A Note from Neale...

Hello my wonderful friends...

In our exploration here of The Holy Experience we now turn to the subject of God, and about some of humanity's conclusions about God.

God does exist, much of humanity has concluded, but the incorrect part of the conclusion that we reached is that God exists outside of us, as an aspect of life that is separate from us.

This idea of separation is what might be called, in the New Spirituality, "Original Sin." Of course in the New Spirituality there is no such thing as "sin," and so perhaps this idea of separation might better be described as "Original Perception."

Our early ideas of separation produced a separation cosmology — that is, a way of holding life itself. This separation cosmology eventually produced a separation theology, which eventually produced a separation psychology, which produced a separation sociology, which has now produced a separation pathology.

It is this separation pathology that we see in evidence wherever we look, that is expressed in virtually every one of the choices, actions, and decisions of all of our human institutions — including government, education, commerce, our collective economies, and our social constructions of every kind... not the least of which we call our religions.

Under such conditions it is no wonder that we find it so difficult to think of people outside of our immediate environment — to say nothing of people of other cultures — as members of our own family. Yet the failure to think of people in this way is what has produced the vast majority of the suffering and the pain and the anguish and the difficulties and the challenges and the human-created disasters that we witness on our planet every day.

It is both the great sadness and the great irony of the human condition that 90% of all human suffering could be disappeared from the face of the earth if we simply embraced every human being as members of our own family.

What it would take to do this is a shifting away from our lifelong human experience and a movement into the Holy Experience of which we have been speaking in this Weekly Bulletin now for many weeks.

And we will continue this discussion in our next issue.

Hugs and Love,