A Note from Neale...

Hello my wonderful friends...

We're looking here at the impact of The Holy Experience on the part of our lives that we call our Family Life.

In CWG we are invited to experience ourselves as members of the human family, and to imagine how we would treat others if we really thought that we were exactly that: members of the same family. This is the Holy Experience as it relates to our family.

You can know that you are having the Holy Experience when you consider every other member of the human race to be a member of your own family. When you experience them in that way.

For many people this is extremely difficult because it goes against the grain of everything they've ever learned or been taught or understood.

Many cultures actually teach their children not to think of people outside of their immediate cultural group as members of their own family. In fact, it goes further than that. Many cultures actively instruct their children to think of some of the people who are outside of their immediate cultural group as enemies; to oppose, even to be at war, with other cultures because of cultural differences which they believe to be antithetical to their own survival.

For centuries and millennia the human race has lived within a social construct of separation and division. This has been created out of our earliest thoughts that we are separate from everything we see and separate from that Source of All Creation which we have imagined to be responsible for the universe around us.

From the beginning of time, human beings have understood that something Larger Than Us was responsible for the outer world of our observation. We looked up at the night sky and saw something more expansive and magnificent than anything we knew humanity was capable of creating.

We watched the elements play their effect on our daily lives — the wind, the rain, the fires, and all the elements of life — and we knew that something greater than us had to be responsible for these as well.

We watched the changing of the seasons and we observed the phenomenon of weather — the ravages of hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes and floods and other natural disasters — and once again we came to the conclusion that something outside of us, or larger than us, or other than us, had to do with all this. Surely we had nothing to do with it, so Someone Else must.

From these and other observations we came to the natural conclusion that something that we today call "God" or "Allah" or "Jehovah" or "Brahman" (or any one of a hundred other names) must exist. We were correct in our conclusion, even if we were incorrect in our means of reaching it.

Next week, we will explore the effect that these ideas have had on the human experience. And in the weeks ahead we'll look at how we can turn that impact around, creating the kind of lives for which we all yearn. I hope you'll join us for this continuing series.

Hugs and Love,