“Right” and “Wrong” Are Not Fixed – An Incredible Excerpt from Neale Donald Walsch
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The changing right and wrong
People’s ideas of “right” and “wrong” change—and have changed—over and over again from culture to culture, time period to time period, religion to religion, place to place… even from family to family and person to person. What many people considered “right” at one time— burning people at the stake for what was considered witchcraft, as an example—is considered “wrong” today.
A definition of “right” and “wrong” is a definition established not only by time, but also by simple geography. Notice that some activities on our planet (prostitution, for instance) are illegal in one place, and, just a few miles down the road, legal in another. And so, whether a person is judged as having done something “wrong” is not a matter of what that person has actually done, but of where he has done it.
Individuals and smaller groups must affect larger groups— and, ultimately, the largest group of all, which is ALL humankind—for there to be permanent and significant change on our planet.
Our world, and the condition it is in, is a reflection of the total, combined consciousness of everyone living here. As you can see by looking around you, much work is left to be done. Unless of course, you are satisfied with your world as it is.
Surprisingly, most people are. That is why the world does not change.
Most people are satisfied with a world in which differences, not similarities, are honored, and disagreements are settled by conflict and war.
Most people are satisfied with a world in which survival is for the fittest, “might is right,” competition is required, and winning is called the highest good.
If such a system happens also to produce “losers”—so be it—so long as you are not among them.
Most people are satisfied, even though such a model produces people who are often killed when they are judged “wrong,” starved and rendered homeless when they are “losers,” oppressed and exploited when they are not “strong.”
Most people define “wrong” as that which is different from them. Religious differences, in particular, are not tolerated, nor are many social, economic, or cultural differences.
Exploitation of the underclass is justified by the self-congratulatory pronouncements from the upper class of how much better off their victims are now than they were before these exploitations. By this measure the upper class can ignore the issue of how all people ought to be treated if one were being truly fair, rather than merely making a horrible situation a tiny bit better—and profiting obscenely in the bargain.
Most people laugh when one suggests any kind of system other than the one currently in place, saying that behaviors such as competing and killing and the “victor taking the spoils” are what makes their civilization great! Most people even think there is no other natural way to be, that it is the nature of humans to behave in this manner, and that to act any other way would kill the inner spirit that drives man to succeed. No one asks the question, “Succeed at what?”
Difficult as it is for truly enlightened beings to understand, most people on our planet believe in this philosophy, and that is why most people don’t care about the suffering masses, the oppression of minorities, the anger of the underclass, or the survival needs of anyone but themselves and their immediate families.
Most people do not see that they are destroying their Earth —the very planet which gives them Life—because their actions seek only to enhance their quality of life. Amazingly, they are not far-sighted enough to observe that short-term gains can produce long-term losses, and often do—and will.
Most people are threatened by group consciousness, a concept such as the collective good, a one-world overview, or a God who exists in unity with all creation, rather than separate from it.
This fear of anything leading to unification and our planet’s glorification of all that separates produces division, disharmony, discord—yet we do not seem to have the ability even to learn from our own experience, and so we continue our behaviours, with the same results.
The inability to experience the suffering of another as one’s own is what allows such suffering to continue. Separation breeds indifference, false superiority. Unity produces compassion, genuine equality.
The events which occur on our planet—which have occurred regularly for 3,000 years—are a reflection of the collective consciousness of our group— the whole group on our planet.
That level of consciousness could best be described as primitive.
The Hitler experience
The Hitler Experience was made possible as a result of group consciousness. Many people want to say that Hitler manipulated a group—in this case, his countrymen—through the cunning and the mastery of his rhetoric. But this conveniently lays all the blame at Hitler’s feet—which is exactly where the mass of the people want it.
But Hitler could do nothing without the cooperation and support and willing submission of millions of people. The subgroup which called itself Germans must assume an enormous burden of responsibility for the Holocaust. As must, to some degree, the larger group called Humans, which, if it did nothing else, allowed itself to remain indifferent and apathetic to the suffering in Germany until it reached so massive a scale that even the most cold-hearted isolationists could no longer ignore it.
You see, it was collective consciousness which provided fertile soil for the growth of the Nazi movement. Hitler seized the moment, but he did not create it.
It’s important to understand the lesson here. A group consciousness which speaks constantly of separation and superiority produces loss of compassion on a massive scale, and loss of compassion is inevitably followed by loss of conscience.
A collective concept rooted in strict nationalism ignores the plights of others, yet makes everyone else responsible for yours, thus justifying retaliation, “rectification,” and war.
Auschwitz was the Nazi solution to—an attempt to “rectify”—the “Jewish Problem.”
The horror of the Hitler Experience was not that he perpetrated it on the human race, but that the human race allowed him to.
The astonishment is not only that a Hitler came along, but also that so many others went along.
The shame is not only that Hitler killed millions of Jews, but also that millions of Jews had to be killed before Hitler was stopped.
The purpose of the Hitler Experience was to show humanity to itself.
– Neale Donald Walsch
