Let me see if I’m tracking this. What seems to be emerging here is a world view of equality and equanimity, where all nations submit to one world government, and all people share in the world’s riches.
Remember when you talk about equality that we’re meaning equal opportunity, not equality in fact.
Actual “equality” will never be achieved, and be grateful that is so.
Why?
Because equality is sameness—and the last thing the world needs is sameness.
No—I am not arguing here for a world of automa-tons, each receiving identical allotments from a Big Brother Central Government.
I am speaking of a world in which two things are guaranteed:
1. The meeting of basic needs.
2. The opportunity to go higher.
With all your world’s resources, with all your abun-dance, you have not yet managed those two simple things. Instead, you have trapped millions on the lowest end of the socioeconomic scale and devised a world view that systematically keeps them there. You are allowing thousands to die each year for lack of simple basics.
For all the world’s magnificence, you have not found a way to be magnificent enough to stop people from starving to death, much less stop killing each other. You actually let children starve to death right in front of you. You actually kill people because they disagree with you.
You are primitive.
And we think we are so advanced.
The first mark of a primitive society is that it thinks itself advanced. The first mark of a primitive conscious-ness is that it thinks itself enlightened.
So let’s summarize it. The way we’ll get to the first step on the ladder, where these two fundamental guarantees are ac-corded everyone . . .
Is through two shifts, two changes—one in your political paradigm, one in your spiritual.
The movement to a unified world government would include a greatly empowered world court to resolve international disputes and a peacekeeping force to give power to the laws by which you choose to govern yourselves.
The world government would include a Congress of Nations—two representatives from every nation on Earth—and a People’s Assembly—with representation in direct proportion to a nation’s population.
Exactly the way the U.S. Government is set up—with two houses, one providing proportional representation and one providing equal voice to all of the states.
Yes. Your U.S. Constitution was God inspired.
The same balance of powers should be built in to the new world constitution.
There would be, likewise, an executive branch, legislative branch, and a judicial branch.
Each nation would keep its internal peacekeeping police, but all national armies would be dis-banded—exactly as each of your individual states dis-banded their armies and navies in favor of a federal peacekeeping force serving the entire group of states you now call a nation.
Nations would reserve the right to form and call up their own militia on a moment’s notice, just as your states each have the constitutional right to keep and activate a state militia.
And—just as your states do now—each of the 160 Nation States in the union of nations would have the right to secede from the union based upon a vote of the people (though why it would want to do so is beyond Me, given that its people would be more secure and more abundant than ever before).
And—once more for those of us who are slow—such a unified world federation would produce—?
1. An end to wars between nations and the settling of disputes by killing.
2. An end to abject poverty, death by starvation, and mass exploitation of people and resources by those of power.
3. An end to the systematic environmental destruc-tion of the Earth.
4. An escape from the endless struggle for bigger, better, more.
5. An opportunity—truly equal—for all people to rise to the highest expression of Self.
6. An end to all limitations and discriminations hold-ing people back—whether in housing, in the work-place, or in the political system, or in personal sexual relationships.
Would your new world order require a redistribution of wealth?
It would require nothing. It would produce, volun-tarily and quite automatically, a redistribution of re-sources.
All people would be offered a proper education, for instance. All people would be offered open opportunity to use that education in the workplace— to follow careers which bring them joy.
All people would be guaranteed access to health care whenever and however needed.
All people would be guaranteed they won’t starve to death or have to live without sufficient clothing or adequate shelter.
All people would be granted the basic dignities of life so that survival would never again be the issue, so that simple comforts and basic dignities were provided all human beings.
Even if they did nothing to earn it?
Your thought that these things need to be earned is the basis for your thought that you have to earn your way to heaven. Yet you cannot earn your way into God’s good graces, and you do not have to, because you are already there. This is something you cannot accept, because it is something you cannot give. When you learn to give unconditionally (which is to say, love unconditionally), then will you learn to receive unconditionally.
This life was created as a vehicle through which you might be allowed to experience that.
Try to wrap yourself around this thought: People have a right to basic survival. Even if they do nothing. Even if they contribute nothing. Survival with dignity is one of the basic rights of life. I have given you enough resources to be able to guarantee that to everyone. All you have to do is share.
But then what would stop people from simply wasting their lives, lollygagging around, collecting “benefits”?
First of all, it is not yours to judge what is a life wasted. Is a life wasted if a person does nothing but lie around thinking of poetry for 70 years, then comes up with a single sonnet which opens a door of under-standing and insight for thousands of people? Is a life wasted if a person lies, cheats, schemes, damages, manipulates, and hurts others all his life, but then remembers something of his true nature as a result of it—remembers, perhaps, something he has been spending lifetimes trying to remember—and thus evolves, at last, to the Next Level? Is that life “wasted”?
It is not for you to judge the journey of another’s soul. It is for you to decide who YOU are, not who another has been or has failed to be.
So, you ask what would stop people from simply wasting their lives, lollygagging around, collecting “benefits,” and the answer is: nothing.
But do You really think this would work? You don’t think those who are contributing wouldn’t begin to resent those who are not?
Yes, they would, if they are not enlightened. Yet enlightened ones would look upon the noncontributors with great compassion, not resentment.
Compassion?
Yes, because the contributors would realize that noncontributors are missing the greatest opportunity and the grandest glory: the opportunity to create and the glory of experiencing the highest idea of Who They Really Are. And the contributors would know that this was punishment enough for their laziness, if, indeed, punishment were required—which it is not.
But wouldn’t those who are really contributing be angry at having the fruits of their labor taken from them and given to the lazy ones?
You are not listening. All would be given minimal survival portions. Those who have more would be given an opportunity to contribute 10 percent of their earn-ings in order to make this possible.
As to how income would be decided, the open marketplace would determine the value of one’s con-tribution, just as it does today in your country.
But then we would still have the “rich” and the “poor,” just as we do today! That is not equality.
But it is equal opportunity. For everyone would have the opportunity to live a basic existence without worries of survival. And everyone would be given an equal opportunity to acquire knowledge, develop skills, and use his or her natural talents in the joy Place.
The Joy Place?
That’s what the “work place” will then be called. But won’t there still be envy?
Envy, yes. jealousy, no. Envy is a natural emotion urging you to strive to be more. It is the two-year-old child yearning and urging herself to reach that door-knob which her big brother can reach. There is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with envy. It is a motivator. It is pure desire. It gives birth to great-ness.
jealousy, on the other hand, is a fear-driven emo-tion making one willing for the other to have less. It is an emotion often based in bitterness. It proceeds from anger and leads to anger. And it kills. jealousy can kill. Anyone who’s been in a jealous triangle knows that.
jealousy kills, envy gives birth.
Those who are envious will be given every opportunity to succeed in their own way. No one will be held back economically, politically, socially. Not by reason of race, gender or sexual orientation. Not by reason of birth, class status or age. Nor for any reason at all. Discrimination for any reason will simply no longer be tolerated.
And yes, there may still be the “rich” and the “poor,” but there will no longer be the “starving” and the “destitute.”
You see, the incentive won’t be taken out of life... merely the desperation.
But what will guarantee that we’ll have enough contributors to “carry” the noncontributors?
The greatness of the human spirit.
Oh?
Contrary to your apparent dire belief, the average person will not be satisfied with subsistence levels and nothing more. In addition, the whole incentive for greatness will change when the second paradigm shift—the spiritual shift—takes place.
What would cause such a shift? It hasn’t occurred yet in the 2000-year history— Try two-billion-year history—
—of the planet. Why should it occur now?
Because with the shift away from material sur-vival—with the elimination of the need to succeed mightily in order to acquire a modicum of secu-rity—there will be no other reason to achieve, to stand out, to become magnificent, save the experience of magnificence itself!
And that will be sufficient motivation?
The human spirit rises; it does not fall in the face of true opportunity. The soul seeks a higher experience of itself, not a lower. Anyone who has experienced true magnificence, if only for a moment, knows this.
How about power? In this special reordering, there would still be those with inordinate wealth and power.
Financial earnings would be limited.
Oh, boy—here. we go. You want to explain how that would work before I explain why it won’t?
Yes. Just as there would be lower limits on income, so would there be upper limits. First, nearly everyone will tithe 10 percent of their income to the world government. This is the voluntary 10 percent deduction I mentioned before.
Yes . . . the old “equal tax” proposal.
In your present society at this present time it would have to take the form of a tax because you are not sufficiently enlightened to see that voluntary deduction for the general good of all is in your best interest. Yet when the shift in consciousness I have been describing occurs, such an open, caring, freely offered deduction from your harvest will be seen by you as obviously appropriate.
I have to tell You something. Do You mind if I interrupt You here to tell You something?
No, go right ahead.
This conversation is seeming very strange to me. I never thought I’d have a conversation with God in which God would start recommending political courses of action. I mean, really. How do I convince people that God is for the flat tax!
Well, I see you keep insisting on seeing it as a “tax,” but I understand that, because the concept of simply offering to share 10 percent of your abundance seems so foreign to you. Nevertheless, why do you find it difficult to believe I would have an idea about this?
I thought God was nonjudgmental, had no opinion, didn’t care about such things.
Wait, let me get this straight. In our last conversa-tion—which you called Book 1—I answered all sorts of questions. Questions about what makes relationships work, questions about right livelihood, questions about diet, even. How does that differ from this?
I don’t know. It just seems different. I mean, do You really have a political point of view? Are You a card-carrying Repub-lican? What a truth to come out of this book! God is a Republican.
You’d rather I be a Democrat? Good God!
Cute. No, I’d rather you be apolitical.
I am apolitical. I have no political point of view whatsoever.
Sort of like Bill Clinton.
Hey, good! Now you’re being cute! I like humor, don’t you?
I guess I didn’t expect God to be humorous or political.
Or anything human, eh?
Okay, let Me place this book and Book 1, for that matter, into context for you once again.
I have no preference in the matter of how you conduct your life. My only desire is that you experience yourself fully as a creative being, so that you might know Who You Really Are.
Good. I understand that. So far, so good.
Every question I have answered here and every inquiry to which I responded in Book 1 has been heard and responded to within the context of what you, as a creative being, say you are attempting to be and do. For instance, in Book 1 you asked Me many questions about how you could finally make relationships work. Do you remember?
Yes, of course.
Did you find My answers so problematic? Did you find it difficult to believe that I would have a point of view on this?
I never thought about it. I just read the answers.
Yet, you see, I was placing My answers within the context of your questions. That is, given that you desire to be or do so-and-so, what is a way to go about that? And I showed you a way.
Yes, You did.
I am doing the same thing here.
It’s just . . . I don’t know . . . more difficult to believe that God would say these things than it was to believe that God would say those things.
Are you finding it more difficult to agree with some of the things said here?
Well...
Because if you are, that’s very okay.
It is?
Of course.
It’s okay to disagree with God?
Certainly. What do you think I’m going to do, squash you like an insect?
I hadn’t gotten that far in my thinking, actually.
Look, the world has been disagreeing with Me since this whole thing started. Hardly anyone has been doing it My Way since it began.
That’s true, I guess.
You can be sure it’s true. Had people been follow-ing My instructions—left with you through hundreds of teachers over thousands of years—the world would be a much different place. So if you wish to disagree with Me now, go right ahead. Besides, I could be wrong.
What?
I said, besides, I could be wrong. Oh, my goodness ... you’re not taking this all as gospel, are you?
You mean I’m not supposed to put any stock in this dia-logue?
Oops, hold it. I think you’ve missed a big part of all this. Let’s go back to Square One: You’re making this all up.
Oh, well, that’s a relief. For a while there I thought I was actually getting some real guidance.
The guidance you are getting is to follow your heart. Listen to your soul. Hear your self. Even when I present you with an option, an idea, a point of view, you are under no obligation to accept that as your own. If you disagree, then disagree. That is the whole point of this exercise. The idea wasn’t for you to substitute your dependency on everything and everyone else with a dependency on this book. The idea was to cause you to think. To think for your self. And that is who I Am right now. I am you, thinking. I am you, thinking out loud.
You mean this material is not coming from the Highest Source?
Of course it is! Yet here is the one thing you still cannot believe: you are the Highest Source. And here is the one thing you still apparently do not grasp: you are creating it all—all of your life—right here, right now. You . . . YOU . . . are creating it. Not Me. YOU.
So . . . are there some answers to these purely political questions that you do not like? Then change them. Do it. Now. Before you start hearing them as gospel. Before you start making them real. Before you start calling your last thought about something more important, more valid, more true than your next thought.
Remember, it’s always your new thought that cre-ates your reality. Always.
Now, do you find anything in this political discussion of ours that you want to change?
Well, not really. I’m sort of agreeing with You, as it happens. I just didn’t know what to make of all of this.
Make of it what you wish. Don’t you get it? That’s what you’re doing with all of life!
Okay, all right... I think I’ve got it. I would like to continue with this conversation, if only to see where it’s going.
Fine, then let’s do that.
You were about to say...
I was about to say that in other societies—enlight-ened societies—the putting aside of a set amount of what one receives (what you call “income”) to be used for the general good of the society itself is a rather common practice. Under the new system we have been exploring for your society, everyone would earn as much each year as they could—and they would retain what they earn, up to a certain limit.
What limit?
An arbitrary limit, agreed to by everyone.
And anything above that limit?
Would be contributed to the world charitable trust in the name of the contributor, so all the world would know its benefactors.
Benefactors would have the option of direct control over the disbursement of 60 percent of their contribution, providing them the satisfaction of put-ting most of their money exactly where they want
it.
The other 40 percent would be allocated to pro-grams legislated by the world federation and adminis-tered by it.
If people knew that after a certain income limit everything would be taken from them, what would be their incentive to keep working? What would cause them not to stop in mid-stream, once they reached their income “limit”?
Some would. So what? Let them stop. Mandatory work above the income limit, with contributions to the world charitable trust, would not be required. The money saved from the elimination of mass production of weapons of war would be sufficient to supply every-one’s basic need. The 10 percent tithe of all that is earned worldwide on top of those savings would ele-vate all of society, not just the chosen few, to a new level of dignity and abundance. And the contribution of earnings above the agreed-upon limit would produce such widespread opportunity and satisfaction for eve-ryone that jealousy and social angers would virtually disintegrate.
So some would stop working—especially those who saw their life activity as real work. Yet those who saw their activity as absolute joy would never stop.
Not everyone can have a job like that.
Untrue. Everyone can.
Joy at the work place has nothing to do with function, and everything to do with purpose.
The mother who wakes up at4 o’clock in the morning to change her baby’s diaper understands this perfectly. She hums and coos to the baby, and for all the world it doesn’t look like what she is doing is any work at all. Yet it is her attitude about what she is doing, it is her intention with regard to it, it is her purpose in undertaking this activity, which make the activity a true joy.
I have used this example of motherhood before, because the love of a mother for her child is as close as you may be able to come to understanding some of the concepts of which I am speaking in this book and in this trilogy.
Still, what would be the purpose of eliminating “limitless earning potential”? Wouldn’t that rob the human experience of one of its greatest opportunities, one of its most glorious adventures?
You would still have the opportunity and the adven-ture of earning a ridiculous amount of money. The upper limit on retainable income would be very high—more than the average person . . . the average ten people . . . would ever need. And the amount of income you could earn would not be limited—simply the amount you would choose to retain for personal use. The remainder—everything, say, over $25 million a year (I use a strictly arbitrary figure to make a point)—would be spent for programs and services benefitting all humankind.
As to the reason—the why of it...
The upper retainable income limit would be a reflection of a consciousness shift on the planet; an awareness that the highest purpose of life is not the accumulation of the greatest wealth, but the doing of the greatest good—and a corollary awareness that, indeed, the concentration of wealth, not the sharing of it, is the largest single factor in the creation of the world’s most persistent and striking social and political dilemmas.
The opportunity to amass wealth—unlimited wealth—is the cornerstone of the capitalistic system, a system of free enter-prise and open competition that has produced the greatest society the world has ever known.
The problem is, you really believe that.
No, I don’t. But I’ve mouthed it here on behalf of those who do believe it.
Those who do believe it are terribly deluded and see nothing of the current reality on your planet.
In the United States, the top one and a half percent hold more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The net worth of the richest 834,000 people is nearly a trillion dollars greater than the poorest 84 million people combined.
So? They’ve worked for it.
You Americans tend to see class status as a function of individual effort. Some have “made good,” so you assume that anybody can. That view is simplistic and naive. It assumes that everyone has equal opportunity, when in fact, in America just as in Mexico, the rich and powerful strive and contrive to hold on to their money and their power and to increase it.
So? What’s wrong with that?
They do so by systematically eliminating competi-tion, by institutionally minimizing true opportunity, and by collectively controlling the flow and the growth of wealth.
This they accomplish through all manner of devices, from unfair labor practices which exploit the masses of the world’s poor to good-old-boy network competitive practices which minimize (and all but destroy) a new-comer’s chances of entering the Inner Circle of the successful.
They then seek to control public policy and govern-mental programs around the world to further ensure that the masses of people remain regulated, controlled, and subservient.
I don’t believe that the rich do this. Not the largest number of them. There may be a handful of conspirators, I suppose...
In most cases it isn’t rich individuals who do it; it’s the social systems and institutions they represent. Those systems and institutions were created by the rich and powerful—and it is the rich and powerful who continue to support them.
By standing behind such social systems and institu-tions, individuals can wash their hands of any personal responsibility for the conditions which oppress the masses while favoring the rich and powerful.
For example, let’s go back to health care in America. Millions of America’s poor have no access to preventive medical care. One cannot point to any individual doctor and say, “this is your doing, it is your fault” that, in the richest nation on earth, millions cannot get in to see a doctor unless they’re in dire straits in an emergency room.
No individual doctor is to blame for that, yet all doctors benefit. The entire medical profession—and every allied industry—enjoys unprecedented profits from a delivery system which has institutionalized dis-crimination against the working poor and the unem-ployed.
And that’s just one example of how the “system” keeps the rich rich and the poor poor.
The point is that it is the rich and powerful who support such social structures and staunchly resist any real effort to change them. They stand against any political or economic approach which seeks to provide true opportunity and genuine dignity to all people.
Most of the rich and powerful, taken individually, are certainly nice enough people, with as much compassion and sympathy as anyone. But mention a concept as threatening to them as yearly income limits (even ridicu-lously high limits, such as $25 million annually), and they start whining about usurpation of individual rights, ero-sion of the “American way,” and “lost incentives.”
Yet what about the right of all people to live in minimally decent surroundings, with enough food to keep from starving, enough clothing to stay warm? What about the right of people everywhere to have adequate health care—the right not to have to suffer or die from relatively minor medical complications which those with money overcome with the snap of a finger?
The resources of your planet—including the fruits of the labors of the masses of the indescribably poor who are continually and systematically exploited—belong to all the world’s people, not just those who are rich and powerful enough to do the exploiting.
And here is how the exploitation works: Your rich industrialists go into a country or an area where there is no work at all, where the people are destitute, where there is abject poverty. The rich set up a factory there, offering those poor people jobs—sometimes 10-, 12-, and 14-hour-a-day jobs—at substandard, if not to say subhuman, wages. Not enough, mind you, to allow those workers to escape their rat-infested villages, but just enough to let them live that way, as opposed to having no food or shelter at all.
And when they are called on it, these capitalists say, “Hey, they’ve got it better than before, don’t they? We’ve improved their lot! The people are taking the jobs, aren’t they? Why, we’ve brought them opportu-nity! And we’re taking all the risk!”
Yet how much risk is there in paying people 75 cents an hour to manufacture sneakers which are going to sell for $125 a pair?
Is this risk-taking or exploitation, pure and simple?
Such a system of rank obscenity could exist only in a world motivated by greed, where profit margin, not human dignity, is the first consideration.
Those who say that “relative to the standards in their society, those peasants are doing wonderfully!” are hypocrites of the first order. They would throw a drown-ing man a rope, but refuse to pull him to shore. Then they would brag that a rope is better than a rock.
Rather than raising the people to true dignity, these “haves” give the world’s “have-nots” just enough to make them dependent—but not enough to ever make them truly powerful. For people of true economic power have the ability to then impact, and not merely be subject to, “the system.” And that’s the last thing the creators of the system want!
So the conspiracy continues. And for most of the rich and powerful it is not a conspiracy of action, but a conspiracy of silence.
So go now—go your way—and by all means say nothing about the obscenity of a socioeconomic system which rewards a corporate executive with a 70-million-dollar bonus for increasing sales of a soft drink, while 70 million people can’t afford the luxury of drinking the stuff—much less eating enough to stay healthy.
Don’t see the obscenity of it. Call this the world’s Free Market Economy, and tell everyone how proud you are of it.
Yet it is written:
If thou wilt be perfect,
go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor,
and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.
But when the young man heard this, he went away,
sorrowful,
for he had great possessions.