I’ve rarely seen You so indignant. God doesn’t become indignant. This proves You are not God.
God is everything, and God becomes everything. There is nothing which God is not, and all that God is experiencing of Itself, God is experiencing in, as, and through you. It is your indignation which you are feeling.
You’re right. Because I agree with everything You’ve said.
Know that every thought I am sending you, you are receiving through the filter of your own experience, of your own truth, of your own understandings, and of your own decisions, choices, and declarations about Who You Are and Who You Choose to Be. There’s no other way you can receive it. There’s no other way you should.
Well, here we go again. Are You saying that none of these ideas and feelings are Yours, that this whole book could be wrong? Are You telling me that this entire experience of my conversation with You could be nothing more than a compila-tion of my thoughts and feelings on a thing?
Consider the possibility that I am giving you your thoughts and feelings on a thing (where do you suppose these are coming from?); that I am co-creat-ing with you your experiences; that I am part of your decisions, choices, and declarations. Consider the possibility that I have chosen you, along with many others, to be My messenger long before this book came to be.
That’s hard for me to believe.
Yes, we went over all of that in Book 1. Yet I will speak to this world, and I will do it, among other ways, through my teachers and my messengers. And in this book I will tell your world that its economic, political, social, and religious systems are primitive. I observe that you have the collective arrogance to think they are the best. I see the largest number of you resisting any change or improvement which takes anything away from you—never mind who it might help.
I say again, what is needed on your planet is a massive shift in consciousness. A change in your aware-ness. A renewed respect for all of life, and a deepened understanding of the inter-relatedness of everything.
Well, You’re God. If You don’t want things the way they are, why don’t You change them?
As I have explained to you before, My decision from the beginning has been to give you the freedom to create your life—and hence, your Self—as you wish to be. You cannot know your Self as the Creator if I tell you what to create, how to create, and then force, require, or cause you to do so. If I do that, My purpose is lost.
But now, let us just notice what has been created on your planet, and see if it doesn’t make you a bit indignant.
Let’s look at just four inside pages of one of your major daily newspapers on a typical day.
Pick up today’s paper.
Okay. It’s Saturday, April 9, 1994, and I am looking at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Good. Open it to any page.
All right. Here’s page A-7.
Fine. What do you see there?
The headline says DEVELOPING NATIONS TO DISCUSS LABOR RIGHTS.
Excellent. Go on.
The story reports on what it calls an “old schism” between industrialized nations and developing countries over labor rights. Leaders of some developing nations are said to be “fearful that a campaign to expand labor rights could create a back door means of barring their low-wage products from the rich nation’s consumer markets.”
It goes on to say that negotiators for Brazil, Malaysia, India, Singapore and other developing nations have refused to establish a permanent committee of the World Trade Organization which would be charged with drafting a labor rights policy.
What rights is the story talking about?
It says, “basic rights for workers,” such as prohibitions on forced labor, establishment of workplace safety stand-ards, and a guarantee of the opportunity to bargain collec-tively.
And why do developing nations not want such rights as part of an international agreement? I’ll tell you why. But first, let’s get clear that it’s not the workers in those countries who resist such rights. Those “negotiators” for the developing nations are the same people, or are closely allied with the same people, who own and run the factories. In other words—the rich and powerful.
As in the days before the labor movement in Amer-ica, those are the people now benefitting from the mass exploitation of workers.
You can be sure that they are being quietly assisted by big money in the U.S. and other rich nations, where industrialists—no longer able to unfairly exploit workers in their own nations—are subcontracting to factory owners in these developing countries (or building their own plants there) in order to exploit foreign workers who are still unprotected from being used by others to increase their already-obscene profits.
But the story says it’s our government—the present admini-stration—which is pushing for workers’ rights to be part of a worldwide trade agreement.
Your current leader, Bill Clinton, is a man who believes in basic workers’ rights, even if your powerful industrialists do not. He is courageously fighting big money’s vested interests. Other American presidents and leaders through-out the world have been killed for less.
Are you saying President Clinton is going to be murdered?
Let’s just say there are going to be tremendous powers attempting to remove him from office. They’ve got to get him out of there—just as they had to remove John Kennedy 30 years earlier.
Like Kennedy before him, Bill Clinton is doing everything big money hates. Not only pressing for workers’ rights worldwide, but siding with the “little person” over the entrenched establishment on virtually every social question.
He believes it’s the right of every person, for instance, to have access to adequate health care— whether or not he or she can afford to pay the exorbitant prices and fees that America’s medical community has come to enjoy. He has said these costs have got to come down. That has not made him very popular with another very large segment of America’s rich and powerful—from pharmaceutical manufacturers to insurance conglomerates, from medical corporations to business owners having to provide decent coverage for their workers—a great many people who are now making a lot of money are going to have to make a little bit less if America’s poor are to be given universal health care.
This is not making Mr. Clinton the most popular man in town. At least not among certain ele-ments—who have already proven in this century that they have the ability to remove a president from office.
Are you saying—?
I am saying that the struggle between the “haves” and the “have-nots” has been going on forever and is epidemic on your planet. It will ever be thus so long as economic interests, rather than humanitarian interests, run the world—so long as man’s body, and not man’s soul, is man’s highest concern.
Well, I guess you’re right. On page A-14 of the same paper there’s a headline: RECESSION SPAWNS ANGER IN GER-MANY. The lower headline reads, “With joblessness at postwar high, rich and poor grow further apart.”
Yes. And what does this story say?
It says there is great foment among the country’s laid-off engineers, professors, scientists, factory workers, carpenters, and cooks. It says the nation has encountered some economic setbacks, and there are “widespread feelings this hardship has not been fairly distributed.”
That is correct. It has not been. Does the story say what has caused so many layoffs?
Yes. It says the angry employees are “workers whose em-ployers have moved to countries where labor is cheaper.”
Aha. I wonder whether many people reading your San Francisco Chronicle on this day saw the connection between the stories on pages A-7 and A-14.
The story also points out that when layoffs come, female workers are the first to go. It says “women comprise more than half of the jobless nationwide, and nearly two-thirds in the east.”
Of course. Well, I continue to point out—though most of you do not want to see it or admit it—that your socioeconomic mechanism systematically discriminates against classes of people. You are not providing equal opportunity all the while you are loudly protesting that you are. You need to believe your fiction about this, though, in order to keep feeling good about yourself, and you generally resent anyone who shows you the truth. You will all deny the evidence even as it is being presented to you.
Yours is a society of ostriches.
Well—what else is in the newspaper on this day?
On page A-4 is a story announcing NEW FEDERAL PRES-SURE TO END HOUSING BIAS. It says “Federal housing officials are putting together a plan that would force . . . the most serious efforts ever to eliminate racial discrimination in housing.”
What you must ask yourself is, why must such efforts be forced?
We have a Fair Housing Act which bars discrimination in housing on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or family composition. Yet many local com-munities have done little to eliminate such bias. Many people in this country still feel that a person ought to be able to do what he wants to with his private property—including rent to or not rent to whomever he chooses.
Yet if everyone who owned rental property were allowed to make such choices, and if those choices tended to reflect a group consciousness and a general-ized attitude toward certain categories and classes of people, then entire segments of the population could be systematically eliminated from any opportunity to find decent places in which to live. And, in the absence of decent affordable housing, land barons and slumlords would be able to charge exorbitant prices for terrible dwellings, providing little or no upkeep. And once again the rich and powerful exploit the masses, this time under the guise of “property rights.”
Well, property owners should have some rights.
Yet when do the rights of the few infringe upon the rights of the many?
That is, and has always been, the question facing every civilized society.
Does there come a time when the higher good of all supersedes individual rights? Does society have a responsibility to itself?
Your fair housing laws are your way of saying yes.
All the failures to follow and enforce those laws are the rich and powerful’s way of saying “No—all that counts are our rights.”
Once again, your current president and his admini-stration is forcing the issue. Not all American presidents have been so willing to confront the rich and powerful on yet another front.
I see that. The newspaper article says that Clinton Admini-stration housing officials have initiated more investigations of housing discrimination in the brief time they’ve been in office than were investigated in the prior ten years. A spokesperson for the Fair Housing Alliance, a national advisory group in Washington, said the Clinton Administration’s insistence that fair housing statutes be obeyed was something they had tried to get other administrations to do for years.
And so this current president makes even more enemies among the rich and powerful: manufacturers and industrialists, drug companies and insurance firms, doctors and medical conglomerates, and investment property owners. All people with money and influ-ence.
As observed earlier, look for Clinton to have a tough time staying in office.
Even as this is being written—April 1994—the pressure is mounting against him.
Does your April 9, 1994, edition of the newspaper tell you anything else about the human race?
Well, back on page A-14 there’s a picture of a Russian political leader brandishing his fists. Underneath the photo-graph is a news story headlined ZHIRINOVSKY ASSAULTS COLLEAGUES IN PARLIAMENT. The article notes that Vladimir Zhirinovsky “got into another fist fight yesterday, beating up” a political opponent and screaming in his face, “I’ll have you rot in jail! I’ll tear your beard out hair by hair!”
And you wonder why nations go to war? Here is a major leader of a massive political movement, and in the halls of Parliament he has to prove his manhood by beating up his opponents.
Yours is a very primitive race, where strength is all you understand. There is no true law on your planet. True Law is Natural Law—inexplicable and not needed to be explained or taught. It is observable.
True law is that law by which the people freely agree to be governed because they are governed by it, naturally. Their agreement is therefore not so much an agreement as it is a mutual recognition of what is So.
Those laws don’t have to be enforced. They already are enforced, by the simple expedient of undeniable consequence.
Let Me give you an example. Highly evolved beings do not hit themselves on the head with a hammer, because it hurts. They also don’t hit anyone else on the head with a hammer, for the same reason.
Evolved beings have noticed that if you hit someone else with a hammer, that person gets hurt. If you keep doing it, that person gets angry. If you keep getting him angry, he finds a hammer of his own and eventually hits you back. Evolved beings therefore know that if you hit someone else with a hammer, you are hitting yourself with a hammer. It makes no difference if you have more hammers, or a bigger hammer. Sooner or later you’re going to get hurt.
This result is observable.
Now nonevolved beings—primitive beings—ob-serve the same thing. They simply don’t care.
Evolved beings are not willing to play “The One With The Biggest Hammer Wins.” Primitive beings play nothing else.
Incidentally, this is largely a male game. Among your species, very few women are willing to play Hammers Hurt. They play a new game. They say, “If I had a hammer, I’d hammer out justice, I’d hammer out free-dom, I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters, all over this land.”
Are you saying women are more evolved than men?
I’m making no judgment one way or the other on that. I simply observe.
You see, truth—like natural law—is observable.
Now, any law that is not natural law is not observ-able, and so has to be explained to you. You have to be told why it’s for your own good. It has to be shown to you. This is not an easy task because if a thing is for your own good, it is self-evident.
Only that which is not self-evident has to be ex-plained to you.
It takes a very unusual and determined person to convince people of something which is not self-evident. For this purpose you have invented politicians.
And clergy.
Scientists don’t say much. They’re usually not very talkative. They don’t have to be. If they conduct an experiment, and it succeeds, they simply show you what they’ve done. The results speak for themselves. So scientists are usually quiet types, not given to verbosity. It is not necessary. The reason for their work is self-evi-dent. Furthermore, if they try something and fail, they have nothing to say.
Not so with politicians. Even if they’ve failed, they talk. In fact, sometimes the more they fail, the more they talk.
The same is true of religions. The more they fail, the more they talk.
Yet I tell you this.
Truth and God are found in the same place: in the silence.
When you have found God, and when you have found truth, it is not necessary to talk about it. It is self-evident.
If you are talking a lot about God, it is probably because you are still searching. That’s okay. That’s all right, just know where you are.
But teachers talk about God all the time. That’s all we talk about in this book.
You teach what you choose to learn. And yes, this book does speak about Me, as well as about life, which makes this book a very good case in point. You have engaged yourself in writing this book because you are still searching.
Yes.
Indeed. And the same is true of those who are reading it.
But we were on the subject of creation. You asked Me at the beginning of this chapter why, if I didn’t like what I was seeing on Earth, I didn’t change it.
I have no judgment about what you do. I merely observe it and from time to time, as I have done in this book, describe it.
But now I must ask you—forget My observations and forget My descriptions—how do you feel about what you have observed of your planet’s creations? You’ve taken just one day’s stories out of the newspa-per, and so far you’ve uncovered:
? Nations refusing to grant basic rights to workers.
? The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer in the face of a depression in Germany.
? The government having to force property owners to obey fair housing laws in the United States.
? A powerful leader telling political opponents, “I’ll have you rot in jail! I’ll tear your beard out hair by hair!” while punching them in the face on the floor of the national legislature in Russia.
Anything else this newspaper has to show Me about your “civilized” society?
Well, there’s a story on page A-13 headlined CIVILIANS SUF-FER MOST IN ANGOLAN CIVIL WAR. The drop head says: “In rebel areas, top guns live in luxury while many thousands starve.”
Enough. I’m getting the picture. And this is just one day’s paper?
One section of one day’s paper. I haven’t gotten out of Section A.
And so I say again—your world’s economic, politi-cal, social, and religious systems are primitive. I will do nothing to change that, for the reasons I’ve given. You must have free choice and free will in these matters in order for you to experience My highest goal for you—which is to know yourself as the Creator.
And so far, after all these thousands of years, this is how far you have evolved—this is what you have created.
Does it not make you indignant?
Yet you have done one good thing. You have come to Me for advice.
Repeatedly your “civilization” has turned to God, asking: “Where did we go wrong?” “How can we do better?” The fact that you have systematically ignored My advice on every other occasion does not stop Me from offering it again. Like a good parent, I’m always willing to offer a helpful observation when asked. Also like a good parent, I’m willing to keep loving you if I’m ignored.
So I’m describing things as they really are. And I’m telling you how you can do better. I’m doing so in a way which causes you to feel some indignation because I want to get your attention. I see that I have done so.
What could cause the kind of massive consciousness shift of which You’ve spoken now repeatedly in this book?
There is a slow chipping away happening. We are gradually stripping the block of granite which is the human experience of its unwanted excess, as a sculptor chips away to create and reveal the true beauty of the final carving.
“We?”
You and I, through our work on these books, and a great many others, messengers all. The writers, the art-ists, the television and movie producers. The musicians, the singers, the actors, the dancers, the teachers, the shamans, the gurus. The politicians, the leaders (yes, there are some very good ones, some very sincere ones), the doctors, the lawyers (yes, there are some very good ones, some very sincere ones!), the moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas in living rooms and kitchens and backyards all over America, and all around the world.
You are the forbearers, the harbingers.
And the consciousness of many people is shifting.
Because of you.
Will it take a worldwide calamity, a disaster of gargantuan proportions, as some have suggested? Must the Earth tilt on its axis, be hit by a meteor, swallow its continents whole, before its people will listen? Must we be visited by beings from outer space and scared out of our minds before having sufficient sight to realize that we are all One? Is it required that we all face the threat of death before we can be galvanized to find a new way to live?
Such drastic events are not necessary—but could occur.
Will they occur?
Do you imagine that the future is predictable—even by God? I tell you this: Your future is creatable. Create it as you want it.
But earlier You said that in the true nature of time there is no “future”; that all things are happening in the Instant Mo-ment—the Forever Moment of Now.
That is true.
Well, are there earthquakes and floods and meteors hitting the planet “right now” or aren’t there? Don’t tell me that as God You don’t know.
Do you want these things to happen?
Of course not. But You said everything that’s going to happen already has happened—is happening now.
That is true. But the Eternal Moment of Now is also forever changing. It is like a mosaic—one that is always there, but constantly shifting. You can’t blink, because it will be different when you open your eyes again. Watch! Look! See? There it goes again!
I AM CONSTANTLY CHANGING.
What makes You change?
Your idea about Me! Your thought about all of it is what makes It change—instantly.
Sometimes the change in the All is subtle, virtually indis-cernible, depending upon the power of the thought. But when there is an intense thought—or a collective thought— then there is tremendous impact, incredible effect.
Everything changes.
So—will there be the kind of major, Earth-wide calamity You speak of?
I don’t know. Will there?
You decide. Remember, you are choosing your reality now.
I choose for it not to happen.
Then it will not happen. Unless it does.
Here we go again.
Yes. You must learn to live within the contradiction. And you must understand the greatest truth: Nothing Matters.
Nothing matters?
I’ll explain that in Book 3.
Well. . . okay, but I don’t like to have to wait on these things.
There is so much here for you to absorb already. Give yourself some time. Give yourself some space.
Can we not leave yet? I sense You are leaving. You always start talking like that when You are getting ready to leave. I’d like to talk about a few other things . . . such as, for instance, beings from outer space—are there such things?
Actually, we were going to cover that, too, in Book 3. Oh, come on, give me a glimpse, a peek.
You want to know if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?
Yes. Of course.
Is it as primitive as ours?
Some of the life forms are more primitive, some less so. And some are far more advanced.
Have we been visited by such extraterrestrial beings? Yes. Many times.
For what purpose?
To inquire. In some cases to gently assist.
How do they assist?
Oh, they give a boost now and then. For instance, surely you’re aware that you’ve made more technologi-cal progress in the past 75 years than in all of human history before that.
Yes, I suppose so.
Do you imagine that everything from CAT scans to supersonic flight to computer chips you imbed in your body to regulate your heart all came from the mind of man?
Well . . . yes!
Then why didn’t man think them up thousands of years before now?
I don’t know. The technology wasn’t available, I guess. I mean, one thing leads to another. But the beginning technology wasn’t there, until it was. It’s all a process of evolution.
You don’t find it strange that in this billion-year process of evolution, somewhere around 75 to 100 years ago there was a huge “comprehension explosion”?
You don’t see it as outside the pattern that many people now on the planet have seen the development of everything from radio to radar to radionics in their lifetime?
You don’t get that what has happened here repre-sents a quantum leap? A step forward of such magnitude and such proportion as to defy any progression of logic?
What are You saying?
I am saying, consider the possibility you’ve been helped.
If we’re being “helped” technologically, why aren’t we being helped spiritually? Why aren’t we being given some assistance with this “consciousness shift”?
You are.
I am?
What do you think this book is?
Hmmm.
In addition, every day, new ideas, new thoughts, new concepts are being placed in front of you.
The process of shifting the consciousness, increas-ing the spiritual awareness, of an entire planet, is a slow process. It takes time and great patience. Lifetimes. Generations.
Yet slowly you are coming around. Gently you are shifting. Quietly, there is change.
And You’re telling me that beings from outer space are helping us with that?
Indeed. They are among you now, many of them. They have been helping for years.
Why don’t they then make themselves known? Reveal them-selves? Wouldn’t that render their impact twice as great?
Their purpose is to assist in the change they see that most of you desire, not create it; to foster, not force.
Were they to reveal themselves, you would be forced, by the sheer power of their presence, to accord them great honor and give their words great weight. It is preferred that the mass of people come to their own wisdom. Wisdom which comes from within is not nearly so easily discarded as wisdom which comes from another. You tend to hang on a lot longer to that which you’ve created than to that which you’ve been told.
Will we ever see them; ever come to know these extrater-restrial visitors as who they really are?
Oh, yes. The time will come when your conscious-ness will rise and your fear will subside, and then they will reveal themselves to you.
Some of them have already done so—with a handful of people.
What about the theory, now becoming more and more popular, that these beings are actually malevolent? Are there some who mean us harm?
Are there some human beings who mean you harm? Yes, of course.
Some of these beings—the lesser evolved—may be judged by you in the same way. Yet remember My injunction. Judge not. No one does anything inappro-priate, given one’s model of the universe.
Some beings have advanced in their technology, but not in their thinking. Your race is rather like that.
But if these malevolent beings are so technologically ad-vanced, surely they could destroy us. What’s to stop them?
You are being protected.
We are?
Yes. You are being given the opportunity to live out your own destiny. Your own consciousness will create the result.
Which means?
Which means that in this, as in all things, what you think is what you get.
What you fear is what you will draw to you.
What you resist, persists.
What you look at disappears—giving you a chance to recreate it all over again, if you wish, or banish it forever from your experience.
What you choose, you experience.
Hmmm. Somehow it doesn’t seem that way in my life.
Because you doubt the power. You doubt Me.
Probably not a good idea.
Definitely not.