We live in a wonderful world---and that does not mean that our world is not faced with enormous challenges. We live wonderful lives---and that does not mean that our lives are not filled with enormous challenges. Our world is, and our lives are.
It has been an interesting week, and as you receive this I am still on the Big Island in Hawaii, preparing to deliver the keynote speech at a major inter-island event here on Saturday night. We have been in this astonishingly beautiful state since February 18, and last Saturday were awakened at 6 a.m. with civil defense sirens blaring and the hotel p.a. system carrying this ominous words: "This is the duty manager speaking. A tsunami warning has sounded
Did you ever feel like you needed nothing? If you ever did, you know the experience of Liberation. Read this note, that I received recently from a dear friend asking me about how the Mind functions, and how "belief" works, in the creation of one's experience. What's all this about the Law of Attraction?
Every so often I have an exchange on the Ask Neale feature of my personal website that I intuitively feel deserves to be shared with a larger audience. A week or so ago, I had such an exchange.
Nearly all of the first month of 2010 has passed and I am wondering how you are doing with your New Year's Resolutions. Yes, almost one-twelfth of the year is behind us, and these are the days and times of our lives, whittling away, melting down, disappearing into the mist, and what have we got to show for it that we didn't have before? I mean, what progress have we made? What is different now from the way it was before, say, last year at this time?
It's interesting to be me. I've just decided that. It's just plain interesting to be me. You know why? I wake up many mornings with the weirdest things in my head. This morning, for instance, at 4:20 in the morning I could not sleep another wink. My mind was racing, filled to overflowing with thoughts. They were thoughts about life and the nature of Ultimate Reality. At last, I couldn't stand it anymore. I had to open my laptop and start getting them out. I had to.
And so now here we are, already past the first week of the New Year. What a remarkable thing Time is. It moves so slow when we are waiting for something special, and it moves so fast when we are not looking. I don't know what happened to 2009. I really don't. Because just the other day I was talking about IT being the "New Year," and now here we are and it is 2010! And did I do everything I wanted to do in 2009? No.
So I'd like to look at a question this week that people all over the world, people of all faiths and traditions, have been asking for a very long time. For over 2,000 years, in fact...Who was this man called Jesus?
When I was a child I had a deep fascination with God. What was He like, I wondered? Where did He live? I know now that my ideas about God as a man living somewhere in the sky were the products of my childhood upbringing in a Roman Catholic family. I know that God is not limited to being a "he" or a "she," but that God shows up in every form in which Life Itself displays itself. Still, I hold onto this idea that there are some attributes of God. I ask myself sometimes, if God chose to show up as a human being, what would that be like? What kind of personality would God have?
What IS it that "serves the Self?" What is the Self trying to do? What is its purpose? What is its function? Why has the Self come to the earth? Why has it taken a physical body? What is it "up to?" - Unless these questions are answered, the statement "look first to the Self" will forever be misunderstood, and will produce misguided results.
