In the last couple of years, a wave of shock and horror has gone through the hearts and minds of people all over the globe as they have witnessed innocent people being beheaded by extremists in the Middle East. We are compelled to ask, "What could cause human beings to do such a thing?"
We asked ourselves similar questions after the cataclysmic events of September 11, 2001. What state of mind could produce an action like flying a planeload of civilians into a building? On television, we saw crowds of people in the Middle East cheering and dancing in the streets in response. Our culture realized that the hijacking wasn't just the action of nineteen men. We sat in stunned silence as we realized that not only could this event occur, but that thousands of people could agree with it. A whole swath of humanity has collectively created a state of being that allows them to embrace mass murder with joy and celebration.
These events have prompted philosophers and spiritual leaders to ask us all, "What role, if any, do you think that you or your society have played in the creation of this extraordinary event?" Astute people began to see that personal responsibility isn't just a concept without functional reality; there's a direct connection between the mental and spiritual health of the planet and the individual health of the people on it.
We are in a time of introspection, in which individuals have begun to see the connection between planetary health and vibrance, and the health of the human species; the views of individuals, assembled into a consciousness held by a large number of people, becomes our collectively created experience. Right now, you could walk down the street in many cities and not find a single person who understands that it is the most sacred beliefs of individuals in the world that create our collective behavior. The beliefs that humanity currently holds about itself are simply no longer viable and no longer serve us.
Where do we start? There are five fallacies about God, and five fallacies about life, that create dysfunction, violence, conflict, and a state of continuing turmoil on this planet. The five fallacies about God are:
1. Humans believe that God needs something.
2. Humans believe that God can fail to get what He needs.
3. Humans believe that God has separated them from Him because they have not given Him what He needs.
4. Humans believe that God still needs what He needs so badly that God now requires them, from their separated position, to give it to Him.
5. Humans believe that God will destroy them if they do not meet His requirements.
It's important to draw the connection between cause and effect, to show how a belief in this creates an outcome called that. The first fallacy, that God needs something, is a self-destructive belief. As soon as we construct a God who needs something in particular in order to be happy, in the absence of which He will be unhappy and send down His wrath, we set up a damaging idea of deity itself. The consequence of this belief is that it gives us human beings the moral authority to act in similar ways toward each other -- and consider it normal.
We then construct our social conventions, our legal systems, our political realities, our economic models -- in fact the whole fabric of human interactions -- based on the moral authority we gather from a God who behaves in this way. We allow ourselves to say, for instance, that, "If you don't fulfill my needs in this relationship I will also punish and condemn you. It may even be perfectly okay to kill you, because sacred scripture authorizes me to do so." Virtually every scripture -- the Koran, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Book of Mormon -- talks about a God who not only becomes angry and kills people, but instructs all other humans to kill them as well. So just that one single idea, that god needs something to be happy, sends people running to the hills, trying to figure out, "What is it that God needs?"
Eight different people will provide eight different answers to that question. Who has it right? Once we've chosen one, we hope that we made the correct choice. Then, most dangerously, we turn around and call the other seven wrong, and decide what their punishment should be for being wrong. We look to the same misunderstandings and the same fallacious beliefs to determine that punishment as we did to discover our original idea of God. We pile fallacy upon fallacy, error upon error, mistake upon mistake. We look to the same God we misunderstood in the first place to help us understand the answer to the question, "What shall we do with those who don't understand you?" Those outcomes can range anywhere from a simple admonition to something far more drastic, like crucifixion.
Every human construction, our entire global system, is based on fallacious fundamental beliefs that have no basis in ultimate reality.
The five fallacies about life are:
1. Human beings are separate from each other.
2. There is not enough of what human beings need to be happy.
3. To get the stuff of which there is not enough, human beings must compete with each other.
4. Some human beings are better than other human beings.
5. It is appropriate for human beings to resolve severe differences created by all the other fallacies by killing each-other.
These flawed perceptions began when we were in very primitive stages of development as a species. During the earliest days of humanity's evolution, the world outside of us was largely outside of our understanding and comprehension. We simply saw what we saw. We did not know why things happened the way they did.
In those very early days we knew that there was something out there. What it was, we did not know. And with the first lightning bolt that struck, with the first peal of thunder, we were clear that it was more powerful than us. When we saw a volcano erupt, when we saw a shooting star, we said, "That's a lot bigger than me. I can't make a shooting star, we said, "That's a lot bigger than me. I can't make something like that happen. What did make it happen?" Quite naturally, early humans came to the assumption that there was something in the universe larger than themselves. From there it was a very short leap to asking, "How can I please that force, so the rain will come and I can grow my crops? How can I control these effects I see in my exterior world? There must be some way."
What you think becomes your reality. That's true whether it's practiced in the year 2005, 21 B.C. or 2 million years ago. In this day and age, when the thinkers are of relatively high consciousness, this can be a plus, but the process can be a minus if the people doing the thing are just barely evolved enough to grapple with these ideas. So if our ancestors, when they saw fire in the sky, did a little dance, and the fire stopped, from that day on they connected their dance with the fore stopping.
I once gave a lecture at the Church of Today in Michigan. This church was in an old building with an tin roof, and it started to rain. Even with amplification, the congregation couldn't hear me. I watched all 1,400 faces look up at the roof when the rain began. It was 11 o'clock in the morning of an all-day retreat, and I realized I'd lost my audience.
I said --as loudly as I could -- into my microphone, "The rain is really hard to hear over, isn't it?" Nods said, "Yes." It was coming down in sheets. I jokingly said, "Not to worry, I'll make it stop." At that moment it stopped. The whole audience was awed. After that they hung on every word I said.
That's how shamanism got started. No one back then had the consciousness to know any better, not even the shaman. He also thought, "This is how it happens." He was so convinced that his dance was making it rain, that the next five times he danced, four out of those five times the rain began. Your thought creates your reality. The thought became the reality which became the thought which became the reality. That's how the cycle began. There was so much faith put in the healer, the medicine man, that he became effective by virtue of that first accident and the shared belief that arose from it. Eventually these attempts to control our exterior environment became mythologies, and the mythologies turned into religions. People believed that It, whatever I was, needed something in order to feel better. Since we humans needed things in order to be happy, we thought God must be the same way. We created God in the image and likeness of man.
We create God. And we're going to create a new God, tomorrow's God, right here on earth during the course of the next twenty-five years. We're going to create a less dysfunctional one. I invite you to take the Five Steps to Peace. In taking these steps, you:
1. Acknowledge that some of your old beliefs about God and about Life are no longer working.
2. Acknowledge that there is something you do not understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which will change everything.
3. Are willing for a new understanding of God and Life to now be brought forth, and understanding that could produce a new way of life on the earth.
4. Are courageous enough to explore and examine this new understanding, and , if it aligns with your inner truth and knowing, to enlarge your belief system to include it.
5. Live your life as a demonstration of your highest and grandest beliefs, rather than as a denial of them.
What religion needs now is what Sir John Templeton calls "Humility Theology." He defines this as "a theology that is willing to admit it does not have all the answers -- about God, about life, and about each other -- is killing us. Yet fallibility is the one thing religious leaders can't admit to. The first of the Five Steps to Peace that I identify in my work is, "Some of our old beliefs aren't working." The second is, "We choose to acknowledge there is something we don't understand about God and about life, the understanding of which could change everything." Can you imagine the pope saying that? In the same spirit that Martin Luther asked his congregation to tack The Ninety-Five Theses on church doors all over Europe in 1517, I invite you to copy the Five Steps to Peace out of this book, and tack them to the church doors.
Most of humanity is sleepwalking. People can be aroused out of that sleep. The process happens largely through the entertainment industry: books, songs, television, and motion pictures are key means by which people are participation in the great awakening. And that process is exponential. It's not a 1, 2, 3, 4 progression. It's a 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 progression as people influence each other.
Jean Houston uses the phrase, "jump time." At jump time, humanity does not evolve in a slow, upward climb. It hits critical mass and then does a very rapid jump. As our consciousness changes, our institutions change. At jump time, we create a whole new cosmology that results in the construction of new collective realities around politics, economics, education, government. The way we live our lives, collectively, shifts and changes during jump time. It happens relatively quickly. Over a period of a decade or two we see enormous changes, and by the end of a quarter century -- just twenty - five years -- virtually everything is different.
The last great, true jump was the Renaissance. In a period of just twenty-five to thirty years, everything was different. Society's attitudes toward sexuality, our beliefs about God, science and society, everything changed, just like that. Many sociologists now agree that we are very close to the next jump time. Cosmologists refer to it as an evolutionary leap; religionists call it a quickening of the spirit; I call it the Great Awakening.
How can you play a part in this? You do it by taking personal responsibility for making the people whose lives you touch aware that it is time to wake up. You choose to participate in the Great Awakening as an awakener. You embrace the personal intention of waking up as many people as you can. I've make that the intention of my life and I suspect that I've touched some seven million people in that process. It doesn't matter if you just touch a dozen, because your reach extends far beyond what you might imagine. I make this point more directly and more specifically in each of my books. In the most recent one, Tomorrow's God, I say it right in the Introduction:
"This book has come to tell you that you can change the course of humanity. You. Not only the people who run governments or own corporations or lead movements or write books or are influential for some other reason. Not only those people. You. You can change the course of human history. This is not an exaggeration. Please believe me. This is not an exaggeration.
"This book calls you to that singular undertaking. It invites you now to internalize the wisdom of both ancient and contemporary masters found here; not merely to hear it again, but now to receive it, to take it in, to absorb it at the deepest level of your being, until it becomes the essence of who you are at the cellular level.
"Life will be inviting you over the years immediately ahead to ask and respond from this level of Deep Knowing. What you place there now in terms of the things you profoundly believe, and how far you spread the messages found here through the living of your life in a new way, will make all the difference in the world to the world.
"Yet do not feel that you have to do all this by yourself. Perhaps the most uplifting and exciting part of the message that is brought to us in this book is that now, none of us have to "go it alone.' We have teammates, and we can join them and all them to us, to rally around humanity's greatest cause: changing ourselves and changing our world."
I'm not the only one who is issuing calls like this. Happily, these calls are being issued from pulpits and from lecterns. Spiritual writers and spiritual messengers all over the world are echoing them. Even some politicians are beginning to say these words. We are beginning to create true mass movement. The idea that each of us is collectively responsible is gaining traction.
But these efforts cannot be undertaken simply at the level of behavior. If a leader suggests we need to change at the level of behavior. If a leader suggests we need to change at the level of behavior, it is like putting a Band-Aid on an open wound. What people who are currently entrenched in the system need to understand is that the solution is not found at the level of behavior. The solution is found at the level of belief. Every behavior springs from -- and is given birth by -- a belief. If we trace behavior back to the belief that sponsored it, and correct our belief, we have a chance to correct the behavior.
Try this simple exercise. Write a list of the last five disasters in your life. As candidly as you can, on the left side of a piece of paper, list the last five bad decisions you made, poor choices, walls you've walked into, major problems you've had.
Now draw a line down the middle. On the other side of the page, write down what you believed that caused you to do that. What belief was behind that choice or decision?
Now cross out the left hand side of the page. It is irrelevant. It's the right hand side of your page that not only sponsored these, but lesser behaviors; perhaps they didn't create catastrophes but they are not doing you any good. Go down that hall of mirrors to discover what belief sponsored this particular disaster, which belief sponsored that one. When we do this in workshops anywhere in the world, participants get huge "A-ha's" when they see the connections. (www.HumanitysTeam.com)
I have a one-word definition for wellness: Peace. The degree to which you exhibit and experience peace -- which is another word for love -- is the essence of personal wellness. The same definition can be applied to planetary wellness. The degree to which the planet experiences being at peace is the degree to which it's well. The degree to which it lacks peace is the degree to which it lacks wellness. The world's environmental health, it's economic health, its political health, it's sociological health, and it's spiritual health, are all a cumulative reflection of our collectively created reality. Wellness equals peace on the planetary as well as on the individual level.
The place where individual health meets planetary health is the level of our individual beliefs, as well as the collective beliefs embraced by humanity. If we as nationalities, as religious groups, as political parties, have the courage to examine the most sacred of our beliefs, we will discover the source of our behavior. Considering the possibility that there may be another way to hold reality is the key to the golden door of peace on this planet.
