May 2020 Humanity's Team Newsletter

In the second week of April I caught a town hall event on CNN in which two questions from the audience surrounding the coronavirus outbreak really got my attention. I’ve placed those questions in the headline above.

Those are fair questions. Even urgent ones.

I’d like to offer my answers to these questions, from the For What It’s Worth Dept. My first and most important answer is yes, we have a God. I join with the huge majority of human beings who believe in a Higher Power. However, it is not my belief, based on my understanding of the Conversations with God messages, that God is a male entity with soft eyes and a long white beard, dressed in a flowing gown and sitting on a throne somewhere.

Now mind you, I’m not making fun of that belief, I simply don’t share it. It is not my awareness that God is either male or female. Nor do I even see God as a specific form/entity — although I do believe that God can take any physical form that God wishes if it serves God’s purpose to do so.

This brings up a question much larger than God’s shape. Does God even have a “purpose”? If so, what is it? And how in the world could the coronavirus pandemic, with the suffering, death, and heartbreak it has caused, be part of that purpose? Is this all somehow part of “God’s plan"?

My awareness tells me no, there is no such thing as “God’s plan.” Not with the classic meaning of God having preordained that certain events will take place in the lives of certain people in certain ways at certain times.

God has not laid out such a blueprint, such a century-by-century, decade-by-decade, year-by-year, month-by-month, week-by-week, day-by-day, hour-by-hour template or design regarding what will happen when, and why.

If such a plan existed, then our lives would amount to nothing more than a “performance” on a planetary stage of a play titled Predestination, where everything is determined ahead of time and humans are nothing but puppets on a string.

It is my understanding that the biggest blessing we have been given by our Creator is the gift of Free Will. That is, we (along with all other sentient beings in the Universe) have had bestowed upon us the opportunity to make choices, individually and collectively, about how we wish our lives, and the events within them, to be experienced.

Those choices demonstrate the understanding we hold and the resultant decisions we have made about who we are (that is, what we understand our actual identity to be as conscious beings in the Universe), and how we determine it is most effective for us to express and experience that.

This is something that is, from my observation, not deeply understood by the largest number of humans. And so, the species collaboratively, if unconsciously, creates events, situations and circumstances generating a Contextual Field within which it becomes possible for each member of the group to manifest in their collective reality their current idea about themselves as it relates to the larger question of the meaning and purpose of Life.

Conversations with God (CWG) put all this in a much shorter sentence, telling us: “Every act is an act of self-definition.”

God’s role in all of this is not to dictate and direct the decisions that we make, nor to create every event and circumstance which comes our way, but rather, to empower us, through a collaborative group process, to do so. Through the larger part of humanity’s history, we have been doing so unconsciously. We see, then, that God does not “allow” particular events to occur. God allows life to proceed freely and undirected by any imperial mandate.

That Which is Divine is, in my understanding from CWG, the Essential Essence that can form Itself into any image or substance in the cosmos — and does so continually. Indeed, the Universe itself IS that, in its Totality. Divinity is found and expressed in and through everything. It is the Power of the Universe, the Source and the Container of All That Is, and the wellspring of the Pure Energy that we call, in human language, Love.

God’s greatest desire is not to have us do what God wants, but to have us choose what we want. God chooses for us to experience ourselves in precisely the way God knows Itself to be: as a Creator. God has imbued every sentient being in the cosmos with the ability do so.

Now...does that have anything to do with the coronavirus outbreak? I’m going to say yes. Not in the sense of us having deliberately and intentionally set out to create this event, but in the sense of our unconscious behaviors having innocently and unwittingly produced the circumstance that has arisen.

I am suggesting that we have unpremeditatedly placed on our planet an occurrence that, in unmistakable terms, invites our entire species to recreate itself anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are.

We now have an opportunity to redesign both our individual and our collective experience in virtually every area of our lives, including why we do what we do, and how we do it.

From our decisions about ourselves and our personal priorities to our more widely impacting choices in personal relationships, in economics, in politics, and even (perhaps most especially) in our philosophy of life and our spiritual expression, this moment allows us an unanticipated and unparalleled chance to click the Reset button.This is not to downplay the tragedy of what is now occurring, but just the opposite, in fact. It is to note the importance of it.

Sadly, most major, titanic shifts in the way we, as a culture, behave have occurred as a result of global tragedy and death on an unfathomable scale. It has taken world wars, genocides, massive earthquakes, monstrous floods, unprecedented loss to wake us up to what there is to be gained by changing.

In response to this present upheaval, we can alter, now and forever, how we choose to conduct ourselves as a race of sentient beings as we interact with each other, with all creatures large and small, and with the planet itself.

And we can begin by honoring, deep in our hearts, those who have lost their lives to the virus, knowing that they are not and have never been only their bodies and their minds, but will always and forever be spiritual beings living eternally with joy, and serving in each moment the Agenda of the Soul — which may well have been to give up their physical form as a means of shaking humanity from the sleep-walking behaviors that have caused so much destruction to our species and to every other life form on this beautiful planet.

This is a process called evolution, in which a new version of every life form is given birth. It has been going on forever, and as with every birthing, it can be fraught with risks and with danger, and yes, with what we define as tragedy.

Yet we could decide that this is the last great upheaval that is required for our species to right the ship, to change the course and alter the direction of our collective trajectory, to emerge at last from the fog of our non-life-friendly political, economic, social behaviors, then to act, finally, as demonstrations of Who We Really Are: Individuations of Divinity.

You can play a role in demonstrating that decision. Indeed, you are playing it right now, in how you are responding to this day’s events, and through your choice to step into Love by the way in which you touch others during this extremely challenging time.

Ah, yes, this is why you are now here. Did you think you placed yourself on this Earth at the present moment by accident...?

In the second week of April I caught a town hall event on CNN in which two questions from the audience surrounding the coronavirus outbreak really got my attention. I’ve placed those questions in the headline above.