Becky: I’d like to ask you about Humanity’s Team. Could you explain what it’s about?
Neale: Humanity’s Team is a grassroots worldwide movement that seeks to place in villages towns and cities across the world, on the ground, a team of people who are working to create this space of possibility for a new spirituality to emerge upon the earth, a spirituality which allows us all to honor our impulse toward the divine, in a way which does not make another wrong for the way in which they are doing it. It is a spiritual movement which seeks to define who and what God really is, who and what we really are and who and what life are and what life is really all about. It is a spirituality which seeks to reinvent God itself, not to illuminate religion or to reject religion, but to refurbish and reinvigorate the world’s religions so that each of us can maintain our cultural and individual traditions, but simply let go of those aspects of those religions which clearly no longer serve us and probably never did, specifically the portion of religions which insist upon exclusivist dogma, which suggests that one of us is better than another of us in the eyes of God. Such an exclusivist theology provides a moral authority for us to oppress each other, if not to say kill each other, and we have done that, we have been killing each other in the name of God for thousands of years, imagining that this is what God wants, that is why I have published a book called "What God Wants" in order to impress upon humanity a different idea about man.
Becky: I loved Chapter 13. It is the easiest chapter to read, because that chapter has the whole feeling of exactly what God wants and on those four pages absolutely nothing is written. How can you explain that, can you elaborate on that?
Neale: Well, first in order to begin to even embrace a God who we declare wants nothing, we have to ask two fundamental questions, one what does God need and two who is God anyway, that is what is God and what is this God that we are talking about, who we imagine, has needs or wants or requires or desires or demands or requirements, who is that? Answering the second question first, we have to shift and alter our definition of God and change our idea and imagine God as not being some big super being, but some larger than life entity who nevertheless has proclivities, emotional turmoils, agitations and psychological difficulties not unlike our own and who has a need for obedience and revenge and so forth. We have to change our mind about that and reframe our understanding of who and what God is and ask ourselves some fundamental questions and the question is that what God wants for us is that what if God was not some singular being living somewhere in the skies or in the universe with proclivities that are very human and needs and desires that are very human, but the least of which is the desire to be worshiped and to be obeyed and at the risk of encouraging his wrath. But if we imagine God as not some superbeing in the sky but an essence of force, a presence if you please, an energy if you will, an aspect of life expressing life through the process of life itself and perhaps God is in fact what life is in all its manifest forms and perhaps life is the physical and exterior manifestation of an invisible force to which we could give the name God. If that were truth, we would ask ourselves, "What does life want?" "Does life need anything from us in particular?", "Does life require us to worship it?", "Do we have to get down on our knees every morning and pray to life in order for life to show up", "is there anything that life needs or desires and the answer is no, life simply is, life is a force an energy in the existent universe that we can use reliably. We can take this energy called life and focus it and use it in particular ways with particular results and do so consistently enough that we can produce outcomes of our desire and there are those who have learnt to manipulate the energies of life and produce such outcomes and on a regular basis, I might add. So if we interchange the words "life" and "God", we see that God is a force or an essence or an energy of the universe that we can use to produce continuing and consistent results that reflect and demonstrate our innermost desires and in fact define for others who and what we really are. If that’s what God is, the essence of the All in All, the Alpha and the Omega, that there is nothing that is not God, we ask ourselves another fundamental question, what does God need? If God is everything there is, then God would presumably need nothing. If God is the living expression of everything you could imagine, then God would want and demand nothing. And so we however on this planet have devised an idea of God which is antithetical to what I have just said and antithetical to God as I understand it. We have imagined that God, who is in fact All in All, everything, nothing that is not God, and yet we imagine that this super everything, in fact nothing stands outside of God, nevertheless has certain wants, needs and desires, the absence of which causes this entity to become furious. We are taught as children of the wrath of God, and we are told in all the works of scriptures of a God of Judgment and damnation, a condemning God who will make us responsible for his happiness, by requiring to show up in his world in a particular way. The very idea is almost absurd when you examine it with even the slightest degree of intelligence, you see immediately the built in contradictions, so when you ask the question how can we talk about a God who needs nothing, we being to look at who is this God that we talk about and how to we find that and if we define God as the all in all, then what could God possibly need and require from us. Supposing that we did not have a need based relationship with God, supposing that we did not have this dysfunctional child-father relationship, suppose that our relationship with God was something entirely different, our relationship with God is one of reciprocal and co-joined creation, that is supposing we were creating with God, that which life is, in our particular individuation of it, supposing we were an indivualised aspect of divinity itself, expressing itself using the power of god or if you please the power of the energy of life which flows through us, as us, if that’s in fact who and what we are, then our opportunity in our lifetime is more magnificent more wondrous and indeed more glorious than anything we could have previously imagined. I believe that is the truth of us and I believe that we are a species about to embark on the expression and experience of that truth in a new way in the days and times ahead. We are among the species of the known universe, a rather primitive species, simply at the emergent point of our sense of understanding of how life really is. And what it is truly all about