to do whatever it took to optimize profits is what led to this collapse -- and that choice is the free-will manifestation of human beings.
Yet if God does not 'want' hurricanes to fly or financial institutions to collapse, and people's lives to be disrupted and destroyed in the process, why does God allow it? If God is the creator of our reality, why is God creating it like this?
The New Spirituality says that we are creating our own reality. It says that we and God are One, and that, as an aspect of Divinity, we have the power and the ability to produce and manifest outcomes in the physical world -- and are doing so every day.
We do this, we are told, with our thoughts, our words, and our deeds. We are able to do this because we are gods. We are Individuations, or aspects, of the Divine. Our word is Law. Our word is God's Word.
I understand that to some, this very thought is blasphemy. Fair enough. We each have the freedom to believe what we choose to believe. And I don't mean to offend anyone here by stating what I believe. Yet if what I believe is mistaken, if our word is not God's Word, but God is separate from us and has the final word on everything, then my original question stands: Why is God doing this to us? Or, if God is not doing this to us, why is God standing by, doing nothing, allowing us to do this to ourselves?
What IS God's role in our lives?
I believe that God's role is, has been, and always will be to empower us to create our own reality. I believe that God has given us the ability to do this both individually and collectively. In our next post, we will look at how this power works, and how we can use it in our daily lives.
For now, I would like to share that I believe -- and I believe strongly -- that prayer works. Because prayer is a statement of what we wish and of what we desire and of what we seek to experience, it uses the Power of God precisely as it was intended to be used; exactly as it was designed.
So, today, perhaps we might join in prayer.
Filed Under: Conversations with God, financial crisis, God, Hurricane Ike, Neale Donald Walsch, Wall Street
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