I reveals the questions to ask yourself to truly understand life. The following inquiries, made in the depth of our own soul, and used by us to invite others into their own soul searching, could change the world.
The Three Persistent Questions
1. How is it possible that 6.9 billion people can all claim to want the same thing (peace, security, opportunity, prosperity, happiness, and love) and be singularly unable to get it?
2. Is it possible that there is something we do not fully understand about life, the understanding of which would change everything?
3. Is it possible that there is something we do not fully understand about ourselves, about our own life and its purpose, the understanding of which would shift our reality and alter our experience for the better, forever?
These are powerful questions. They deserve answers. They at least deserve being asked. Yet are great numbers of people asking them? Are politicians? No. Presidents and prime ministers, kings and heads of state? No. Religious figures? No. Educators? Not many. Military generals and admirals? No. Leaders of business and industry? No. Ordinary people at their dinner table? Well, yes, possibly. Beginning now. Perhaps. Beginning now.
Ordinary people like you and I will now be asking these questions all over the planet. And when we finish asking the first three, we’ll then move to…
The Four Fundamental Questions Of Life
1. Who am I?
2. Where am I?
3. Why am I where I am?
4. What do I intend to do about that?
I do not believe that one can ignore these questions and rapidly evolve. None of us can. We must end any personal confusion we may have around these questions (there are many other questions in life, but these are foundational), or we will go through our days and nights having no idea what we’re doing or why we’re doing it.
This is the situation with most people on the earth today. And that is the reason why the world is in the condition that it’s in.
I did not move forward in my life until I answered the Four Fundamental Questions of Life. (And by the way, I answer them daily. Sometimes during the day as events transpire. Used in this way, these questions are not only informative, they are transformative.)
And the first of these four is the real key. It unlocks everything. It invites us to look deeply at the biggest mystery, the mystery of our own identity. By that I don’t mean, of course, our name. I mean our identity in the cosmos.
There is no “right answer” to this question, there is only the answer you give.
The second question seems simple, but its answer may not be. Where am I?
Where do you conceive of yourself as being? That is, what is this place in which we experience our existence? How do you conceive of it? How do you hold it in your reality?
I am speaking here of how you hold it conceptually, yes? I’m not talking about your physical description of this place (“I live on planet Earth. It is the third rock from the sun…,” etc.), I am referring to your conceptual understanding of this space. Is it a place of learning, a school?
Do you experience it as a place of testing, an examination room? Is it a place of proving or contesting or competing, like a giant racetrack or an athletic field, where some are winners and some are losers?
Do you have no conceptual reference point for this space, and truly conceive of it only as a physical location in a larger system of planets whizzing around a star?
What is this place in which we find ourselves? The mind begs to know…Where am I?
Again, there is no “right” answer to this question. Yet until I gave it some answer, I had no conceptual framework within which to hold my life’s experience. And absent such a framework, those experiences themselves felt essentially meaningless. No different from those of a fly or an ant. I felt that I was simply a more sophisticated life form. I had a life expectancy and, barring unforeseen circumstances, I knew I would be here for x amount of time, but what is this place?
And then, the next question looms: Why?
Why am I where I am? Why am I not somewhere else? Is there a “somewhere else”? What is the purpose of my being in this time and place? Is there a purpose? Who would give it one?
I don’t know how a person advances in their evolution without giving some thought—and eventually, some sort of answer—to these questions.
Many people respond to these questions with a curt “I don’t know” and let it go at that. I couldn’t do that. And I don’t encourage any true students of life to do that. If they truly don’t have an answer, I encourage them to create one. That is, decide what their answer is, out of pure intention. In this way they live their life from Intention rather than living their life by default.
A life lived by default is a life lived according to the Default Responses of the majority of people on the earth. I hope that none of you ever again chooses to live your life like that. Most of us have lived at least portions of our lives in this way, but we never have to again if we do not want to.
The Last Inquiry
This leads to the final question. Not just the final question in this series of seven, but what could be, metaphorically, The Final Important Question of Life: Having given your answers to all the other questions, you are invited to decide, What do you intend to do about that?
This is always the final question in life. In every situation, in every circumstance, in every moment that our experience presents, the question always and forever is: What do I intend to do about that?
Life proceeds out of your intentions for it. This is the fuel that drives the engine of creation in your life.
It is important to understand that life is nothing but energy. It is energy organized. And who does the organizing? We do. Surprisingly, the answer is…us.
Life is pure energy that circles back into itself. That is, life is a self-fuelling, self-sustaining, self-determining, and self-creating process. It depends on itself, relies on itself, and looks to itself to tell itself what the next expression of itself shall be.
This is true universally, it is true globally, it is true nationally, it is true locally, and it is true individually. It is merely a matter of proportion. And so we see the Universe deciding about itself in this way, our planet deciding about itself in this way, our nation deciding about itself in this way, our own city or community deciding about itself in this way, and our own person deciding about itself in this way. Life informs Life about Life through the process of Life Itself.
Why am I where I am? Why am I not somewhere else? Is there a “somewhere else”? What is the purpose of my being in this time and place? Is there a purpose? Who would give it one?
Life’s information creates life in formation. At the most personal level, your information creates you, in formation. You are constantly forming and reforming yourself, shaping and reshaping yourself, creating and re-creating yourself anew. Indeed, the function of life is to re-create yourself anew in each golden moment of Now, in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about Who You Are.
That’s all of it, in a nutshell. That’s what’s going on here. All of humanity is engaged in this process. We are doing it politically, we are doing it economically, we are doing it culturally, we are doing it racially, we are doing it socially, we are doing it sexually, we are doing it spiritually. This is all we are doing and we’re not doing anything else.
This is what God is doing. God is re-creating Itself anew in the single and only moment called Now—and life is God, doing this. Life is God, expressing Itself in an endless multiplicity of forms. You are one of the forms of God. You are, all of you, God’s information. And thus, Gods… in formation.
In addition to authoring the renowned With God series, Neale Donald Walsch has published 12 other works, as well as a number of video and audio programs. Available throughout the world, each of the Conversations With God books has made the New York T
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