Preparation

"You must become sober about yourself and your life." ... "You must rise above your preoccupations and your petty interests and concerns."

"It takes far longer to prepare than it does to act."

"Time is of the essence then. You need this time to consider where you live, how you live, how you can get about, where you will be able to provision yourself, where those provisions might be and to build a network of support with your friends, family and neighbors who are living in your proximity. This will give you time to relieve yourself of unnecessary possessions, activities or obligations that are draining your energy away from this primary focus and emphasis."

"Do not set out on it unless you intend to complete it[the preparation]."

Directives

"BEGIN TO PREPARE YOUR OWN LIFE FOR A FUTURE THAT WILL BE UNLIKE THE PAST.

Begin with little things, and build from there—

where you live,

how you travel,

where you work.

Are these things going to be able to be sustained into the future?

Are you where you need to be geographically?

Are you with the people you need to be with?

Are you doing the things you really need to be doing right now?" 

Learn how to prepare for a future that will be unlike the past."

"You are asked to receive, not to judge.

You are asked to prepare for the world, not to use religion as a form of escape.

You are asked to honor your deeper nature and to take the Steps to Knowledge so that its reality can become apparent to you.

You are asked to end your ceaseless conflicts and to never think that you can conduct violence here on Earth in the name of God, for that is an abomination. There are no holy warriors. There is nothing holy about war.

You are asked to learn and to prepare for a new world and to prepare for the realities and challenges and opportunities of emerging into a larger arena of intelligent life in the universe.

You cannot teach yourself these things, for you do not know enough.

And to argue against it is only to project your own limits and misunderstanding."

"This is not a time for confusion, ambivalence or complacency.

This is a time to meet a greater challenge. This is a time to prepare yourself for things you cannot even comprehend.

This is a time to follow Knowledge and to regain your true power and direction, which are yours to reclaim and which are needed now for you to begin the preparation."

"Fear will not prepare you. Wishful thinking will not prepare you. Saying everything will be wonderful will not prepare you. You must prepare. Let Knowledge motivate you. Let your deeper sense of what is right and correct motivate you. Nothing is being asked of you except to receive the gift of Knowledge that is being given to your world through this Teaching."

"Hold onto the idea that you are here to serve others. Nurture this idea. But open yourself to learning to be served. You cannot serve others if your development is being neglected, obstructed or denied. How do you learn to be served? By identifying and receiving the answer that is being given to you as the result of your request to know your purpose, your meaning and your direction in life. The answer is always a form of preparation. At a certain stage of your development, there will be a specific training or preparation for advancement. Before this, there is learning lessons, interacting with others and making mistakes in life. But at a certain point, it becomes a formal preparation. This preparation requires practice and dedication; it has structure and form, and so forth. Perhaps you will go through several different preparations of this kind until you find the one which will carry you across the bridge from your personal reality into a Greater Reality which is waiting to be discovered. Here you must learn a practice, a spiritual practice."

"Therefore, the preparation is great. Do not set out on it unless you intend to complete it. Do not dabble with it. That will not give you anything. You will not understand it, and you will not be in a position to evaluate it."

Preparing for Contact

"Humanity’s preparation for the appearance of forces from the Greater Community is far behind schedule. Many important people have not responded. And the intrusion into the world has accelerated at a far greater pace than was originally thought to be possible."

"The Greater Community is what you are preparing for. Of course you don't see this, at least not yet. From where you are looking, all you see are the immediate things of your life. And what you speculate may happen tomorrow is based upon these things. However, when you have a greater perspective and can see further afield and can see what is coming on the horizon for humanity, then you will have the incentive to prepare and to educate yourself and others."

"What you are preparing for is greater than what your parents or your grandparents had to face." ... "You are preparing for a world that must establish a world community. You are preparing as a race to encounter intelligent life from beyond the world and to become engaged and involved, inadvertently, in a larger scheme of affairs, conflicts and interactions that are occurring in this part of the Greater Community."

"The Intervention and the growing chaos in the world will strengthen your commitment to Knowledge and your preparation. God has given the preparation. There is no other way to prepare."

"If you prepare consciously and wisely, you and future generations will have a greater opportunity to live and to realize the great rewards of being part of a Greater Community of life. However, if you fail to be aware of the need for preparation or if you do not prepare wisely or effectively, then life will become more harsh and difficult, and the challenges will seem abrupt and overwhelming. You will be taken by surprise, and you will not be ready."

The internal preparation needed before the Great Waves

"Most of the preparation for the Great Waves is internal—what you can face, what can you see, what can you know, what can you do."

"And when time does run out, may the inner work be sufficient so that the Ark be sound and float amidst the rising waters."

The outer preparation before the Great Waves of change

"Once the internal work is sufficient, then the outer work becomes the main focus. You have time now to do this inner work. In the future, you will not have this time."

"Community preparedness is so vitally important, even in outlying rural areas. You will have to have enough provisions to provide for yourself in the interim, to support people who may come to you who have nothing, to consider the predicament for elderly persons living in your proximity and to have enough resources to provide for them if necessary or to assist them. This will make the difference between a set of circumstances being difficult and being catastrophic."

Lack of preparation

"The shock of the future will be a shock because you are unprepared. You have not been paying attention. You have been obsessed with other things of little or no significance. You have been caught up in the affairs of the day and in your own feelings, memories and regrets, not mindful of the world around you. With preparation, there is no shock. There is only confirmation. Even that which is shocking will not overwhelm you. It will surprise and dismay you perhaps in the moment, but you will not be overtaken by it. You will not be paralyzed by it, frozen in fear, without any idea of what to do. When the ship begins to list and takes on water, you will be ready. You will not be frozen. You will not go down with the ship."

"Humanity is not prepared. If you think about this, if you look about and see where people are investing themselves; what preoccupies people everywhere; where they devote their time, their energy and their resources; what they think is important and what predominates their attention, you will see that very few people can yet bear witness to the great events that are occurring now and that will come."

Unconscious expectation without preparation

"The fact that humanity is unprepared for the realities of contact with life in the universe is very apparent, but at a more unconscious level, people are anticipating this, and that is why it emerges in your movies, in your books, in human imagination."

"Perhaps your life has been changing internally and externally as if in preparation for something great that you would have to serve and be a part of. If this is your experience, then you can be certain that you are preparing for the new world, however unconsciously."

Living for the moment

"Living for the moment is really to position yourself to be a victim of the world. That is like saying, 'I will be happy if everything is going my way,' but things are not going to go your way even though you will try to control yourself and other people to bring about desired outcomes, things are not really going to go your way, not always, not often. So to say, 'I live for the moment' is to say 'I will become dependent upon my circumstances to make me happy.' And when your circumstances disappoint you, you will fall into darkness within yourself. When your body becomes ill or disabled, you will be hopeless and helpless because the greater incentive is not there to drive you on."

"You cannot live only for the moment now. Snap out of that dream! It is a fool’s paradise. You must live in the moment and prepare for the future all at once. This is what the birds and the bees do. This is what you as an intelligent creature on earth must do."

"The requirement of life at this time" ... "is to live in the moment and to prepare for the future appropriately and accordingly."

"Life in the world has changed, yet humanity has not responded. The situation has become critical, and yet people act as if nothing were happening beyond their own personal interests. And as long as they have a job and are free to carry on their pleasurable hobbies, what does it matter? When people think like this, they are headed for catastrophe. They do not see the early warning signs of what is coming. They do not feel the inclinations and the signals from Knowledge. They are unresponsive to themselves and to the world, and they think their discomfort is simply a psychological problem."

The Great Preparation

"The Greater Community Way of Knowledge is a very great preparation. It is great because it meets a great need in the world."

"Your preparation will restore you and redeem you to your real purpose and meaning in life. Where you have come from, you are important. When you are in the world, you are not important until you find the importance that you experienced and that you knew before you came here."

"People often ask, 'How can I find my purpose in life? What is my purpose in life? How can I gain access to my spiritual nature? How can I discover why I am in the world and what I am here to do?' All of these are important questions, but they call for a form of preparation and not simply an answer. In fact, the form of preparation is the answer. How could there be any other kind of answer? What other answer could there be? If you told people the truth about their lives, it would not help them unless they were in a position to receive it, accept it, and put it into practice. How could they be in this position unless they had advanced through the stages of development that await them? So, the correct answer is a process of development."

"The Creator and the Unseen Ones want to prepare humanity for the Greater Community. In fact, this is the most important need of humanity at this time."

"Into this grave situation the Creator of all life has sent a preparation, a teaching of spiritual ability and discernment, power and accomplishment. We are students of such a teaching, as are many throughout the universe. This teaching is a form of Divine intervention. It does not belong to any one world. It is not the property of any one race. It is not centered around any hero or heroine, any one individual. Such a preparation is now available. It will be needed. From our perspective, it is the only thing currently that can give humanity an opportunity to become wise and discerning regarding your new life in the Greater Community."

Metaphors for preparation

"When the ship begins to list and take on water, you will be ready. You will not be frozen. You will not go down with the ship."

See Also

Building your ark

Climate change

Human emergence into the Greater Community

The Intervention

The Watchtower

Time and energy

Further Study

• The Journey to a New Life, Chapter 10: Courage and the Will to Prepare

• Greater Community Spirituality, Chapter 10: How Do You Prepare?

• Greater Community Spirituality, Chapter 11: What Is Your Preparation For?

• The New World Prophecy: Food, Water and Energy

• Living The Way of Knowledge, Chapter 1: Living in an Emerging World

• Living The Way of Knowledge, Chapter 11: Preparing for the Future

• Preparing for the Greater Community

• Preparing for the Great Waves of Change