January/February 2012 Everyday Intention
One Journey to Discover the Divine
by Ellen Dickstein
Human beings must find a common ground if our battles are ever to end. Remarkably, that common ground lies at the very heart of the spiritual traditions that currently divide us, according to Guy Finley, author of The Seeker, The Search, The Sacred.
Guy Finley
The clearer the truth of our common spiritual bond, the greater the possibility of a new understanding that can help heal our planet. Finley’s One Journey Project aims to spread this important message worldwide.
“We are all one,” Finley says. “If we all knew it, we could not hurt one another. By sharing this message, perhaps we can change the world.”
Q. What is the One Journey Project?
A. We have created the One Journey Project to help the whole world remember something that’s been forgotten: Even though we all are different people, living in different places — captured by different purposes relative to our culture — underlying all of that, there isn’t one of us who doesn’t hurt, who doesn’t fear uncertainty. And, at the same time, who doesn’t share in something celestial that’s capable of answering all our heartaches.
The One Journey Project makes evident an amazing, mostly unseen fact: Using a chronological presentation of spiritual knowledge, handed down since the beginning of time and repeated in beautiful ways depending on the time and culture — it makes evident that there has always been only one divine life, and that all human beings everywhere are a part of it.
Q. Religions have so many varied forms, but what is the common thread running through all of them?
A. Have you ever met anybody who didn’t want to be loved? Even from infancy, we’re reaching out. We don’t just want to hold something, we want to be held. Now you can’t be attracted to something — you can’t want the love of something — without the love of something being in you
If you want to find love, it wouldn’t even dawn on you to search for it if love weren’t already in you. So the journey is discovering that what you’re looking for, you are being set out to find by love itself. Divine love is looking for you.
Q. Since religions have developed to help people find that connection to divine love, why is there so much dissension among religions?
A. First, real religion has nothing to do with what people see today. The word “religion” itself, the ancient meaning of it, was that a human being was intended to reconnect with that which is divine. So now, the process of the idea of finding something is replaced with the idea of realizing something.
If I only have to realize something, then the real purpose of religion is to remind me that I have to realize something — not to send me out searching for something and then have authorities telling me, “No. You’re doing this wrong.” And that’s where you have war between religious groups — my idea of where to find and how to do and receive is different from your idea. But all of those ideas are predicated on a mistaken understanding of the true nature of religion.
Q. The One Journey Project website features The Living Book. What can we learn from it?
A. All of our individual stories make up an incredible drama. But as individuals mature, we begin to grow weary of the drama. We recognize that it is produced by a certain dependency on things outside of ourselves. In that understanding, we are weaned away from the drama.
Now you go back 5,000 years, and you have an individual who one day awakens to the fact that there is a completely different kind of life they’re meant to have. They begin to make notes — to write down ideas. From those notes, traditions and religions, spiritual paths and disciplines are created.
You take all those ideas, from the beginning all the way through the present time, and you look at them all at once, and you realize, “Wait a minute. Everyone is saying the same thing. I thought there was this story and that story. But it’s all one story.”
Over time a “living book” has been created, but no one has ever seen the whole book at once. Onejourney.net presents the whole book at once, and then invites everyone who sees it to submit from their own discipline or religious background, that which corresponds to this one great story. The result is a perpetual book that will move through time — electronically now — in which individuals can collectively and individually share in the new understanding that it is one story, and that we are individual tellers of it.
Q. It is so powerful when you look at all of these quotations from 5,000 years ago until today from all over the world, and you begin to realize they’re all sharing the same message. You realize it is my story too, and I can go on the same inner journey that all of these people have, and make the discoveries for myself.
A. Because it is one journey.
Q. If enough people began to realize this, do you think it really is possible for the world to change?
A. If just you or I change, the world changes. How much more so when you can introduce an idea that challenges the nonsensical, fanatical distinctions that people hold between different groups? And every little degree to which something is changed, changes the whole. The true butterfly effect. That’s the hope.
Guy Finley is the bestselling author of The Secret of Letting Go, The Courage to Be Free and 40 other works that have sold over a million copies in 20 languages worldwide. Visit www.onejourney.net.
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