Walsch, Neale Donald - Conversations with God, Book Two
Het tweede deel van deze driedelige serie las ik vrij snel na deel 1, rond mei/juni 2016. Hoewel ik steeds vaker een gelezen boek weer terugzet in de kast, zonder er een leeservaring over te schrijven, kon ik dat voor dit boek niet over mijn hart verkrijgen. Dus al die tijd lag het op de stapel ‘nog te beschrijven’ boeken.
Evenals bij het eerste deel, raakte ik bij het lezen van deel twee overweldigd door de prachtige inhoud en diepgaande en overdadige inzichten. Ook nu heb ik weer heel erg veel onderstreept, omdat praktisch het hele boek onderstreepwaardig is. De integrale leeservaring is te lang geleden om daar verder nog iets steekhoudends over te zeggen. Daarom pak ik de meest interessante onderstrepingen erbij, geordend naar het betreffende hoofdstuk.
In ieder citaat is dus God aan het woord. In zijn inleiding schrijft Walsch daarover het volgende:
“You may not believe that this material has actually come from God, and I have no need for you to. What is important to me is only whether the material itself has any value, brings any insight, or promotes any fruitful change in our day-to-day life on Earth.”
Een korte waarschuwing vooraf: het is veel. En het is in het Engels, sterker nog: gecondenseerd Engels. Maar ik garandeer dat ieder citaat een wereld aan inzichten en stof tot nadenken bevat. Consumeer deze leeservaring daarom gedoseerd. De beloning zal ongekend rijk zijn!
Introduction
“Clearly, you have made a deep commitment to continually grow. Only a person with such a commitment would pick up a book like this.”
“This book may be a bit more uncomfortable than Book 1.”
1.
“Start telling the truth now, and never stop. Begin by telling the truth to yourself about yourself. Then tell the truth to yourself about another. Then tell the truth about yourself to another. Then tell the truth about another to that other. Finally, tell the truth to everyone about everything.”
2.
“There should be only one consideration when making any decision – Is this a statement of Who I Am? Is this an announcement of Who I Choose to Be? (…) A life lived by choice is a life of conscious action. A life lived by chance is a life of unconscious reaction.”
“Remember this: the soul creates, the mind reacts. The soul knows in its wisdom that the experience you are having in This Moment is an experience sent to you by God before you had any awareness.”
In heel andere bewoordingen en vanuit een compleet andere achtergrond, is dit hetzelfde wat Dick Swaab zegt over dat de hersenen al een beslissing hebben genomen, voordat je je hiervan bewust wordt.
“Every Now Moment is a glorious gift from God. That’s why it is called the present.”
“The soul understands what the mind cannot conceive. If you spend your time trying to figure out what’s ‘best’ for you, your choices will be cautious, your decisions will take forever, and your journey will be launched on a sea of expectations. (…) your feelings are your truth. (…) Feelings are the language of the soul, but you must make sure you are listening to your true feelings and not some counterfeit model constructed in your mind.”
Van deze inhoud hoor ik een heldere echo terug bij Don Miguel Ruiz, over onze gevoelens. Die kunnen ons nooit bedriegen.
Ook de volgende is een prachtige versie van de Eerste overeenkomst van Ruiz: ‘Wees onberispelijk met jouw woord’.
“You cannot take responsibility for how well another accepts your truth; you can only ensure how well it is communicated. And by 'how well', I don’t mean merely how clearly; I mean how lovingly, how compassionately, how sensitively, how courageously, and how completely.”
3.
“Time is not a continuum. It is an element of relativity that exists vertically, not horizontally. (…) Time is an ‘up and down’ thing! Think of it as a spindle, representing the Eternal Moment of Now. (…) You have always been, are now, and always will be. There has never been a time when you were not – nor will there ever be such a time.”
“There are no ‘rotten apples’. There are only people who disagree with your point of view on things, people who construct a different model of the world. No persons do anything inappropriate, given their model of the world. (…) Hitler went to heaven. (…) First, he could not have gone to hell because hell does not exist. Therefore, there is only one place left to which he could have gone. (…) There is no ‘bad’ where I Am. And there is no Evil. There is only the All of Everything. The Oneness. And the Awareness, the Experience, of that. (…) His (Hitler) actions were what you would call mistakes – the actions of an unevolved being – and mistakes are not punishable by condemnation, but dealt with by providing the chance for correction, for evolution. (…) Your statement that their (the victims of the Holocaust) deaths were untimely, and therefore somehow ‘wrong’, suggests that something could happen in the universe when it is not supposed to. Yet given Who and What I Am, that is impossible. (…) When you see the utter perfection in everything – not just those things with which you agree, but (and perhaps especially) those things with which you disagree – you achieve mastery.”
4.
“No one comes to you by accident. There is no such thing as coincidence. Nothing occurs at random. Life is not a product of chance. (…) The horror of the Hitler Experience was not that he perpetrated it on the human race, but that the human race allowed him to. (…) The purpose of the Hitler Experience was to show humanity to itself. (…) Hitler was not sent to you. Hitler was created by you.”
5.
“It is you who are moving, not time. Time has no movement. There is only One Moment. (…) Everything that’s ever happened – and is ever going to happen – is happening now. (…) You are at a place in the Space-Time Continuum where you are not consciously aware of the occurrence. You do not ‘know’ it has ‘happened’. You have not ‘remembered’ your future! (This forgetfulness is the secret of all time. It is what makes it possible for you to ‘play’ the great game of life.) (…) A thing ‘happens’ only when it is ‘experienced’. A thing is ‘experienced’ only when it is ‘known’.”
“There is only one of you, but you are much larger than you think! (…) You are a Divine Being, capable of more than one experience at the same ‘time’ – and able to divide your Self into as many different ‘selves’ as you choose. (…) You are a being of Divine Proportion, knowing no limitation. A part of you is choosing to know yourself as your presently-experienced identity. Yet this is by far not the limit of your Being, although you think that it is. (…) You must think that it is, or you cannot do what you’ve given yourself this life to do. (…) You are using all of Life – all of many lives – to be and decide Who You Really Are. (…) It would be very difficult for you to play this wonderful game of life if you had full awareness of what’s going on. Even this description offered here cannot give you that. If it did, the ‘game’ would be over! The Process depends on the Process being incomplete, as it is – including your lack of total awareness at this stage.”
“Everyone is creating everything now being experienced – which is another way of saying that I am creating everything now being experienced, for I am everyone. (…) It is all contained in a single truth: THERE IS ONLY ONE OF US.”
6.
“At one point the entire universe actually was ‘solid’. There was virtually no space between the particles of matter (… it) filled an area smaller than the head of a pin. There was actually a ‘time’ before that ‘time’ when there was no matter at all – just the purest form of Highest Vibration Energy, which you would call anti-matter. (… The universe) will expand and contract. And then it will do the same thing all over again. And again. And again. Forever and ever. World without end. This is the breathing in and breathing out of God.”
“Everything is cyclical. Everything. When you understand this, you become more able to enjoy the Process – not merely endure it.”
“Few people understand the rhythms of life more than women. Women live their whole lives by rhythm. They are in rhythm with life itself.”
7.
“It is all right to love sex! It’s also all right to love your Self! In fact, it’s mandatory.”
“Give yourself abundant pleasure, and you will have abundant pleasure to give to others.”
“Sexual expression is the inevitable result of an eternal process of attraction and rhythmic energy flow which fuels all of life.”
8.
“Betrayal of yourself in order not to betray another, is Betrayal nonetheless. It is the Highest Betrayal. (…) If all you are doing is following someone else’s rules, then you have not grown, you have obeyed.”
“Enjoy everything. Need nothing. (…) Needing someone is the fastest way to kill a relationship. (…) The greatest gift you can give someone is the strength and the power not to need you, to need you for nothing.”
9.
“When you give your children wisdom, you do not tell them what to know, or what is true, but, rather, how to get to their own truth. (…) Knowledge is lost. Wisdom is never forgotten.”
“Data from a prior time or experience should always and only be the basis for new questions. Always the treasure should be in the question, not in the answer.”
10.
“Truth and politics do not and cannot mix because politics is the art of saying only what needs to be said – and saying it in just the right way – in order to achieve a desired end.”
“You cannot legislate morality. You cannot mandate equality. (…) In great societies, very few laws are necessary.”
11.
“The only problem of humanity is lack of love. Love breeds tolerance, tolerance breeds peace. Intolerance produces war and looks indifferently upon intolerable conditions. Love cannot be indifferent. It does not know how.”
“All conflict arises from misplaced desire. (…) ‘Not needing’ is a great freedom. It frees you, first, from fear: fear that there is something you won’t have; fear that there is something you have that you will lose; and fear that without a certain thing, you won’t be happy. (…) You are not angry when someone is unkind, because you have no need for them to be kind. You have no anger when someone is unloving, because you have no need for them to love you. (…) World peace is a personal thing!”
12.
“Everything you think, say, and do is a reflection of what you’ve decided about yourself; a statement of Who You Are.”
“The evolution of a society is measured by how well it treats the least among its members.”
“You must stop seeing God as separate from you, and you as separate from each other. The only solution is the Ultimate Truth: nothing exists in the universe that is separate from anything else. Everything is intrinsically connected, irrevocably interdependent, interactive, interwoven into the fabric of all life.”
Jeroen Brouwers zegt het zo in Bezonken Rood:
“Niets bestaat dat niet iets anders aanraakt.”
13.
“Every person who has ever come to you has come to receive a gift from you. In so doing, he gives a gift to you – the gift of your experiencing and fulfilling Who You Are.”
16.
“Nothing breeds fairness faster than visibility. Visibility is simply another word for truth. (…) The best personal relationships, and certainly the best romantic ones, are relationships in which everyone knows everything; in which visibility is not only the watchword, but the only word; in which there simply are no secrets.”
17.
“Often the only way to know yourself as That Which You Are is to experience yourself as That Which You Are Not.”
“This struggle becomes not a struggle at all, but a process. It is a process of Self-definition (not self-discovery), of Growth (not learning), of Being (not doing). (…) The reason becomes the process, and the doer becomes a be-er.”
18.
“When you talk about equality, we’re meaning equal opportunity, not equality in fact. Actual ‘equality’ will never be achieved, and be grateful that is so.”
“The first mark of a primitive society is that it thinks itself advanced.”
“It is not for you to judge the journey of another’s soul. It is for you to decide who YOU are, not who another has been or has failed to be.”
“The guidance you are getting is to follow your heart. Listen to your soul. Hear your self. Even when I present you with an option, an idea, a point of view, you are under no obligation to accept that as your own. If you disagree, then disagree. That is the whole point of this exercise. The idea wasn’t to substitute your dependency on everything and everyone else with a dependency on this book. The idea was to cause you to think. To think for your self. And that is who I Am right now. I am you, thinking, I am you, thinking out loud.”
19.
“You cannot know you Self as the Creator if I tell you what to create, how to create, and then force, require, or cause you to do so. If I do that, My purpose is lost.”
“Truth and God are found in the same place: in the silence. When you have found God, and when you have found truth, it is not necessary to talk about it. It is self-evident.”
20.
“Return to spirituality. Forget about religion. (…) Because it is not good for you. Understand that in order for organized religion to succeed, it has to make people believe they need it. In order for people to put faith in something else, they must first lose faith in themselves. So the first task of organized religion is to make you lose faith in yourself. The second task is to make you see that it has the answers and you do not. And the third and most important task is to make you accept its answers without question. (…) Religion has separated man from God, man from man, man from woman – some religions actually telling man that he is above woman, even as it claims God is above man – thus setting the stage for the greatest travesties ever foisted upon half the human race. God is not above man, and man is not above woman – that is not the ‘natural order of things’.”
I rest my case!
Gelezen: mei 2016