The Essential Path

Neale will be well known to many readers for his many books beginning with the Conversations with God series back in the 90s – indeed, we devoted a one-day seminar to his work in 1996, attended by 35 people. This latest book, as the title suggests, is a challenge to our species to recognise our true spiritual nature and its implications. At a time of alienation, us versus them, we need to question our basic assumption of separateness and that survival represents our fundamental drive. Neale proposes that we need to go beyond ideas represented by both traditional religions and materialism to a more transcendent position that combines two insights: who we are as spiritual beings manifesting physically, and what we are as one essence manifesting individually, hence we are both a Spiritual Being and One Being. This means that We Are All One and can make a decision to embrace this view and live out its implications. Scientific materialists could accept the second proposition, but not the first, if the word life were substituted for essence, so it would have been useful for Neale to have articulated this as a way of appealing to his Group Two, also in terms of ecological connectedness and interdependence. As he says, the implications of fully embracing this view are revolutionary in all spheres of life, but I think different arguments will appeal to different sets of people. However, the succinct case he makes is well worth reading and applying the implications to our lives and systems in the long path towards becoming a more awakened species.