Findhorn is the first stop on Neale Donald Walsch's two-month European tour with his life partner Em who complements his talks with her exquisite poetry.
Lightbabies
by m. Claire
We are Lightbabies.
Golden Grace.
Wings, meant to Fly.
We are delicate, and pregnant
with Goodness.
We are each made of such a quiet
that the entire Universe
can hear Us.
*
There is only the unfolding, the opening
ever happening.
All else are thoughts -
lollipops for the mind.
We, are Lightbabies
parading
as Human Kind.
"I welcome you here," Neale began. "You're not here by accident. I invite you to entertain the idea that you were brought here by your soul - at this time, in this place. Reflect for a moment on how you came to be here. What decisions and choices did you have to make to be here? Neale suggested it to be a mixture of things - body, mind, and soul - sometimes pulling in different directions, sometimes working in concert to put you in a place of receptivity that is greater than at other times. These are the times, Neale says, to pay attention because that's when something responds to our own inner desire and calls forth from the field of infinite possibilities our yearning to explore more deeply. At some point, Neale assured, you'll discover the real reason you're here - nothing happens to you co-incidentally. All of the events, people, places, and things are drawn to us and created by us - placed into the field of our awareness. Creation is impossible - we can't really be created because everything has already been created. It all is now - every conceivable outcome already exists and we draw from that field for specific purposes that may or may not be known to us consciously, but for reasons that are very clear to the totality of who you are.
"So welcome. It is good that you have come here. Let's make it a time of mutual exploration. This will be a marvellous experience if you really bring yourself fully to the experience. I encourage you to share, comment, question. There's more than one teacher, one master in the room. Bring to the space what we all came to receive from the space."
Neale spoke briefly about his experience of writing the Conversations With God books and how he was told by God that everything he had written was meant to be shared. Neale went on to tell us that in fact, all the experiences we've had in our lives are also meant to be shared. If we did this, the raison d'etre (reason for being) of our whole life would be placed in a new space of possibility. Neale shared that in writing the books, he had been 'forced' to consider that his reason for being here has nothing to do with himself. Of the 3,000 pages of written material, he claims that the single most important statement came from this conversation with God.... He asked God, "Why is my life not working? I don't understand why I'm struggling and what I've done to deserve it." God chuckled and said, "Oh, Neale, I see the problem - you think your life is about you - that would be a problem!" "Well if it's not me, then who?" Neale asked. God replied, "Everyone who's life you touch."
If you look at it spiritually, you are here for a reason, for an intended outcome. Neale's been asking this question since he was seven years old. 'What's it all about? Why am I here?' After half a century he still didn't have answers that satisfied his soul. He felt he should have had some answers by then; however, he still thought life was about 'get the girl, get the job, get the car, get the wife, get the house, get the promotion, get the children, get the corner office, get the grandchildren, get old, then get the hell out!'
He later came to the abrupt awareness that that wasn't it. Deep inside he knew that wasn't it. A deep yearning told him there was more, and from that place he begged God, "What's the answer, surely there's more. What is it?" And God said, "Oh, I see, once you've accomplished all the things you thought you were here for, life seems pretty empty. On the other hand, the journey has just begun. The opportunity has just begun. Your real purpose has begun to be served."
Neale said, "I invite you to disabuse yourself of the notion that your life has anything to do with you." At this point, he stopped to wipe the tears from his eyes, sharing, "This experience has changed my life and even after all these years I cannot talk about it without being moved."
"Yes," he continued, "you're on a spiritual journey, but according to the 247 known religions, the point is to get back to where you came from. Religions believe you have come in in a state of original sin and must clean up, overcome, purify, etc., so that you can return to God purified; otherwise, you'll not be allowed home. Imperfection cannot exist in a state of perfection. You've gotta' figure out which path will take you to the mountain top. If you don't take the right path, the consequences are not insignificant. Even if you picked a path, you'd still be wondering if it was the right path - so you'd still be dissatisfied."
There's a third choice - you could decide it has nothing to do with you at all - you came here having completed the journey already. You could decide that you were born in a state of perfection and exist in that state even now - whole, complete, perfect - just as we are, sitting here. Then you would come upon the quintessential question, 'Now what?' For what reason would you be sitting here as perfection? The answer is: to experience yourself as perfection - as LOVE, yes, LOVE.
When Neale clarified with God, "My purpose is to love?" God answered, "No - you ARE love! Simply be who you are and in that self same moment express who you are and you will have come to accomplish your purpose: to give people back to themselves. Let your light shine so that all who stand in the radiance of that light will know who they are." This is what every master has done since the beginning of time. Consistently and astonishingly true - they have done nothing but love us and a few have gotten it and caused others to know who they really and and so on until the whole of humanity know who they are.
So, God's purpose in creating life as we know it is to express and know itself. Let's assume there is something called God (and if that word doesn't resonate, then substitute it for whatever feels true for you - life, freedom, love, joy, all that is). In the beginning God was all there is and all that is was all there was, and there was nothing else and it was - as you might imagine - magnificent. In the absence of that which you are not that which you are is not, so if nothing exists in contrast to you, you can't experience it. We join together in communion with one another that we might know ourselves as who we really are.
Awareness is insufficient. For example, you can have a knowing of sex and you can experience sex, but one is very different from the other. Every choice you make is propelled by the same yearning - who am I and how can I experience that because the knowing of it is not enough.
So, God having found nothing outside itself, turned within - which is a good idea for all of us - and looking within found everything for which he was searching. Metaphorically, God divided itself into countless individuations and having experienced itself said, "How wondrous." Death is a process of reidentification - it is in that moment that you reidentify and know again who you really are - the moment when body, mind, spirit become one again, then none.
To close this part of the afternoon before tea (of course, it is Findhorn after all), Em shared this poem...
Precious Occurrence by m. Claire
I am a precious occurrence
and I don't have long.
We, are a precious occurrence
and as long as we think we have
we don't have long.
Too much time is being wasted
running
from face to face asking,
"What is my name?"
*
If you don't yet know it
or if you've forgotten,
then become still, go within
and answer it.
*
You, are a Precious Occurrence:
Tell Us Your Name.
After teabreak, we began to clarify this being called God. Neale asked Em to share a poem to set the tone...
Speak in a Soul Language by m. Claire
Speak in a Soul Language
so that Everyone
can hear.
Unwind The Story of Humanity
with a
presence so precious
even God
cannot give it
definition.
Practice loving so openly
that the word for tears
becomes
'ocean'
and
the School of Compassion
becomes the
World's Greatest Institution.
Let no one walk alone
with this
burden that is
Ours
to share:
Speak in a Soul Language
so that Everyone
can hear.
Many believe God requires certain things of us and, depending on which religion we subscribe to, God will be woefully unhappy if we don't do these things.
It is, therefore, radical to suggest that there is nothing God wants. Neale's book, What God Wants, proposes this spiritually revolutionary thought - that which has and is everything needs nothing. When writing this book, Neale asked God, "What do you want from me?" God's response was, "You wouldn't believe me if I told you." "Try me," Neale challenged. "Nothing," God said. "I am the happiness you would try to give me. I am the love you would try to give me. I am that I am. I am absent nothing therefore I require nothing."
All masters say the same thing in their own articulation - life gives us the opportunity for self-realisation. It's one thing to know that we are divine; it's another to experience it - to express it - to express our grandest notion of who we are. We can then recreate ourselves in the next grandest version.
We hold the idea of God, the reality of God in a new way. Humanity has known this for a very long time. We have always had a deep awareness of something else - something bigger - the idea that something other than us was at cause in the matter and wondered how we could manipulate it. For example, how could we cause it to rain when our crops needed it? Humanity started to create rituals to influence the devices - to appease the gods so that we would be favoured and have our needs met.
So, how utterly revolutionary a notion - that God does not need to be appeased. Consider the notion that you are as perfect and innocent as a two-year-old child and, in your beauty, you couldn't offend God even if you tried. This notion precedes a larger notion which has to do with the very identity of God itself and that is that we are separate from God. This notion too flows through humanity. Neale calls it separation theology - it's totally inaccurate. Unfortunately, the same model we've created about God, is the same overlay we've placed on life (separation cosmology produces a separation sociology). When our mutual interests are the same, I'll co-operate with you - when not, may the best interest win. It is then about power. This is a pathology that is prevalent in the world today.
Everything is unravelled when we ask what if God is not separate? Suddenly we have a new theology/spirituality of holding the whole experience we are mutually creating. All of life would change overnight. Anger expressed as violence would disappear. Love expressed as jealousy would disappear. Lack expressed as insufficiency would disappear. It would be patently obvious to us that there's no reason for 4,000 children to die of starvation every minute as we leave more food on our plates tonight than would feed an entire village. How can we allow this to happen and call ourselves civilised - think of ourselves as evolved?
Yet, there is something that can be done about all of this. It is accomplished through changing beliefs (not behaviours). We alter the collective behaviours by altering the collective beliefs. To set up the case I give you this model....
The perspective - how you see yourself in relationship to life.... Do you see yourself as a series of random events? Do you perceive that things happen to you? Are we simply reacting to incoming data as best we can? Is that your perspective? This is not an unimportant question. It drives your cosmology, your theology. Are we somehow, at some level, creating the incoming data, are we at cause in the matter? If we're not, we're the victims of our circumstances. If we are, we're the creators. Your perspective will create your perception - where you are standing determines what you see or, to put it another way, seeing is believing.
Belief creates behaviour. Nobody does anything they don't want to do. Nobody acts inappropriately, not even Hitler or Osama bin Laden, given their model of the world. Their belief system drives the engine of their behaviours.
The way we shift the world's collective reality is by shifting our perspective. What can you do about hunger, about oppression? Good question! Here's the way humanity typically goes about problem-solving....
First, it sees the problem as political. In response it creates laws and rules to regulate ourselves.
We have the same problems today as we had thousands of years ago. So obviously it's not working.
Second, we see the problem as economic. We throw money at it or withhold money in the form of sanctions.
Third, we see the military as a solution. We drop bombs on the problem. We've been doing this throughout history.
We try to talk, buy, and power ourselves out of the problems yet stuff keeps coming up. We ask ourselves what does it take?
The problem is a spiritual problem. It always has been and the causal belief that creates all problems is separation. Change that fundamental belief and we change the world. Create a cultural story that says we are all one and everything changes. Change your perspective and you change your perception; change your belief and you change your reality, and it can happen overnight. Take it from me - it can happen overnight..... or maybe it can happen in a three-day workshop!
Neale then took us on the journey of the soul as he sees it. Picture a figure of eight on its side (the sign of Infinity), encircling a realm of the spiritual or absolute on one side, and the realm of the physical or relative on the other.
The absolute or spiritual is the realm in which we know everything absolutely - who we are, our purpose. Everyone and everything is an expression of love. We can know it in fullness.
We journey from there to the realm of the relative so we can know it in experience.
In the relative realm, the oneness that we are individuates into mind, body, spirit - three in one. We equip ourselves with the tools through which to express ourselves as who we know ourselves to be, relatively speaking (things exist relative to other things) within a contextual field in which to experience ourselves (the universe).
We come endless numbers of times - we continue to conceive ourselves in the next grandest version of ourselves.
The third point of crossing over that is neither here nor there, is between the two points where the knowing and experiencing exist in the self same moments in time (pure being). There is no place that exists outside of God, so it's the holy trinity after all - it's all three. We do that through infinity in a way that looks to us as if it's sequential, but it's actually all happening at once.
I sometimes like to speak of God as if it were pure intelligence - it's as close as I can come to any real definition. I imagine that God exists in its purest form as energy - in the little space between the two realms of absolute and relative and we go back and forth through a swinging door marked death on one side and birth on the other - that place where we cross over - that place of always here, always now - that place I imagine God to be. Everything is always perfect - we need nothing more. In this particular when/where nothing else is needed for us to be happy. Mastery is noticing that nothing is needed to be added to the moment. The existence of the realm of the relative and the absolute make possible that single experience.
Neale admitted that it would be fair at this juncture for us to ask, 'So what? These are his thoughts and experiences. What would cause them to make a difference to my life?' If you're totally happy with the way things are on the planet, then none of this matters or makes a difference. In fact, if this were true, you wouldn't be here. We're all messengers sending a message to life about life. We all touch others by the way we show up in our lives and we've chosen to show up here, now.
The soul is on a cyclical journey through the ethers - sometimes in the absolute realm, sometimes in the relative realm, sometimes in both. We have the ability and the power to call to us anything we need in order to bring about a particular experience which allows us to know ourselves in a particular way. It may not always seem like we are responsible or that we create our own reality, but we do.
The first step in going to that place of mastery, of peace, of total integration is the step of knowing that at some level you are creating all of it. To the degree that you think someone else is 'doing it' you're right back there with earliest man trying to get 'that which is' to do that which you want. Everything you experience is drawn to you from the field of infinite possibility whether you are conscious of it or not. When you deliberately create, you put yourself in an enormous place of empowerment - so powerful have you become at manipulating the energies of life itself. When you begin to understand, functionally and theoretically that nothing is happening to me - everything is happening through me, this is a huge step.
We operate at four levels of consciousness: subconsciousness, consciousness, superconsciousness and supraconsciousness (the God place where soul resides). The agenda of the supraconscious is to announce and declare, become and fulfill, express and embrace who we really are. We all have our stories - the closer we come to clarity about the reason we have placed ourselves here, the more we will drop our stories. The master understands that he creates the reason for being here. Society's psychiatric model allows us to give life a pass, to blame someone else for our reality - the psycho-spiritual model asks us why we create everything we create and to take responsibility for every circumstance - to choose to see that we are at cause. This is a new way of using our mind. It changes the way we internally hold an experience. When you work with this mental construct it is almost impossible to be unhappy - you can be sad, but not unhappy. Neale introduces this concept in his new book, Happier Than God, which shows us how to take the wisdom of the Conversations With God material and apply it as a functional matter in our everyday lives. When you fully reidentify and embrace yourself as the cause and not the victim, everything changes and every circumstance and event is held as a sacred honour.
Shine by m. Claire
God says for me to tell You This:
nothing needs fixing;
everything desires
A Celebration.
You were made to bend
so that you would find
all of the many miracles at your feet.
You were made to stretch
so that you could discover
your own beautiful face of Heaven
just above
all that you think you must shoulder.
*
When I appeal to God to speak to me
I'm feeling just as small and alone as You might be.
But this is when, for no particular reason at all,
I begin to shine.
Please join us tomorrow when Neale will talk more about the process of divine individuation.
Mattie Porte
Photographer: Peter Vallance
Poems by m. Claire
©2007-2008 - All Rights Reserved
Next Stop on Neale's European Tour
Conversations with God: The 5-Day Retreat
Dorset, England
October 7-12, 2008
To book, visit: http://www.lovelightpromotions.com
