The Essential Path: Overcoming Fear and Finding Freedom in an Ever-Changing World
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About this ebook
“Deep inside you know Who You Truly Are. We all do. It's not a question of discovering it, it's a question of claiming it. Being it. And that's actually easier done than said. We're all just one decision away from The Essential Path. It's a path that could change a world that deeply yearns for a new direction.” — Neale Donald Walsch, author, The Essential Path
Our modern era is plagued by increasing alienation—we are seeing an “us against them” world. Everywhere we turn, we find ourselves divided from each other as never before across political, economic, social, and spiritual lines. As humanity is being torn apart right before our eyes—separating many of us from our friends and even our loved ones, from our hopes and dreams, from the natural world, and from so much that gives meaning and value to our lives—people are blaming everyone and everything around them for the collective problems that we have created ourselves. We are turning against each other, rather than to each other, just when we need each other the most.
Bestselling author of Conversations with God Neale Donald Walsch offers a radical solution to the growing problem of humanity’s alienation. He invites us to question our basic assumptions about ourselves, about each other, about life and how it works, and about God, and to rethink the very definition of humanity. The Essential Path challenges every human to make a Daring Decision—to look at who we are and how we can choose to be, in a planet-altering new way.
With insight and spiritual perceptivity, Walsch peers into the heart of a broken, divided society, prompting us to ask the critical questions that have the power to transform our world.
Neale Donald Walsch
Neale Donald Walsch devotes his time to sharing the messages of his books through writing, lecturing, and facilitating spiritual renewal retreats. The creator of the School of the New Spirituality and founder of The Group of 1000, a nonprofit organization supporting global spiritual awakening, he lives in Ashland, Oregon, and may be contacted through NealeDonaldWalsch.com.
Read more from Neale Donald Walsch
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The Essential Path - Neale Donald Walsch
1
THE PROPOSITION
We’re one decision away from a solution to humanity’s biggest problem.
This is a decision so powerful in its impact that it would solve not only our species’ biggest collective problem, but the largest problem faced by every individual reading this right now.
But be warned. This decision may not be what it seems—and it definitely will not fall in line with what is most widely expected or most generally accepted.
That makes it a daring decision. Perhaps the most significant decision of your life. And don’t think you didn’t know that when you started reading here. You knew exactly what you were doing.
And why.
Nobody has to tell us that life on our planet is not what we had hoped it would be. All we have to do is take a look at what’s happening every day around the world—and in some cases, in our own lives.
There are very few among us who have not found ourselves shaking our heads in discouraged dismay at the latest tweet or online news bulletin or newspaper headline. And sometimes—too many times, perhaps—at the challenges confronted in our home.
This leads to a compelling question: Is it possible—just possible—that there’s something we don’t fully understand about ourselves, about life, and about God, the understanding of which would change everything?
To me the answer is obvious. Is it to you?
If your answer is yes, you’re invited to now undertake a very quick but deeply revealing explanation of everything—why things are the way they are on Earth today, when our biggest problem arose, what has blocked us from the obvious solution, and how we can dissolve the problem virtually overnight.
We begin with some additional compelling questions.
2
THE QUESTIONS
What if the most wonderful ideas you ever had about life were true?
What if the most wonderful ideas you ever had about yourself were true?
What if the most wonderful ideas you ever had about God were true?
What if the most wonderful ideas you ever had about what happens after you die were true?
What would then be true for you?
Do you think there would be any difference between how you might then experience life and how you now experience life?
Your answers to these questions are now setting the course and direction of your experience on Earth, did you know that?
Not to be overly dramatic about it, but it’s true. They are determining the path you will take.
And humanity’s collective answers to these questions are now creating the future of our species by determining the path we will all take.
Will it be the path that our species has taken for thousands of years—the one that got us here, where our lives and the world are today? Is this where we want to be? Is this our most wonderful idea about life? About ourselves? About God?
Ideas are important. It is ideas that create beliefs, beliefs that create behaviors, behaviors that create experience, and experience that creates reality. And if our most wonderful ideas become our beliefs, life on our planet will look much different than it does today.
Cognitive scientists tell us that all it takes is one in ten people to emphatically embrace an idea, and the mass will follow. What, then, could cause just one in ten people to believe that the most wonderful ideas we ever had are true?
A single decision.
We’re one decision away.
Really.
But we must make that decision now. Not doing so is starting to have, on all of us, a very real effect.
3
THE EFFECT
Let’s not dance around this. We have a big problem here. On Earth, I mean. And it’s touching our lives every day. Individually and collectively.
There’s no reason to move into a dark or depressed state over this, though, because the solution really is just one decision away. And it’s not even a difficult decision to make. We just have to choose to make it.
Many people agree with the decision intuitively already. They simply haven’t implemented it in their lives as a practical matter, probably because they’re waiting to see if anyone else agrees. But the time for waiting is over.
The problem now confronting us is becoming pervasive. It’s evidenced not only in the world’s governments and the world’s corporations and the world’s social or religious institutions. It’s affecting all of us. In individual homes all across the planet, we’re feeling the effect.
So what’s up? What’s the problem? Let’s lay it out in direct terms.
Humanity’s biggest problem is that humanity doesn’t know what humanity’s biggest problem is.
We can see the effect of this problem all around us, but we don’t seem to see the cause.
Now, you have a real problem when you know you have a problem, but don’t understand what the problem is. You don’t know what’s causing the effect that you’re observing every day. And humanity’s confusion about this has gone on for so long that it’s now created a condition. A condition that’s threatening to become permanent.
Here’s one way that it shows up: Perhaps more than ever in recent times, we’re hearing folks say that if we do have a problem right now, it’s only because of those others
who are creating problems. We didn’t have these problems before, these folks say, and we want to go back to the Good Old Days.
And just who, exactly, are those others
to whom these folks are referring?
It’s those unwanted immigrants, those unsatisfied minorities, those unhappy women, those right-wing radicals, those left-wing nut jobs, those unacceptable gays, those uninformed students, those dumb conservatives, those empty-headed liberals, those unmotivated government assistance recipients. It’s those others
who just keep making things difficult.
A well-known political strategist in the United States, Brad Todd, crystalized all of this in a tweet he posted in mid-2018: Is the American Left willing to live with and among the American Right? Or are we at culture rupture?
And the phenomenon is not limited to the United States, but is emerging all over the world. Newspaper columnist Paul Krugman put it this way in an opinion piece in the New York Times written at about the same time: The real crisis is an upsurge in hatred—unreasoning hatred that bears no relationship to anything the victims have done.
I resonate with the urgency of Mr. Todd’s questions and I concur with Mr. Krugman’s observations. Suddenly it feels as if we live in a world of us vs. them. People around the globe are lining up on one side or the other, and the middle ground seems to be disappearing.
Not everyone may feel this way, but everyone can feel everyone who feels this way. So it’s affecting all of us. Each day it’s producing distressing headlines, angry blogs, name-calling speeches, childish rants in tweets, bullying diatribes, finger-pointing tirades, and violence-laden outbursts.
And while we may not know the underlying cause of the problem human society is now facing, the cumulative impact of that problem can be put into a single word.
Alienation.
We are seeing it more and more. It is an outgrowth of a very contentious and unhappy situation.
4
THE SITUATION
Alienation inevitably arises in the aftermath of ongoing citizen frustration. Citizen frustration inevitably arises in the aftermath of ongoing societal dysfunction. Societal dysfunction inevitably arises in the aftermath of ongoing systemic failure. And that’s exactly what we’ve had here. Long-term, ongoing, systemic failure.
We’ve put into place on our planet a wide assortment of systems created to make life better for all of us. Those systems are not working. There are some rare exceptions, but in the main, most are failing to produce the outcomes they were intended to produce.
Wait. It’s worse. They’re actually producing the opposite.
Our political systems—created to produce safety and security for the world’s nations and their people—have in the main produced far too much of exactly the opposite: ongoing disagreements, endless insulting and demonizing of opponents, dangerous trade wars, nerve-racking military threats, and escalating violence between people at every level.
Our economic systems—created to produce opportunity