A Letter to Neale

Reader Question:

Dear Neale......I read somewhere in the CWG books about something called The Be-Do-Have Paradigm. Can you explain to me what this is? I have a feeling that it is important, but I might have glanced over it when I first read about it, and now I can't find it in my CWG books. I've been searching and can't seem to locate it in the dialogue.

Neale Responds

The "Be-Do-Have Paradigm" is a way of looking at life. It is nothing more or less than that. Yet this way of looking at life could change your life—and probably will. Because what is true about this paradigm is that most people have it all backward, and when they finally get it straightened out and start looking at it frontward, everything in their lives shifts 180-degrees.

Most people (I know I did) started out with the understanding that how life worked was like this: Have-Do-Be. That is, when I HAVE the right stuff, I can DO the right things, and then I will get to BE what I want to be.

When I HAVE good grades I can DO the thing called graduate and I can BE the thing called employable—might be one example. Here's another. When I HAVE enough money I can DO the thing called buy a house and I can BE the thing called secure. Want one more? Here goes: When I HAVE enough time I can DO the thing called take a vacation and I can BE the thing called rested and relaxed.

See how it works? This is how my father, my school, my society told me that it works. Life works this way. The only problem was, I was NOT getting to BE the things I thought I was going to get to be after I had done all that I thought I had to do, and had all the things that I thought I needed to have. Or, if I did get to BE that, I only got to be it for a short period of time.

Soon after I got to be "happy" or "secure" or "contented," or whatever it was that I thought I was going to get to be, I found myself once again UNhappy, INsecure, and NOT contented!

I didn't seem to know how to "hold onto the stuff." I didn't know how to make the flavor last. So it always seemed as if I did all that I had to do for nothing. It felt like wasted effort, and I began to resent that in my life.

Then I had the conversations with God experience, and everything changed. God told me that I was starting out in the wrong place. What I needed to do was BEGIN where I thought I was going to GO.

All creation starts from a place of BEING, God said, and I have had it in the reverse. The trick in life is not to try to get to be "happy," or be "secure," or whatever, but to start out BEING happy, or BEING content, or whatever, and go from there in the living of our daily lives.

But how do you do that if you don't HAVE what you NEED TO HAVE in order to be happy, etc.? That's the question, and it's a fair one.

The answer is that coming FROM a state of being, rather than trying to get TO a state of being, practically assures that the "havingness" end of the equation is taken care of.

When you come FROM a state of being, you need to have nothing in order to begin the process. You simply select, quite arbitrarily, a state of being, and then come from that place in everything you think, say, and do. But because you are thinking, saying, and doing only what a person who is being happy, contented, or whatever, thinks, says and does, the things that a happy or contented person winds up HAVING come to you automatically.

Let's try this out and see if it really can work that way. Let's say that what a person wants to BE is the thing called "secure." If that is the desired experience, what we can do is start OUT from the square on the playing board that says, I AM SECURE. We start out with this idea, and this is the operating idea behind everything we do. We have moved into the BE-Do portion of the paradigm.

When a person does what only a secure person would do, that person almost automatically winds up having what only a secure person would have. Try it out some time, with any State of Being that you choose. It's amazing how this works.

I send you Pure Love,