A Note from Neale... My Dear Friends... Our world spins on, and we find ourselves in an avalanche of incoming data, thanks to the Internet and its Worldwide Web, which seem to feed us relentlessly with information about what is going on --- but with very little data about why. Yet this is a major question of our day and time. Why would a retired police captain in Florida carry a handgun into a movie theatre...and why would he take it out and shoot a man in the chest, killing him, because the man threw a bag of popcorn into his face after the two argued about the man texting in the theatre during the previews? Why would a 12-year-old boy walk into his middle school gym in Roswell, New Mexico, pull a shotgun out of a bag, and open fire on students waiting for school to start, wounding two? Why would a grown man leave a 4-month-old baby --- who police had to take to the hospital for dehydration --- in a car seat in the back of his vehicle for three hours while he visited a strip club in Ft. Meyers, Florida? Why does the world have to be filled with violence and killing, every place from Ukraine to Syria, as people struggle against their own governments? Why do we have to take 26 minutes to put a man to death in an Ohio prison, using a previously untried mixture of chemicals to execute a death penality, causing the convict to suffer agonizing oxygen starvation for nearly a half hour? What is our world coming to --- and, more important, how much longer are we going to be content to allow it to go on? I know it looks as if there are no solutions to these kinds of problems --- that they are isolated incidents, and the kinds of events over which the average person has no control. And to some degree that may seem to be true. But how long will it be before the whole of our human society decides that enough is enough with humanitys insanity, and we are all going to join each other in doing something about it? What can we do about these kinds of things?, you ask. And the answer is, we can work hard --- incredibly hard --- to change humanitys cultural story. It is the cultural story of our species that sponsors and even in some ways encourages such behavior. It is the main thrust of that overriding story --- the idea that we are all separate from each other --- which generates such careless disregard for life and limb. A new and different Story would ultimately change everything. But it would take a gargantuan effort --- truly a worldwide effort --- to produce such a shift in the narrative that our species passes on to its offspring from generation to generation. It has been said that if visitors landed here from outer space, maybe --- just maybe --- the worlds people would be frightened enough, and see themselves in the Same Boat enough, to change their behaviors, to alter their Story of Separation. Yet is it true that only aliens can end our alienation? Does anybody see the irony in that? The work of the Conversations with God Foundation is to change the cultural story of humanity. Our story of Separation is no longer working. It never worked, but at no previous time have the ravages of its effects been more keenly or ubiquitously felt. The problem starts with humanitys theology. The challenge is that, with rare exception, our spiritual view says that we are “over here” and God is “over there.” This is what I call a Separation Theology. This wouldnt be so bad if this were as far as it went. But the problem with a Separation Theology is that it produces a Separation Cosmology. That is, a way of looking at all of life that says that everything is separate from everything else. And a Separation Cosmology produces a Separation Psychology. That is, a psychological viewpoint that says that I am over here and you are over there. A Separation Psychology, in turn, produces a Separation Sociology. That is, a way of socializing with each other that encourages the entire human society to act as separate entities serving their own separate interests. And a Separation Sociology produces a Separation Pathology. That is, pathological behaviors of self-destruction, engaged in individually and collectively and producing indifference, suffering, conflict, violence, and death by our own hands—as evidenced on our planet throughout human history, and in horrifically magnified form today everywhere. Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see? If you do, what do you think we might do about it? With Love,
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 09:29:13 +0000
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