Neale Talks About the Circle of Life...

My dear friends...

All through my life I have been afraid.   Fear has ruled much of my experience.   I learned to be afraid as a little child.   I was taught to be afraid by my parents and others in my environment.

I learned to be afraid of the things that my parents were afraid of.   I learned to be afraid of the things that my family was afraid of.   I learned to be afraid of the things that the people around me and in my culture and in my country were afraid of.   I became afraid of those things whether I had a direct reason to be afraid of them or not.   My reason for being afraid of things was that other people were afraid of things.   I assumed that if they were afraid of them that I should be afraid of them too.

As I grew older I began to divorce myself from the feelings of those around me because I could see the impact that they were having on their lives and I did not want to have that same impact on my life.   I found myself disowning the experience of others in place of my own experience.   This transformation of my personal experience of life took a quantum leap after I had my conversations with God.   In those conversations I was told that all of my experience of life proceeds from one of two places:   love or fear.   I decided to see if this could possibly be true.   I undertook to make a great experiment.   I decided to see if I could shift my feeling from fear to love arbitrarily.

I chose as my subject a woman of whom I was very much afraid.   I wasn't afraid of her in the physical sense, I was afraid of her psychologically.   She held a position of power in the community in which I lived and in the space in which I interacted daily, and it seemed to me that she had great power over my life.   She had the ability to control outcomes in my life, or at least to impact them in negative ways.   I was afraid of her opinion of me.   I was afraid of her thoughts about me.   I was afraid of her decisions about me.   I was afraid of what she would tell others about me.

I decided to see if I could shift my feeling about this person from fear to love.   As a result of my decision to do this I found myself listening much more carefully to what this person was saying in her everyday conversations.   I found myself observing much more closely what this person was doing with her everyday actions.   I found myself experiencing this person in a new way, looking at her through new eyes.

I realized as I undertook this experiment that I had been cloaking her naked beauty with the garment of my illusions about her.   Once I saw her as who she really was rather than what I imagined her to be in my own limited view, she transformed magically right before my eyes.   Of course, nothing about her had changed, only the viewpoint that I held about her had shifted.   I began to change the way I interacted with her.   My own vibe shifted around her.   The result was miraculous.   She, in turn, shifted her vibe around me.   She began to sense that my wariness about her had somehow disappeared.   Her wariness around me had, therefore, melted away as well.   We began to see each other in a way that we had not seen each other before.

I found this experience to be transformative.   We two are now the best of friends.   We see ourselves as colleagues and collaborators.   We are no longer afraid of each other.   There was nothing to be afraid of in the first place, but I had imagined that there was, and by my imagination had placed it there.

This was an astonishing experiment for me because it gave me a direct experience of the power of the truth that all outcomes in my life proceed from a place of love or fear.   I thought, what if I shifted my outlook from fear to love with regard to everything in my life?   I decided to expand my experiment.   But first I had to look at how I could shift from fear to love with regard to any particular person, place or thing.  

As I explored this question I realized that the first step in changing my place of being from a space of fear to a space of love was to see that both spaces were one and the same space, simply experienced at different levels of vibration.   Let me explain.

Consider hot and cold.   If we are not careful we could imagine that hot and cold are two different things.   We could speak of them as being opposites.   And, in normal relative human terms, one would suppose that that definition is correct.   But in truth, cold and hot are simply the same thing experienced at different degrees .   We are talking about a condition called temperature .   This condition can be experienced in many different ways depending upon its vibration.   "Cold" is the condition called temperature at a certain vibe.   "Hot" is an experience of temperature at an altogether different vibe.   Nothing has changed except the vibration itself.   The higher the vibration, the warmer the experience of the thing called temperature.

So, too, is it with the thing called Life.   Experienced at a certain level of vibration, Life shows up in fearful ways.   Experienced at a higher level of vibration, Life shows up as love.   Life itself is one thing.   It is not two separate things, but one thing only.   Yet we experience this one thing quite differently from moment to moment depending upon the degree at which we express it.   Now the wonderful thing about life is that we are in control of the mechanism by which we decide which degree we experience.   We can turn the dial "as it were" at our own discretion.   We can select an "emotional temperature" quite arbitrarily.   We do this through the mechanism of thought, word and deed - the three tools of creation.

When I think in loving ways and say loving things and do that which love would do, I literally shift the vibe around a particular person, place or thing.   I alter my perception and therefore alter my experience of that person, place or thing.   Hence, it has been said that everyone is lovable.   And if everyone loved everyone and did loving things to everyone - that is, if we all simply loved each other - every negative condition on this planet would be healed.   No person would murder another.   No person would damage, hurt or seek to destroy another.   No person would withhold from another.   And no person would stand in fear of another, nor do the things that fear sponsors.

All we need do, then, is place ourselves in a different space on the continuum of life.   Life is a continuum.   It is a circle, not a straight line with a beginning and an end.   The circle of life moves from what we call fear to what we call love in one continuous flow.   It is not a straight line with fear at one end and love at the other.   It is a circular reality that flows from one to the other in a continuous movement and it is all the same thing.

When we see that fear and love are the same thing expressed at different levels of awareness, or vibration, we then understand that good and evil are also the same thing experienced at different levels of awareness, or vibration.   This allows us to more deeply understand the statement made in Conversations with God that "Hitler went to heaven."

When we first hear such a statement, we wonder how such a thing could possibly be true.   Only when we see that all of life is a continuum, and that no one thing is separate from any other thing, could we understand this deep statement about Ultimate Reality.

Masters are those who understand such things.   Therefore they judge not, and neither condemn.   To a Master, the statement "Hitler went to heaven" would be self-evident.   Of course Hitler would go to heaven, a Master would say.   Where else could Hitler have gone?   Where else is there?   Yet even heaven can be experienced in a hellish way.   It would all depend upon the perception of the individuated essence of life as it moved through the experience.   Nowhere is this understanding more clearly explained in simple terms than in the wonderful motion picture What Dreams May Come , produced by Stephen Simon and Barnet Bain and starring Robin Williams.   This movie, released a number of years ago, has become a classic.   If you have not seen it, make it your intention to do so.   It reveals a great truth.   That truth is that hell does not exist, except as a function and a creation of our own mind.   It is a place from which we may remove ourselves the instant that we shift our perception and alter our point of view.

In other words, when we change our sponsoring thought, hell becomes heaven and heaven becomes all there is.   In the human experience there are only two sponsoring thoughts: love and fear.   In my own life, this revelation as brought to me in conversations with God, has been transformative.   It has changed everything.   And I owe to this simple truth the shift that has occurred within me.   Only when I fall back into the vibration of fear does my exterior and interior reality become smaller once again, reducing me to a shadow of my true self.

 With Pure Love,

Read this week's Letter to Neale here

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Read a message from one of the prisoners impacted by our Prison Outreach HERE