Neale Donald Walsch argues that humans already shape evolution and must choose how. He cites 656 children dying of starvation every hour as evidence we're self-destructive, and says we have 20 to 30 years to change through conscious spiritual commitment and living as examples.
Questions this video answers
February 26, 2019
656 children per hour
In the next 20 or 30 years
Chapters
And let's consider that title our role in evolution. I presume you wouldn't be here in the room if it didn't hold at least some interest for you. What is our role in evolution? I'd like to begin by saying that our role in evolution has nothing to do with everybody else. So don't feel like, oh, oh, I got this burden or this assignment or this, you know, process I have to engage in that's going to, you know, produce an evolutionary leap for humankind. So just to know that the role in evolution that you are being invited to play by life itself has nothing to do with everybody else, and it has everything to do with everybody else. So it's one of those divine dichotomies that are often spoken of in the conversations with God material. It's a divine dichotomy where two apparently contradictory truths exist simultaneously in the same space. So the process of evolution invites us to answer a question, to make a decision, a major decision that we need to address today, in my view. And the decision is not whether you will participate in the process of evolution, but how. You see, you cannot not participate in the process of evolution. You're participating in that process automatically by the living of your life. So the question is not whether you will participate, but how. Before we get into the how, let me just take a tiny diversion here and talk about why. Why bother engaging in the process of evolution in a conscious way? The question why is answered by taking a look at what we're doing here. To begin with, it's simple. It's now or never time. We are a self destructive species. Whether we're willing to acknowledge it or not. Humanity is a self destructive species. That is we are killing ourselves and killing each other and we can't find a way to stop it. And we're doing it in a thousand ways all the time. As an example, we're poisoning ourselves and each other by the way we treat the environment. And we can't even admit it. Half of us can't even. Oh Neil, don't start with the environment stuff. We're killing ourselves. We're cutting our lives short, for sure. By the way, we're feeding ourselves or, or not feeding some of us. By the way, we're not feeding some of us. I don't know whether you're aware of it or not, but statistics from the United nations and other agencies like that tell us that 656 children die on this planet every hour from starvation. Yeah, you heard that right. I didn't say every week or every day, every hour, 656 children die of starvation because of the way we're not feeding ourselves. We can't even. We can't even get food. Food to them. We're killing ourselves by the way we use bombs and missiles to solve our differences and resolve our disagreements. We're killing ourselves by the way we sell certain substances like tobacco or street drugs. And we sell that stuff knowing that it is killing us to buy it and use it. We're killing each other by creating startlingly realistic images of violence and killing and putting them on huge screens in movie theaters and on television screens as well, and calling it. You ready? Entertainment. I was in Rome a few years ago, and I went to the Coliseum and I thought, how can people. How could people have actually sat in these concrete seats, you know, and watched the lions attacking the Christians? How. How could they have called that entertainment and cheered? And then I realized, okay, maybe we're not doing it in real time, in real life, but we're not that far removed. After all these centuries, we've stopped doing it live, in person. But we've. We've created the most incredible, incredible images of it so we can continue to look at the horror and the devastation of violence and killing in front of us on a huge screen, sometimes in 3D, and we call it entertainment. We kill people in the name of God. We use God as our justification for killing other people. But other than that, you're probably not part of the. The larger problems that I've just described. But we're certainly all witnessing it. And it's getting to the point where we wake up in the morning almost nervous to turn on the Internet or read the paper. Paper, yeah, that was a flimsy substance that you'd hold in your hand that had words printed on it. In the morning, you'd actually read off of it. It's called a newspaper. So let's look at how we can participate if we choose to make it better. Because it's now or never time. It happens in the next 20 or 30 years, and that's a long stretch, or it's not going to happen at all. So this is about the future of yourself, if you're a younger person, certainly of your children. Absolutely. Of your children's children. That's what we're talking about here. Remembering what I said at the outset. It has to do with you and you and you and you. What have I done? Speaking about myself. And you get to ask yourself the same question. Who am I? Who am I? Becomes the key question of your life. Are you a physical entity? But is that who we are? Basically a chemical creature that we, you know, we were born, we live, we have this experience, we die, and that's it? Or is it possible, just possible that we're more than that, that we are actually not a chemical creature but a spiritual entity? And many of you in this room have already made that decision. Yes, that's that describes me. I am a spiritual entity with a body and the mind. But then we needs must ask ourselves the next obvious question, why? And when we live into the answer why, that is, become an example of living the answer when we become a model of the answer, an exemplar, if I dare use the word when we become that, we not only accelerate the evolutionary process within ourselves, but in fact within the lives of all those whose lives we touch.
