Neale Talks About the Divine Dichotomy …

My dear friends...

When I was a young boy I lived in a black and white world. It appeared to me as if things were either one way or another. I saw very little gray in between the black and white, and I certainly did not envision a world in which two sets of facts which were obviously contradictory could exist simultaneously in the same space and both be true.

As I have grown older, and particularly since I received the messages of the Conversations with God books, I have come to understand that dichotomy is possible.

A dichotomy is a situation in which two apparently contradictory experiences, evidences, or truths seem to be existing harmoniously at the same time in the same space.

Logic tells us that this would not be possible. Logic insists that two truths which contradict each other cannot exist simultaneously in the same space in any harmonious way. And so our sense of logic fights us all the way as we consider this message from Conversations with God . Yet CwG insists that there is such a thing as a divine dichotomy, and it says that divine dichotomy is found throughout the Universe.

This is because the Universe is not a mutually exclusive system. It is not a system within which one thing cannot be true if another thing is true. It is a system within which two things can be true at the same time, even though they may appear to be contradicting each other. Allow me to give you a very simple, if not simplistic, example with which I might illustrate this principle.

Let us say that it is raining throughout the land. The rain has been falling fast and heavy for almost two days. Is the rain good or is the rain bad? Here is a divine dichotomy. One person on one side of the highway says that the rain is good because it nourishes his crops and brings moisture to his parched fields. The man on the other side of the highway curses the rain, for he had planned a major festival outdoors. He had rented his property to a carnival that was coming to town and stood to make a great deal of money on the event because his income was based on the gate receipts. The drenching downpour for almost two days reduced the crowd attending the carnival to a mere trickle. And so here within ten feet of each other are two men who experienced the exact same condition in precisely opposite ways. This is a simple example of what CwG means when it refers to a divine dichotomy.

There are far more sophisticated examples of divine dichotomy in the universal scheme of things, and, indeed, scientists come across such conditions all the time. What this has to do with us in our everyday life is easy to see once we look at it closely. In my own life I have confronted many situations in which I was asked to believe that two things were true at the same time. I refused to do so, because I was under the impression that such a thing was not possible. Since my exposure to the messages in Conversations with God , I see that not only is such a thing possible, but that it is rather commonplace in our dual-system Universe.

Instead, this new thinking has taken me out of a black and white world and moved me into a world in which opposing points of view do not always have to oppose each other, and in which contradictory statements do not have to create conflict.

To use one striking example that I can think of immediately, the idea of "America the beautiful" and "the ugly American" can now be embraced by me, because I see that both characterizations can be accurate at one and the same time. Such dualistic thinking allows me to explore a deeper truth and investigate larger possibilities that did not exist in an either/or kind of world.

By moving from an either/or world to a both/and world, I see that both "this" and "that" can be true at the same time, and that allows me to see much more of how things really are in the world around me.

with 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