Glorify who you are today, do not condemn who you were yesterday, and dream of who you can be tomorrow.
It is the great sadness of our species that we have not found a way to eliminate the conflict and to eliminate violence as a device to resolve our conflicts throughout the entire history of the human race.
The new spirituality is that it will produce an experience in human encounters in which we become a living demonstration of the basic spiritual teaching 'We are all one.'
One either has to believe in a God who's terribly prejudiced, or disbelieve the teachings of such exclusionary theologies. Religions have taught us that 'we are better than they.'
I think the new spirituality will be a spirituality that's not based on a particular dogma. And that steps away from the old spiritual paradigm that we have created on this planet, which comes from a thought that there is such a thing as being better.
The new spirituality will step away from dogma, will step away from 'We're right and you're wrong.'
Because our choices are largely based on survival. But if life is eternal, life is not a question.
And we're seeing a higher level of consciousness and many more opportunities for people to challenge their present ways of thinking and move into a grander and larger experience of who they really are.
We've seen in the last half century an incredible shift. This is just an extraordinary time to be alive.
I think in metaphysical terms, I would call that increasing the speed of the vibration of life.
The sad part about our past is that religions, ironically enough, are responsible for creating the most destructive idea that has ever been visited upon the human race: the idea that there is such a thing as 'better.'
A great many people experience the movement from one century to the next, but a minuscule number of people experience the movement from one millennium to the next.
There's no way you can misunderstand the teachings of the Qur'an, there's no way you can misunderstand the teachings of the Bible, there's no way you can misunderstand the teachings of the Bhaghavad Gita, or of the Book of Mormon, or of the other sacred texts of many of those religions.
I'm calling my book series the 'with God series.' And this next 'with God' book is Friendship with God, which comes out in November. This books challenges us to bring about the end of 'better' on this planet.
Nothing has done more to separate and divide human beings one from another than exclusivist organized religion.
And because we are, somehow, better than they, we get to go to heaven and they don't. Christians will tell you outright that they believe that.
If we win, someone else loses. But if someone else loses, we lose. Which is a point we're not getting. The new spirituality will make this just painfully obvious.
Beyond the Catholic exclusionary paradigm is a larger one which is the Christian one. Christians claim that if you don't believe in Christ, you can't get to heaven. Well that eliminates two thirds of the world's population!
Because we believe that our ethnic group, our society, our political party, our God, is better than your God, we kill each other.
As we move into the 21st century, there's what the Bible calls a 'quickening of the spirit.'
