Excerpt from Conversations with God
Editor’s Note: For the next several months this space will be used to explore — one-by-one — the messages, metaphysical principles, and spiritual meaning of the material found in the nearly 3,000 pages of the Conversations with God dialogues. This series of observations and interpretations is offered with my continuing disclaimer: I could be wrong about all of this.
CWG Explored/Installment #7: How long does Mastery take?
In my last column here I wrote:
What does it take to change the Self? What is required to transmogrify? Does it take a long, long time? Years and years of study, effort, and practice? Was Malcolm Gladwell right in his 2008 book, Outliers, in which he hypothesized that it takes 10,000 hours to reach mastery at anything? Could this include reaching mastery at Mastery?
I promised that I would touch on this in my next entry of this series…and so here we are. And the answer, as most of you know, is no, it does not take 10,000 hours to reach mastery at Mastery.
First of all, in my awareness it is not a question of reaching Mastery, but of returning to it. There is nothing we have to learn — not a single thing — to “reach mastery.”
In my lectures and spiritual renewal workshops I often point to a tree outside the window and ask, “What has that magnificent oak, standing there in its majesty under the splendor of its canopy, learned in the years of its growth?”
The answer, of course, is: “Nothing. Not a thing. Everything the tree needed to know to become its glorious self was encoded in the seed, no bigger than your fingernail, from which it sprung. The tree had merely to grow into what it was programmed at the outset to always become.
“Now if God so loved the tree that it encoded in its seed everything it needed in order to become what it was created to become, would God not all the more encode you?”
The answer, of course, is “Yes.” And God has.
Therefore, there is nothing for you to learn, and it does not take 10,000 hours to learn nothing. “Ah, but,” — you might say — “it took 10,000 hours and more for the tree to grow into the fullness of its magnificent self.” And that, indeed, is true. Growth takes time.
For trees.
Growth for humans takes no time at all, because we are not talking about physical growth — we are not talking about growth of the Body (or even the Mind) — we are talking about growth of the Soul . . . and such a thing is not only not required, it is impossible.
That which is whole cannot grow to become whole. That which is complete cannot grow to become complete. That which exists in its ultimate totality cannot grow to become its ultimate totality. It already is that which the Mind might imagine that it seeks to become.
The Soul simply desires to experience that which it Already and Always Is: the Individuation of Divinity, the Expression of Divine Consciousness in Singular Form. Or, if you please, a Singularization of The Singularity.
So if growth is not necessary, then what is necessary for humans to reach the State of Mastery?
Awareness. And its expansion.
And this is a function of the Mind, not of the Soul, as I have experienced it.
The Journey of the Soul through Time and Space is the process by which the Soul expands the Awareness of the Mind, so that the Mind may then use the Body to express and experience in physicality the total being’s True Nature and Only Identity.
Thus, the three-part being that constitutes every member of the human species becomes the living expression of Divinity — or the out-picturing, if you will, of that which was encoded in its DNA (Divine Natural Awareness) at the outset.
(Of course, there is no such thing as the outset, since “outset” suggests a “beginning” — and no such thing exists in the realm of Time/No Time within which Divinity expresses).
And so, it takes no Time at all to achieve Mastery. Yet it may take what you call “time” in your illusory world for your Mind to experience Mastery, and your Body to demonstrate it.
Even within the context of your illusory world, however, this is not a process of learning or achieving or becoming something you are not, but of simply realizing and expressing what you are, have always been, and will always be.
This can be experienced in “Earth time” in an instant. It does not have to take 10,000 hours. And it can if you wish it to, or if you think that it must. But it can also be experienced in an instant. And, indeed, it has been already for nearly every human being.
Many people can remember a time when, for whatever reason, and perhaps only for the blink of an eye, they suddenly and inexplicably “knew” everything. They knew who they were, they knew themselves as one with all, they knew that there was nothing they had to do to fully experience their reason for being here, they knew the deep peace and simple joy that comes from knowing that.
There is scarcely a person anywhere who has not had at least one such instant, one moment of what we have come to call “mastery” of life on this planet. It may have been when they were nine minutes old, or nine weeks old, or nine months old, or nine years old, or nineteen years old, or ninety years old, or in one of the moments between, but they, and most of us, have had at least one instant in which total mastery of life was experienced.
Of course, a statement like that begs the question: What is “mastery”? How is it defined?
For me, “mastery” is defined as “the fullest expression of the fullness of my being.” That is, the total expression of the totality of my Self.
Yet in order for me to know and to recognize that I have had such an experience, I would have to know (and be able to explain to my Mind) what my “Self” is.
What is the Self that I am seeking to express in fullness?
We’ll look at that next.
Below is the third installment of a continuing series of entries from the CWG book Tomorrow’s God. If you have not yet read this text, and if you have even the slightest interest in your future and the future of your children and your grandchildren, you will find the ongoing postings here to be of utmost importance. I invite you to return to this space often to capture updates in the ongoing progression through this remarkable book.
This book is a conversation between Neale Donald Walsch and God. The words spoken by God are in blue.
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Chapter One
The Greatest Blasphemy
We need a new God.
I know.
No. I’m serious. We need a new God. The old God isn’t working anymore.
The old one never worked.
Some people think it did.
They were not looking at the world around them.
They weren’t?
Not honestly. Not comprehensively. They were seeing only what they wanted to see.
They were not seeing the cruelty and the fighting and the killing that was going on in God’s name. They were not seeing the separation and the oppression and the fear and the utter dysfunction. Or, worse yet, they were seeing it and they played into it. They used it as a means of controlling the people.
In truth the old God, Yesterday’s God, might have made individual lives work here and there—perhaps even many of them—but that God was never able to create a just society or a joyful, harmonious civilization, to say nothing of a peaceful world. And that God can’t do that even today.
Even today, with all your powers of instant communication and total connection and advanced comprehension and increased awareness and sophisticated technology and marvelous miracles, you can’t produce the simple, humble experience for which humanity has yearned from the beginning of time.
You can’t produce peace.
I know.
You can’t produce lasting joy.
I know.
And the God in whom you believe can’t, either.
Why? Why? Why can’t all the best efforts of humanity and all the help we’ve begged for, and received from God, produce this result?
Because the God in whom you believe isn’t real. The God in whom you believe is made up. It is a God you created out of thin air, having nothing to do with Ultimate Reality.
Well, there’s a challenging thought. That’s just about the greatest blasphemy.
All great truth begins as blasphemy.
The time to challenge your most sacred beliefs is at hand. If you don’t challenge your beliefs soon, your beliefs are going to challenge you.
This book is meant to be challenging.
This book is meant to save the world.
Will it?
That’s up to the world.
Why? Why isn’t it up to you? If you’re God, why isn’t it up to you?
Because my function is not to save the world. My function is to create it.
And after you create it, you don’t care what happens?
I care what happens as much as you do.
No, you don’t. If you care what happens as much as we do, you won’t let the world destroy itself.
You mean if I care what happens more than you do. If I care what happens as much as you do, I will let the world destroy itself, because that’s exactly what you are doing.
Since I care only as much as you do, the world in which you live may very well be destroyed. At the very least, life as you now know it could be irrevocably altered. And if that’s what happens, I will let it happen.
Why? Why won’t you do something to stop it?
Because you won’t.
We can’t. You can. You’re God. You can do what humans cannot.
Your statement is inaccurate. I can, and YOU can. But I will not, unless you do.
Why not? What kind of a God are you?
The best kind there is. The only kind there is. The kind who gives you free will, and who will never, ever interfere with that.
Not even to save us from ourselves?
If I saved you from yourselves, then you wouldn’t BE “yourselves,” but only a slave to me. You would not have free will. Your will would be free only until you did something that I did not want you to do. Then, I would stop the exercise of your free will and make you do what I want you to do.
Of course you would. If you were half the God that humans think you are, you would stop us from destroying ourselves. You would do what is best for us. You would make us do what is best for us.
By whose assessment, and by whose definition?
What?
“Best” by whose assessment, and “us” by whose definition?
By yours. By your assessment. By your definition. You would define what is meant by the term “us,” you would decide what is “best” for us, and then you would make what is “best” happen for all of “us.” We depend on you to do this. That’s what God is for.
Really? Is that what you think?
Below is the second installment of a continuing series of entries from the CWG book Tomorrow’s God. If you have not yet read this text, and if you have even the slightest interest in your future and the future of your children and your grandchildren, you will find the ongoing postings here to be of utmost importance. I invite you to return to this space often to capture updates in the ongoing progression through this remarkable book.
— Neale Donald Walsch
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Tomorrow’s God says that the next thirty years will see a paradigm shift within humanity so positive, so reshaping, so utterly inside-outing, that it will alter the course of human history. And it invites you—yes, you, the person now reading this—to join in this reinventing of humanity. That is why this book has been written. It is an invitation directly from God to you.
Think about this. Now think about how this writing came to your attention. How did you come to hear about it? Or, if you never knew about it until just this minute, how did it attract your attention? What made you pick this up and start reading it? For that matter, what makes you keep reading it? Do you think this is all happening by chance?
It is not. There is no such thing as “chance.” The universe does nothing by accident. This book has come to you to tell you that you can change the course of human history. You. Not only the people who run governments or own corporations or lead movements or write books or are influential for some other reason. Not only those people. You. You can change the course of human history.
This is not an exaggeration. Please believe me. This is not an exaggeration. This book calls you to that singular undertaking. It invites you now to internalize the wisdom of both ancient and contemporary masters found here; not merely to hear it again, but now to receive it, to take it in, to absorb it at the deepest level of your being, until it becomes the essence of who you are at the cellular level.
Life will be inviting you in the years immediately ahead to act and respond from this level of Deep Knowing. What you place there now in terms of the things you profoundly believe, and how far you spread the messages found here through the living of your life in a new way, will make all the difference in the world to the world.
Yet do not feel that you have to do all this by yourself. Perhaps the most uplifting and exciting part of the message that is brought to us in this book is that now, none of us have to “go it alone.” We have teammates, and we can join them and call them to us, to rally around humanity’s greatest cause: changing ourselves and changing our world.
I said earlier that you might not find much that is new in this book. I was wrong. You might find…a New You. And a way to create a New World.
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In our next installment — PART ONE: Redesigning God
Below is the first installment of a continuing series of entries from the CWG book Tomorrow’s God. If you have not yet read this text, and if you have even the slightest interest in your future and the future of your children and your grandchildren, you will find the ongoing postings here to be of utmost importance. I invite you to return to this space often to capture updates in the ongoing progression through this remarkable book.
— Neale Donald Walsch
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The book Tomorrow’s God contains the most exciting news of the past 100 years: Humanity is about to create a new form of spirituality on the earth. Our civilization stands at the brink of its greatest adventure and its most extraordinary achievement.
I want you to commit now to finding your place in that creation. This book is a look at Tomorrow’s God. It is about humanity’s future—but not some far-off distant vision. Rather, it includes a startling prediction for the next thirty years. It is about our near future, and the role that humans will play in creating it. It is about the role that you can play in creating it. It is about what will happen and how it will happen.
Like the other With God books, this text takes the form of a conversation with God, but it is not necessary to believe that I actually had such a conversation in order to benefit from it. All that is necessary is that you have an open mind—and this book even tells you how to achieve that.
But now, fair warning. You will find information in this book that is not new to you. Very little here cannot be found, cumulatively, in the sacred writings of all the world’s wisdom traditions. Very little has not already been spoken by all of humanity’s master teachers. Very little, for that matter, has not appeared in my own previous writing.
What, then, would be the reason to read this book? I suggest that it is not that it contains wisdom that we have not been given, but that it repeats wisdom to which we have not been listening.
And the problem is, if we do not listen to this wisdom now, we may not have many more chances to have it repeated.
We are at the edge, you see. We have gone as far as we can go in the direction we have been taking. We need now to change course if we wish to preserve life as we know it on this planet.
Humanity cannot afford any more temper tantrums. We have found a way to pack the end of the world into a briefcase. We can seal the death of civilized society in a spore-filled envelope and simply mail it off. Talk about our fate being sealed…
We have trained ourselves to be able to fly airplanes into buildings, killing thousands of people, without flinching. We have talked ourselves into believing that preemptive strike—shooting first and asking questions later—is a perfectly acceptable means of conducting foreign policy.
We have decided that to have dominion over the earth means to destroy it—and to pretend that we don’t know we are doing it. We have concluded that altering the basic genetic structure of our food is the way to improve it. We have chosen to allow 20 percent of the world’s people to receive 80 percent of the world’s income, and to call this the good life.
We are, in short, confused. Yet there is a way out of this confusion, and you can play a role in taking us there. This book talks about your role.
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THE ENTIRE TEXT of Tomorrow’s God is going to be posted here, excerpt by excerpt. I dearly hope you will read it, and allow it to change your life as it has changed the lives of thousands of people around the world.
— NDW
Divine inspiration is the birthright of every human being. You are all very special. You simply do not know that. You do not believe it. Your religions have told you that you are not. They have told you that you are sinners, that you are unworthy, that only a very few among you have achieved a level of worthiness to be inspired directly by God — and that all of those people are dead. They have convinced you that no one living today could possibly achieve that level of worthiness, and, hence, no book written today could possibly contain sacred truths or the Word of God.
To tell you otherwise would be to leave open the possibility that another master, another prophet, another messenger of God could come along, bringing new revelations and opening you to new understandings – and that is something that already established organized religions could not abide.
And so, while your world’s religions may not be able to agree on which book contains the highest truth and deepest wisdom and the True Word of God, there is one thing on which they are able to agree. And that is whatever book it is, it’s an old one. It could not be a new book written today.
God’s direct revelations ended long ago, your religions agree. Only old sacred books can contain divine revelation. Most people can accept that God’s great truths have come to humans through humans. They simply cannot accept that this could be true of humans living today.
This is how you think. This is how you have it constructed. If it’s old, it’s worthy; if it’s new, it’s unworthy. If it’s old, it’s true; if it’s new, it’s wrong. If it’s old, it’s right; if it’s new, it’s wrong. If it’s old, it’s good; if it’s new, it’s bad. This peculiar mindset is what makes progress on your planet so difficult, and evolution so time-consuming.
What complicates all this is that, as you have constructed it, this mindset applies only to things – that is, inanimate objects – and to ideas. Ironically, when it comes to people you have it constructed the other way around. If it’s new, it’s worthy; if it’s old, it’s unworthy. Thus, your society dismisses out of hand some of the brightest new ideas and some of the wisest older people.
The stubborn tendency of human beings to cling to their past, to refuse innovation or new thinking until they are forced to do so by an ultimately embarrassing weight of evidence, has been slowing your evolutionary process for millennia. You are facing now a new and startling danger – a danger posed to your entire species. A threat to your very survival posed by the combination of a split in ideology and an advance in technology, which makes it possible for you to seek to resolve your differences with tools of human destruction unlike anything you may have heretofore dreamed of in your worst nightmare.
There are five things you can choose now if changing your world, and the self-destructive direction in which it is moving, is what you wish to achieve.
- You can choose to acknowledge that some of your old beliefs about God and about Life are no longer working.
- You can choose to acknowledge that there is something you do not understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which will change everything.
- You can choose to be willing for a new understanding of God and Life to now be brought forth, an understanding that could produce a new way of life on your planet.
- You can choose to be courageous enough to explore and examine this new understanding, and, if it aligns with your inner truth and knowing, to enlarge your belief system to include it.
- You can choose to live your life as demonstrations of your highest and grandest beliefs, rather than as denials of them.
These are the Five Steps to Peace, and if you take them, you can shift everything on your planet.
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Excerpt from God’s portions of the dialogue in The New Revelations
You are not your body. Your body is something you have.
You are not your mind. Your mind is something you have.
You are not your soul. Your soul is something you have.
Who, then, are you?
You are the sum total of all of these things—a loving, caring, sensitive, compassionate sentient being that has these things—and each of these things has a purpose and a function that serves the agenda of all three.
This Body/Mind/Soul trio will be referred to in this self-exploration as The Totality of You.
The function of the Mind is to guarantee the survival of the current physicalization of The Totality of You for as long as it takes to fulfill the Soul’s Agenda.
The function of the Body is to gather data from the physical environment to assist the Mind in guaranteeing your survival, and to place within that environment, in physical form, the non-physical ideas, concepts, and decisions of the Mind.
The function of the Soul is to experience as many aspects as possible of Who and What It Really Is, using the Body, the Mind, and the physical environment in which It has placed Itself, as tools with which to accomplish this.
=== * ===
Because your Mind has been given little—or worse yet, totally inaccurate—information about the Soul’s Agenda (which is Life’s agenda), neither your Mind nor your Body can very often serve that agenda well—unless it is working in conjunction with the Soul.
Right now, if your Mind does not know what the Soul knows, your life could feel as if it’s being pulled in different directions. Indeed, your very purpose for being on Earth could wind up being compromised—if not completely ignored.
This is, in fact, the circumstance in which most of humanity finds itself today.
=== * ===
What must happen if you wish to live a life that serves its actual purpose is that your Mind must bring into its database that of which the Soul is already aware, so that you can produce the experience of it. The Soul holds Knowledge, while the Mind creates the Experience, of what you call Reality.
This is the very reason that The Totality of You came into the physical realm: to Experience that of which It has full Knowledge. Yet if the Mind’s data does not include the Soul’s Awareness, the continuing experiences the Mind creates will not be expressions of what the Soul knows—and that will not serve The Totality of You.
It is very important to understand that the “database” from which you may construct any present reality (i.e., the information that is stored within you), exists in two different places and is accessed in two different ways.
The challenge in human life is that most people do not know this—or do know it, but have not yet learned how to shift their point of focus from one well of information to the other at will…much less bring the two together.
What is being said here is that data about Life is held in “memory” within the Totality of You—and that one kind of memory is Physical, while the other is Metaphysical. The first kind of memory we have called Experience and the second, Knowledge. The first type of memory produces Desire (a yearning for more experience), the second reveals Intention (a yearning for a particular kind of experience—based on Knowledge, not prior Experience).
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As you may have guessed, the first kind of “memory” is held in the Mind, the second in the Soul. The Mind captures, categorizes, files, and brings forward memories of every experience your Body and Mind have ever had. The Soul is the repository of all Knowledge about Who You Are, Where You Are, Why You Are Where You Are, and all other aspects of Everlasting Life. This Knowledge is what has also been called here your Awareness. The terms are used synonymously.
As explained earlier, the sum of these two “data banks” is what humans call Consciousness. You no doubt have often heard the term “consciousness raising.” This refers to the increase or expansion of the Mind’s database—its limited storehouse of Experience–to include more of the Soul’s unlimited Knowledge or Awareness of Life.
Experience+Awareness=Consciousness.
The level of your Consciousness depends upon how much Experience you have had not only of your physical life, but also of your metaphysical life, the knowledge of which exists in your Soul’s Awareness.
When, in any particular moment, your Present Experience (that is, the experience you are now having, rather than your memories of previous experience) and your Present Awareness (that is, the awareness to which you now have given yourself access) are joined together, the Mind’s Desire and the Soul’s Intention become One.
This is, truly, a marriage made in heaven: the merging of the Mind and the Soul. And what God has joined together, let no man put asunder.
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The above excerpt is from The Only Thing That Matters, which the author, Neale Donald Walsch, has described as the most important writing he has been inspired to produce since Conversations with God-Book One
You may have already known that the Agenda of the Soul is something to which you should be paying attention, but it might not have been made clear to you just how important it is to your personal, earthly well-being.
Yes, not just to your spiritual well-being, but to your physical, psychological, emotional, social, and even financial well-being as well. There is nothing else in Life that can bring you security, health, prosperity, happiness, and inner peace faster or more abundantly than the achieving of Completion. This is, of course, the opposite of what you have been told. There are, you have been advised, many other things to which you must pay attention.
You have been told that to be happy in Life you need to get the guy, get the girl, get the car, get the job, get the house, get the spouse, get the kids, get the better job, get the better house, get the promotion, get the grandkids, get the gray hair, get the office in the corner, get the retirement watch, get the illness, get the burial plot, and then get out.
You have been told that you need to obey God’s commands, do God’s will, follow God’s law, spread God’s word, and fear God’s wrath, for when you face God’s judgment you will be begging for God’s mercy—and, depending on your offenses, you may not get it, but rather, may find yourself condemned to everlasting and unbearable torture in the fires of hell.
You have been told about the Survival of the Fittest and that To the Victor Go the Spoils, that Nice Guys Finish Last and that The One with the Most Toys Wins, that It’s Every Man for Himself and that The End Justifies the Means, that Money Doesn’t Grow on Trees and that You’re to Be Seen and Not Heard and that You Are Not to Color Outside the Lines and that You Made Your Bed and Now You Have to Lie in It.
You have been told that There Is Only One Way to Heaven and You’d Better Get It Right, that It’s Us Against Them, and that You Can’t Fight City Hall; that you should Never Raise Your Head Above the Crowd, that You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It, and that you should Never Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch.
Your Mind has been filled with many, many others messages that have created a day-to-day reality so far removed from your real reason for being on the Earth that it is a wonder you find any joy or excitement in life at all.
* * *
Now you are being told that the only thing that matters doesn’t have to do with any of this. The missing puzzle piece revolves around how you reach Completion on The Sacred Journey of the Soul. Can this be true?
It can, and it is.
But don’t worry; going where your Soul seeks to go will not deny you the Good Life. Completion of the Agenda of the Soul will get you everything that your Body and your Mind signal to you that they desire to enjoy.
This is not about giving up one aspect of Life for another. Trust that. Pay attention to the Soul’s Agenda, and to what it takes to complete it, and the rest of Life—not only what you desire, but all that you may imagine that you need—will take care of itself. It will take care of itself by itself.
Or, to paraphrase a far more eloquent statement:
Don’t go around asking,
“What are we to eat?” “What are we to drink?”
“Wherewithal shall we clothe ourselves?”
Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven,
and all else shall be added unto you.
The “Kingdom of Heaven” and “Completion of The Sacred Journey” refer to the same experience. The problem with both phrases is that no one has lately (if ever) explained or described to you what this experience is, and how to achieve it.
* * *
The Kingdom of Heaven is not a physical location, it is a State of Being. It is, in fact, the state of being “Complete.” And so it is perfect that the two phrases are used here interchangeably.
It is literally “heaven” for humans to find themselves in a state in which there is nothing left to be, do, or have in any given Moment in order to experience inner peace, total love, and absolute bliss, because All That Is and all that one could ever desire is fully present, fully expressed, and fully experienced Right Here, Right Now.
You are Complete.
The Agenda of the Soul is to bring The Totality of You to this very State, so that the aspect of Life that is called “you” may express, experience, reflect, demonstrate, and personify the aspect of Life that is called Divinity.
This is your Basic Instinct.
* * *
Survival is the Basic Instinct of most chemical or biological life forms. It is what makes flowers turn toward the sun. It is what makes birds fly to warmer climates. It is what makes turtles recede into their shells. It is what makes lions roar and rattlesnakes shake their rattle.
Survival is not, however, the Basic Instinct of human beings—nor of any sentient creatures in the cosmos who have evolved into Self Consciousness. For such beings, the Basic Instinct is Divinity.
If your Basic Instinct were survival, you would run away from the flames of the burning house. But you run into the flames, because you’ve heard a baby cry. In that Moment your survival is not the issue.
If your Basic Instinct were survival, you would turn away from the man with the gun. But you stand between the man and the person he is assaulting. In that Moment your survival is not the issue.
Something deep inside of you, something you cannot describe or name, calls to you in such Moments to demonstrate at the highest level Who You Really Are.
People who have done this, when interviewed by the newspapers later, never put it that way, of course. They say they simply acted on instinct.
But it surely could not have been survival instinct, for their actions defied survival. Yet they had no fear—not even a thought of fear—at the time, because Who They Really Are knows that survival is not the issue. It knows that their survival is guaranteed. There are no questions about whether they will survive, the only questions are: How? In what form? Why? And for what purpose?
These become, in moments of self-realization, Life’s Only Inquiries. And in moments of self-realization, the Mind and the Soul answer as One.
Instantly.
* * *
As a human, your Basic Instinct is on display when the Complete Being that is you is Completely Remembered, Recreated, Reintegrated, and Reunited with Divinity.
Even as the tiniest cell within you is a member of your Body, so is every element of physical Life a member of the Body of God. When the Mind’s Experience and the Soul’s Knowledge combine to produce elevated Consciousness, human beings choose to experience themselves once again as members of the Body of God. They are thus said to have Re-Membered.
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The above excerpt is from The Only Thing That Matters, which the author, Neale Donald Walsch, has described as the most important writing he has been inspired to produce since Conversations with God-Book One
GOD: If you believe that God is some omnipotent being who hears all prayers, says “yes” to some, “no” to others, and “maybe, but not now” to the rest, you are mistaken. By what rule of thumb would God decide?
If you believe that God is the creator and decider of all things in your life, you are mistaken.
God is the observer, not the creator. And God stands ready to assist you in living your life, but not in the way you might expect.
It is not God’s function to create, or uncreate, the circumstances or conditions of your life. God created you, in the image and likeness of God. You have created the rest, through the power God has given you. God created the process of life and life itself as you know it. Yet God gave you free choice, to do with life as you will.
In this sense, your will for you is God’s will for you.
You are living your life the way you are living your life, and I have no preference in the matter.
This is the grand illusion in which you have engaged: that God cares one way or the other what you do.
I do not care what you do, and that is hard for you to hear. Yet do you care what your children do when you send them out to play? Is it a matter of consequence to you whether they play tag, or hide and seek, or pretend? No, it is not, because you know they are perfectly safe. You have placed them in an environment which you consider friendly and very okay.
Of course, you will always hope that they do not hurt themselves. And if they do, you will be right there to help them, heal them, allow them to feel safe again, to be happy again, to go and play again another day. But whether they choose hide and seek or pretend will not matter to you the next day, either.
You will tell them, of course, which games are dangerous to play. But you cannot stop your children from doing dangerous things. Not always. Not forever. Not in every moment from now until death. It is the wise parent who knows this. Yet the parent never stops caring about the outcome. It is this dichotomy—not caring deeply about the process, but caring deeply about the result—that comes close to describing the dichotomy of God.
Yet God, in a sense, does not even care about the outcome. Not the ultimate outcome. This is because the ultimate outcome is assured.
And this is the second great illusion of man: that the outcome of life is in doubt.
It is this doubt about ultimate outcome that has created your greatest enemy, which is fear. For if you doubt outcome, then you must doubt Creator—you must doubt God. And if you doubt God, you must live in fear and guilt all your life.
If you doubt God’s intentions—and God’s ability to produce this ultimate result—then how can you ever relax? How can you ever truly find peace?
Yet God has full power to match intentions with results. You cannot and will not believe in this (even though you claim that God is all-powerful), and so you have to create in your imagination a power equal to God, in order that you may find a way for God’s will to be thwarted. And so you have created in your mythology the being you call “devil.” You have even imagined a God at war with this being (thinking that God solves problems the way you do). Finally, you have actually imagined that God could lose this war.
All of this violates everything you say you know about God, but this doesn’t matter. You live your illusion, and thus feel your fear, all out of your decision to doubt God.
But what if you made a new decision? What then would be the result?
I tell you this: you would live as the Buddha did. As Jesus did. As did every saint you have ever idolized.
Yet, as with most of those saints, people would not understand you. And when you tried to explain your sense of peace, your joy in life, your inner ecstasy, they would listen to your words, but not hear them. They would try to repeat your words, but would add to them.
They would wonder how you could have what they cannot find. And then they would grow jealous. Soon jealousy would turn to rage, and in their anger they would try to convince you that it is you who do not understand God.
And if they were unsuccessful at tearing you from your joy, they would seek to harm you, so enormous would be their rage. And when you told them it does not matter, that even death cannot interrupt your joy, nor change your truth, they would surely kill you. Then, when they saw the peace with which you accepted death, they would call you saint, and love you again.
For it is the nature of people to love, then destroy, then love again that which they value most.
But why? Why do we do that?
All human actions are motivated at their deepest level by one of two emotions—fear or love. In truth there are only two emotions—only two words in the language of the soul. These are the opposite ends of the great polarity which I created when I produced the universe, and your world, as you know it today.
These are the two points—the Alpha and the Omega—which allow the system you call “relativity” to be. Without these two points, without these two ideas about things, no other idea could exist.
Every human thought, and every human action, is based in either love or fear. There is no other human motivation, and all other ideas are but derivatives of these two. They are simply different versions—different twists on the same theme.
Think on this deeply and you will see that it is true. This is what I have called the Sponsoring Thought. It is either a thought of love, or fear. This is the thought behind the thought behind the thought. It is the first thought. It is prime force. It is the raw energy that drives the engine of human experience.
And here is how human behavior produces repeat experience after repeat experience; it is why humans love, then destroy, then love again: always there is the swing from one emotion to the other. Love sponsors fear sponsors love sponsors fear. . .
. . .And the reason is found in the first lie—the lie which you hold as the truth about God—that God cannot be trusted; that God’s love cannot be depended upon; that God’s acceptance of you is conditional; that the ultimate outcome is thus in doubt. For if you cannot depend on God’s love to always be there, on whose love can you depend? If God retreats and withdraws when you do not perform properly, will not mere mortals also?
. . .And so it is that in the moment you pledge your highest love, you greet your greatest fear.
For the first thing you worry about after saying “I love you” is whether you’ll hear it back. And if you hear it back, then you begin immediately to worry that the love you have just found, you will lose. And so all action becomes a reaction—defense against loss—even as you seek to defend yourself against the loss of God.
Yet if you knew Who You Are—that you are the most magnificent, the most remarkable, the most splendid being God has ever created—you would never fear. For who could reject such wondrous magnificence? Not even God could find fault in such a being.
But you do not know Who You Are, and you think you are a great deal less. And where did you get the idea of how much less than magnificent you are? From the only people whose word you would take on everything. From your mother and your father.
These are the people who love you the most. Why would they lie to you? Yet have they not told you that you are too much of this, and not enough of that? Have they not reminded you that you are to be seen and not heard? Have they not scolded you in some of the moments of your greatest exuberance? And, did they not encourage you to set aside some of your wildest imagining?
These are the messages you’ve received, and though they do not meet the criteria, and are thus not messages from God, they might as well have been, for they have come from the gods of your universe surely enough.
It was your parents who taught you that love is conditional—you have felt their conditions many times—and that is the experience you take into your own love relationships.
It is also the experience you bring to Me.
From this experience you draw your conclusions about Me. Within this framework you speak your truth. “God is a loving God,” you say, “but if you break His commandments, He will punish you with eternal banishment and everlasting damnation.”
For have you not experienced the banishment of your own parents? Do you not know the pain of their damnation? How, then, could you imagine it to be any different with Me?
You have forgotten what it was like to be loved without condition. You do not remember the experience of the love of God. And so you try to imagine what God’s love must be like, based on what you see of love in the world.
You have projected the role of “parent” onto God, and have thus come up with a God Who judges and rewards or punishes, based on how good He feels about what you’ve been up to. But this is a simplistic view of God, based on your mythology. It has nothing to do with Who I Am.
Having thus created an entire thought system about God based on human experience rather than spiritual truths, you then create an entire reality around love. It is a fear-based reality, rooted in the idea of a fearful, vengeful God. Its Sponsoring Thought is wrong, but to deny that thought would be to disrupt your whole theology. And though the new theology which would replace it would truly be your salvation, you cannot accept it, because the idea of a God Who is not to be feared, Who will not judge, and Who has no cause to punish is simply too magnificent to be embraced within even your grandest notion of Who and What God is.
This fear-based love reality dominates your experience of love; indeed, actually creates it. For not only do you see yourself receiving love which is conditional, you also watch yourself giving it in the same way. And even while you withhold and retreat and set your conditions, a part of you knows this is not what love really is. Still, you seem powerless to change the way you dispense it. You’ve learned the hard way, you tell yourself, and you’ll be damned if you’re going to leave yourself vulnerable again. Yet the truth is, you’ll be damned if you don’t.
[By your own (mistaken) thoughts about love do you damn yourself never to experience it purely. So, too, do you damn yourself never to know Me as I really am. Until you do. For you shall not be able to deny Me forever, and the moment will come for our Reconciliation.]
Every action taken by human beings is based in love or fear, not simply those dealing with relationships. Decisions affecting business, industry, politics, religion, the education of your young, the social agenda of your nations, the economic goals of your society, choices involving war, peace, attack, defense, aggression, submission; determinations to covet or give away, to save or to share, to unite or to divide—every single free choice you ever undertake arises out of one of the only two possible thoughts there are: a thought of love or a thought of fear.
Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms.
Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals.
Fear wraps our bodies in clothing, love allows us to stand naked. Fear clings to and clutches all that we have, love gives all that we have away. Fear holds close, love holds dear. Fear grasps, love lets go. Fear rankles, love soothes. Fear attacks, love amends.
Every human thought, word, or deed is based in one emotion or the other. You have no choice about this, because there is nothing else from which to choose. But you have free choice about which of these to select…
…You have been taught to live in fear. You have been told about the survival of the fittest and the victory of the strongest and the success of the cleverest. Precious little is said about the glory of the most loving. And so you strive to be the fittest, the strongest, the cleverest—in one way or another—and if you see yourself as something less than this in any situation, you fear loss, for you have been told that to be less is to lose.
And so of course you choose the action fear sponsors, for that is what you have been taught. Yet I teach you this: when you choose the action love sponsors, then will you do more than survive, then will you do more than win, then will you do more than succeed. Then will you experience the full glory of Who You Really Are, and who you can be.
To do this you must turn aside the teachings of your well-meaning, but misinformed, worldly tutors, and hear the teachings of those whose wisdom comes from another source.
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The above excerpt is from Conversations with God – Book One
One of the most controversial statements made in the Conversations with God dialogues was this pronouncement: “Nobody does anything inappropriate, given their model of the world” I was flabbergasted when I first heard this, and, of course, I asked God for an immediate explanation. “What can you possibly mean?”, I wanted to know. Here is the challenging exchange that followed…
GOD: I mean, no one ever sees their actions as “wrong.”
NEALE: But some peoples’ actions are wrong, whether they see them as that or not.
GOD: Perhaps this is a good time to bring up the Seventh New Revelation…
There is no such thing as Right and Wrong. There is only What Works and What Does Not Work, depending upon what it is that you seek to be, do or have.
NEALE: How can you say that? How can you say “there’s no such thing as right and wrong”?
GOD: Because it’s true. “Right” and “wrong” are figments of your imagination. They are judgments you are making, labels that you are creating as you go along. They are values that you are deciding upon, depending on what it is that you want, individually and as a society. When what you want changes, what you decide to call “right” and “wrong” changes. Your own history proves this.
NEALE: Nonsense. The basics don’t change.
GOD: They don’t?
NEALE: No.
GOD: Give me an example of a “basic” value that doesn’t change.
NEALE: Okay, killing. “Thou shalt not kill” doesn’t change. That’s a basic human value.
GOD: Unless what you want is to win a war.
NEALE: No fair. That’s self-defense. We have a right to defend ourselves.
GOD: Well, not all wars are wars of self-defense. Your planet has known such things as wars of aggression.
NEALE: Yes, but let’s not talk about them. That only complicates things.
GOD: I see.
NEALE: Our country never aggresses upon anyone. The only wars that we ever fight are wars of self-defense.
GOD: Your country only fights wars of self-defense?
NEALE: That’s right.
GOD: Of course it’s right.
NEALE: And what does that mean?
GOD: It means that you’ve just proven what I said before. There is not a country and there is not a group of people on earth that imagines itself to be an aggressor. Everyone who enters into war does so saying that they are defending something.
Do you see this now? I am making a repeated point of this because it is something you need to look at very closely.
On your planet there are no “attackers,” only “defenders.” You achieve this interesting paradox by simply calling all attack a defense. In this way you are able to change your basic values from moment to moment as it suits you, without seeming to change them at all.
You get to kill people with impunity to obtain what you want by simply saying that you had no choice. You had to defend yourself.
All attackers see their actions in this way. Indeed, you have seen your own attacks on others exactly this way. Not just in war, but in every situation of conflict in your life, from battlefields to bedrooms, command centers to board rooms. Nobody attacks, everybody defends.
Seeing another’s attack on you in this way can produce miracles. Yet you could never see another’s attacks in this way so long as you imagine that there is such a thing as “right” and “wrong.”
NEALE: This is very hard to swallow, I hope you know that. The idea of a world in which there is no such thing as right and wrong is very difficult to accept. It seems to me that we really do have some basic values here on this planet. Values shared by all people…or certainly, by most of them.
GOD: Well, don’t be shy. Give me another example.
NEALE: Okay, the prohibition against suicide. Most people consider that the taking of one’s own life is wrong. It is immoral.
GOD: Yes, on the question of ending one’s life, it is the current imaging of the majority of people on your planet that it is “not okay” to do that.
Similarily, many of you still insist that it is not okay to assist another who wishes to end his or her life.
In both cases you say this should be “against the law.” You have come to this conclusion, presumably, because of the ending of the life in question occurs relatively quickly. Actions which end a life over a somewhat longer period of time are not against the law, even though they achieve the same result.
Thus, if a person in your society kills himself with a gun, his family member lose insurance benefits. If he does so with cigarettes, they do not.
If your doctors assists you in your suicide it is called manslaughter, while if a tobacco company does, it is called commerce.
With you, it seems to be merely a question of time. The legality of self-destruction—the “rightness” or “wrongness” of it—seems to have much to do with how quickly the deed is done, as well as who is doing it. The faster the death, the more “wrong” is seems to be. The slower the death, the more it slips into “okayness.”
Interestingly, this is the exact opposite of what a truly humane society would conclude. By and reasonable definition of what you would call “humane,” the shorter the death, the better. Yet your society punishes those who would seek to do the humane thing, and rewards those who would do the insane.
It is insane to think that endless suffering is what God requires, and that a quick, humane ending to the suffering is “wrong.”
“Punish the humane, reward the insane.”
This is the motto which only a society of beings with limited understanding could embrace.
So you poison your system by inhaling carcinogens, you poison your system by eating food treated with chemicals that over the long run kill you, and you poison your system by breathing air which you have continually polluted. You poison your system in a hundred different ways over a thousand different moments, and you do this knowing these substances are no good for you. But because it takes a longer time to them to kill you, you commit suicide with impunity.
NEALE: What about stealing? It’s a basic human value that we don’t take from another that which is not ours.
GOD: Unless you think that another has no right to it, and you do.
NEALE: That’s not fair. If someone else has no right to something and we do, then, precisely because it is not theirs, but ours, we have a right to take it away from them.
GOD: Of course you do. According to your values, that is true. Particularly, your value called “ownership” (which we shall discuss later). Yet that is precisely my point. You are doing nothing here but proving my point.
My point is that your values change as your perceptions change. They change as your desires change, as the things you want change.
If you want something that another party thinks is theirs, and if you want it or imagine that you need it bad enough, you will justify yourself in taking it. Believe me. You have done this. You have done exactly this.
Values are a moveable feast. You cannot think of a single “basic human value” that has not been temporarily set aside, altered, or completely abandoned at one time or another by human beings who have simply changed their mind about what it is they wanted to be, do, or have in a particular moment.
If you think, therefore, that there is such a thing as absolute “right” and absolute “wrong,” you are deluding yourself.
NEALE: You mean, we are “wrong”?
GOD: That’s very clever, and it points up a major problem with your word “wrong.” It has for centuries been used in at least two different ways—to mean that which is “mistaken,” and to mean that which is “immoral.”
An action that is called “mistaken” is an action that does not produce a desired or predicted outcome.
An action that is called “immoral” is an action that violates some life code or larger law a society has put in place—or that a society imagines its Deity to have put in place.
The difficulty with morals, as I have just pointed out, is that they change from time to time and place to place, depending upon what it is a society or its members are trying to accomplish. Morality is, therefore, extremely subjective.
The difficulty with “mistakes” is that in religious societies or contexts they are often equated with moral failure, rather than simply operational failure. This makes it not merely inconvenient or unfortunate to have made a mistake, but sinful. In certain religious or morality-based cultures, normal human error can be considered an offense against God—punishable by severe and disproportionate sanctions or suffering.
We have already looked at some examples of this. Here are more:
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- He that curseth his father or his mother shall be put to death.
- A blasphemer shall be stoned to death.
- A woman who fails to wear a covering over her entire body may be whipped and beaten.
- A person who steals shall have his hand cut off.
Those who do not agree with such stringent, inflexible standards, to say nothing of the disproportionate responses required by them, are considered apostates—and can be killed.
This circumstance creates all the conditions for large-scale conflict and war, for now an attack may be justified as a defense of the faith, an act authorized by—and, indeed, required by—God.
NEALE: That’s exactly what’s been happening on our planet. You’ve hit the nail right on the head. That’s what’s been going on in the world in these days and times.
GOD: It has been going on for centuries. Indeed, for millennia. That is why the Seventh New Revelation is so important, for it creates a context that separates “mistake” from “morality,” removing God from the picture.
Do you really think I ever cared whether you ate meat on Fridays, or wore a head-to-toe body covering because you were female, or stood on the appropriate side of the Wailing Wall?
NEALE: I heard that not long ago some women attempted to stand with the men on the “men’s side” of the Wailing Wall, one of the most sacred sites in all of Judaism. They wanted to make a point: that it is time to end this infantile separation of women from the men because of a thought that women are unworthy or, because of their menses, somehow “unclean.” The men—some of them rabbis—began shouting and cursing and spitting, and some even began scuffling with the women.
GOD: Is it truly your imagining that God is concerned with these things?
It does seem rather petty, even in the name of sacred tradition.
GOD: Perhaps especially so.
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Editor’s Note: If you would like to COMMENT on the above excerpt from The New Revelations, please scroll down to the end of the green ancillary copy that appears just below, which has been placed here for First Time Readers…
If Conversations with God has touched your life in a positive way, you are one of millions of people around the world who have had such an experience. All of the readers of CWG have yearned to find a way to keep its healing messages alive in their life.
One of the best ways to do that is to read and re-read the material over and over again — and we have made it convenient and easy for you to do so. Come here often and enjoy selected excerpts from the Conversations with God cosmology, changed on a regular basis, so you can “dip in” to the 3,000 pages of material quickly and easily. We hope you have enjoyed the excerpt above, from Friendship with God.
Now, may we tell you about a very easy way that you can share these wonderful messages with others? Please keep reading…
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About Book-On-A-Bench…
If you believe that the messages in Conversations with God could inspire humanity to change its basic beliefs about God, about Life, and about Human Beings and their relationship to each other, leave those messages lying around.
Simply “forget” or “misplace” a copy of Conversations with God on a bench somewhere. At a bus stop, or a train station, or an airport—or actually on the bus, train, or plane. At a hairstyling salon, a doctor’s office, a chiropractor’s office, a park bench, or even just a bench on the street. Just leave a book lying around.
If everybody did this, the message of Conversations with God could “go viral” in a very short period of time. So you are invited to participate in the Book-On-A-Bench program and spread ideas that could create a new cultural story far and wide.
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ABOUT the author of Conversations with God…
Neale Donald Walsch is a modern day spiritual messenger whose words continue to touch the world in profound ways. With an early interest in religion and a deeply felt connection to spirituality, Neale spent the majority of his life thriving professionally, yet searching for spiritual meaning before experiencing his now famous conversation with God. His Conversations with God series of books has been translated into 37 languages, touching millions and inspiring important changes in their day-to-day lives.
Neale was born in Milwaukee to a Roman Catholic family that encouraged his quest for spiritual truth. Serving as his first spiritual mentor, Neale’s mother taught him not to be afraid of God, as she believed in having a personal relationship with the divine — and she taught Neale to do the same.
A nontraditional believer, Neale’s mother hardly ever went to church, and when he asked her why, she told Neale: “I don’t have to go to church — God comes to me. He’s with me and around me wherever I am.” This notion of God at an early age would later move Neale to transcend traditional views of organized religion.
By his late teens Neale’s involvement with spiritually-based teachings led him to begin dipping into a variety of spiritual texts, including the Bible, the Rig Veda, the Upanishads and Divine revelation according to Sri Ramakrishna. He noticed that when people became involved in organized religion they sometimes seemed less joyful and more angry, occasionally exhibiting behaviors of prejudice and separateness. Neale concluded that humanity’s collective experience of theology was not as positive as it was meant to be. It seemed to him that there was something missing in standard theological teachings; that they might contain very good lessons, he concluded, but that they might not be complete.
After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, but academic life could not hold his interest and he dropped out of college after two years to follow an interest in radio broadcasting that eventually led to a full-time position at the age of 19 at a small radio station far from his Milwaukee home, in Annapolis, Maryland.
Restless by nature and always seeking to expand his opportunities for self-expression, Neale in the years that followed became a radio station program director, a newspaper managing editor, public information officer for one of the nation’s largest public school systems, and, after moving to the West Coast, creator and owner of his own public relations and marketing firm. Moving from one career field to another, he could not seem to find occupational satisfaction, his relationship life was in constant turmoil, and his health was going rapidly downhill.
He had relocated in Oregon as part of a change-of-scenery strategy to find his way, but Fate was to provide more than a change of location. It produced a change in his entire life. One day a car driven by an elderly gentleman made a left turn directly into his path. Neale emerged from the auto accident with a broken neck. He was lucky to escape with his life.
Over a year of rehab threw him out of work. A failed marriage had already removed him from his home, and soon he couldn’t keep even the small apartment he’d rented. Within months he found himself on the street, homeless. It took him two weeks shy of a year to pull himself together and get back under shelter. He found a modest part-time job, once again in broadcasting, then worked his way into full time broadcasting, eventual landing a spot as a nationally syndicated radio talk show host.
He had seen the bottom of life living outside, gathering beer and soft drink cans in a park to collect the return deposit, but now his life seemed to be on the mend. Yet, once more, Neale felt an emptiness inside that he could not define, and the daily difficulties that everyone faces continued.
In 1992, following a period of deep despair, Neale awoke in the middle of a February night and wrote an anguished letter to God. “What does it take to make life work?” he angrily scratched across a yellow legal pad. “And what have I done to deserve a life of such continuing struggle?”
What followed has been well chronicled and widely discussed around the world. Neale says his questioning letter received a Divine answer. He tells us that he heard a voice just over his right shoulder—soft and warm, kind and loving, as he describes it—that offered a reply. Awestruck and inspired, he quickly scribbled the response onto a yellow legal pad he’d found on a coffee table before him.
More questions came, and as fast as they occurred to him, answers were given in the same gentle voice, which now seemed to have moved inside his head, but also seemed clearly beyond his normal thinking. Before he knew it, Neale found himself engaged in a two-way on-paper dialogue.
He continued this first “conversation” for hours, and had many more in the weeks that followed, always awakening in the middle of the night and being drawn back to his legal pad. Neale’s handwritten notes would later become the best-selling Conversations with God books. He says the process was “exactly like taking dictation,” and that the dialogue that was created in this way was published without alteration or editing. He also says that God is talking to all of us, all the time, and that he has come to understand that this experience is not unusual, nor does it make him in any way a special person or a unique messenger.
In addition to producing the With God series of books, Neale has published 18 other works, as well as many video and audio programs. Available throughout the world, seven of the Conversations with God books made the New York Times bestseller list, with Conversations with God: Book 1 occupying a place on that list for more than two-and-half years. Walsch’s books have sold more than 7.5 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 37 languages. Anecdotal evidence suggests that CWG is one of the most widely distributed hand-to-hand books ever published, with estimates that, on average, at least two people have read every copy purchased — meaning that something more than 15 million people worldwide have read the CWG messages.
The With God series has redefined God and shifted spiritual paradigms around the globe. In order to deal with the enormous response to his writings, Neale has created several global outreach projects dedicated to inspiring the world to help itself move from violence to peace, from confusion to clarity, and from anger to love revolving around their core messages.
The projects include: (1) the Conversations with God Foundation, an adult education outreach; (2) Humanity’s Team, a global spiritual activist outreach; (3) CWG for Parents, an outreach providing resources to those who wish to bring their children the messages of CWG; (4) the Changing Change Network, a CWG helping outreach to persons facing major life challenges; (5) The Global Conversation, an internet newspaper outreach relating the spiritual messages of CWG to the news of the day; and (6) CWG Connect, a multi-media communications outreach creating a worldwide CWG community featuring Video and Audio On-Demand services, together with ongoing personal interaction with the author of CWG. Access to all of these programs will be found at the gateway internet site: www.CWGPortal.com
Neale’s work has taken him from the steps of Machu Picchu in Peru to the steps of the Shinto shrines of Japan, from Red Square in Moscow to St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City to Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Everywhere he has gone—from South Africa to Norway, Croatia to The Netherlands, the streets of Zurich to the streets of Seoul—Neale has found a hunger among the people to find a new way to live; a way to co-exist, at last, in peace and harmony, with a reverence for Life Itself in all its forms, and for each other. And he has sought to help them develop a new, expanded understanding of God, of life, and of themselves that allows them to create and experience this.
Neale’s latest book, The Only Thing That Matters, was published in October, 2012. He lives in Ashland, Oregon and is married to the American poet Em Claire (www.emclairepoet.com).
NEALE: Why does it take so much time for me to create the reality I choose?
GOD: For a number of reasons. Because you do not believe you can have what you choose. Because you do not know what to choose. Because you keep trying to figure out what’s “best” for you. Because you want guarantees ahead of time that all your choices will be “good.” And because you keep changing your mind!
NEALE: Let me see if I understand. I shouldn’t try to figure out what’s best for me?
GOD: “Best” is a relative term, depending on a hundred variables. That makes choices very difficult. There should be only one consideration when making any decision – Is this a statement of Who I Am? Is this an announcement of Who I Choose to Be?
All of life should be such an announcement. In fact, all of life is. You can allow that announcement to be made by Chance, or by Choice.
A life lived by Choice is a life of conscious action. A life lived by Chance is a life of unconscious reaction.
Reaction is just that — an action you have taken before. When you “re-act,” what you do is assess the incoming data, search your memory bank for the same, or nearly the same, experience, and act the way you did before. This is all the work of the Mind, not of your Soul.
Your Soul would have you search It’s “memory” to see how you might create a truly genuine experience of You in the Now Moment. This is the experience of “soul searching” of which you have so often heard, but you have to be literally “out of your mind” to do it.
When you spend your time trying to figure out what’s “best” for you, you are doing just that: spending your time. Better to save your time than to spend it wastefully.
It is a great time-saver to be out of your mind. Decisions are reached quickly, choices are activated rapidly, because your Soul creates out of present experience only, without review, analysis and criticism of past encounters.
Remember this: the Soul creates, the Mind reacts.
The Soul knows in its wisdom that the experience you are having in This Moment is an experience sent to you by God before you had any conscious awareness of it. This is what is meant by a “pre-sent” experience. It’s already on the way to you even as you are seeking it — for even before you ask, I shall have answered you. Every Now Moment is a glorious gift from God. That’s why it is called the present.
The Soul intuitively seeks the perfect circumstance and situation now needed to heal wrong thought and bring you the rightful experience of Who You Really Are.
It is the Soul’s desire to bring you back to God — to bring you home to Me.
It is the Soul’s intention to know Itself experientially — and thus to know Me. For the Soul understands that You and I are One, even as the Mind denies this truth, and the Body acts out this denial.
Therefore, in moments of great decision, be out of your Mind, and do some Soul searching instead.
The Soul understands what the Mind cannot conceive.
If you spend your time trying to figure out what’s “best” for you, your choices will be cautious, your decisions will take forever, and your journey will be launched on a sea of expectations.
If you are not careful, you will drown in your expectations.
NEALE: Whew! That’s quite an answer! But how do I listen to my soul? How do I know what I’m hearing?
GOD: The Soul speaks to you in feelings. Listen to your feelings. Follow your feelings. Honor your feelings.
NEALE: Why does it seem to me that honoring my feelings is precisely what has caused me to get into trouble in the first place?
GOD: Because you have labeled growth “trouble,” and standing still “safe.” I tell you this: your feelings will never get you into “trouble,” because your feelings are your truth.
If you want to live a life where you never follow your feelings, but where every feeling is filtered through the machinery of your Mind, go right ahead. Make your decisions based on your Mind’s analysis of the situation. But don’t look for joy in such machinations, nor for celebration of Who You Truly Are.
Remember this: true celebration is mindless.
If you listen to your Soul you will know what is “best” for you, because what is best for you is what is true for you.
When you act only out of what is true for you, you speed your way down the Path. When you create an experience based on your “now truth” rather than react to an experience based on a “past truth,” you produce a “new you.”
Why does it take so much time to create the reality you choose? This is why: because you have not been living your truth.
Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.
Yet once you come to know your truth, don’t keep changing your mind about it. This is your Mind trying to figure out what’s “best.” Stop it! Get out of your Mind. Get back to your senses!
That is what is meant by “getting back to your senses.” It is a returning to how you feel, not how you think. Your thoughts are just that – thoughts. Mental constructions. “Made up” creations of your Mind. But your feelings – now they are real.
Feelings are the language of the Soul. And your Soul is your truth.
There. Now does that tie it all together for you?
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Editor’s Note: If you would like to COMMENT on the above excerpt from Conversations with God – Book Two, please scroll down to the end of the red ancillary copy that appears just below, which has been placed here for First Time Readers…
If Conversations with God has touched your life in a positive way, you are one of millions of people around the world who have had such an experience. All of the readers of CWG have yearned to find a way to keep its healing messages alive in their life.
One of the best ways to do that is to read and re-read the material over and over again — and we have made it convenient and easy for you to do so. Come here often and enjoy selected excerpts from the Conversations with God cosmology, changed on a regular basis, so you can “dip in” to the 3,000 pages of material quickly and easily. We hope you have enjoyed the excerpt above, from Friendship with God.
Now, may we tell you about a very easy way that you can share these wonderful messages with others? Please keep reading…
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About Book-On-A-Bench…
If you believe that the messages in Conversations with God could inspire humanity to change its basic beliefs about God, about Life, and about Human Beings and their relationship to each other, leave those messages lying around.
Simply “forget” or “misplace” a copy of Conversations with God on a bench somewhere. At a bus stop, or a train station, or an airport—or actually on the bus, train, or plane. At a hairstyling salon, a doctor’s office, a chiropractor’s office, a park bench, or even just a bench on the street. Just leave a book lying around.
If everybody did this, the message of Conversations with God could “go viral” in a very short period of time. So you are invited to participate in the Book-On-A-Bench program and spread ideas that could create a new cultural story far and wide.
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ABOUT the author of Conversations with God…
Neale Donald Walsch is a modern day spiritual messenger whose words continue to touch the world in profound ways. With an early interest in religion and a deeply felt connection to spirituality, Neale spent the majority of his life thriving professionally, yet searching for spiritual meaning before experiencing his now famous conversation with God. His Conversations with God series of books has been translated into 37 languages, touching millions and inspiring important changes in their day-to-day lives.
Neale was born in Milwaukee to a Roman Catholic family that encouraged his quest for spiritual truth. Serving as his first spiritual mentor, Neale’s mother taught him not to be afraid of God, as she believed in having a personal relationship with the divine — and she taught Neale to do the same.
A nontraditional believer, Neale’s mother hardly ever went to church, and when he asked her why, she told Neale: “I don’t have to go to church — God comes to me. He’s with me and around me wherever I am.” This notion of God at an early age would later move Neale to transcend traditional views of organized religion.
By his late teens Neale’s involvement with spiritually-based teachings led him to begin dipping into a variety of spiritual texts, including the Bible, the Rig Veda, the Upanishads and Divine revelation according to Sri Ramakrishna. He noticed that when people became involved in organized religion they sometimes seemed less joyful and more angry, occasionally exhibiting behaviors of prejudice and separateness. Neale concluded that humanity’s collective experience of theology was not as positive as it was meant to be. It seemed to him that there was something missing in standard theological teachings; that they might contain very good lessons, he concluded, but that they might not be complete.
After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, but academic life could not hold his interest and he dropped out of college after two years to follow an interest in radio broadcasting that eventually led to a full-time position at the age of 19 at a small radio station far from his Milwaukee home, in Annapolis, Maryland.
Restless by nature and always seeking to expand his opportunities for self-expression, Neale in the years that followed became a radio station program director, a newspaper managing editor, public information officer for one of the nation’s largest public school systems, and, after moving to the West Coast, creator and owner of his own public relations and marketing firm. Moving from one career field to another, he could not seem to find occupational satisfaction, his relationship life was in constant turmoil, and his health was going rapidly downhill.
He had relocated in Oregon as part of a change-of-scenery strategy to find his way, but Fate was to provide more than a change of location. It produced a change in his entire life. One day a car driven by an elderly gentleman made a left turn directly into his path. Neale emerged from the auto accident with a broken neck. He was lucky to escape with his life.
Over a year of rehab threw him out of work. A failed marriage had already removed him from his home, and soon he couldn’t keep even the small apartment he’d rented. Within months he found himself on the street, homeless. It took him two weeks shy of a year to pull himself together and get back under shelter. He found a modest part-time job, once again in broadcasting, then worked his way into full time broadcasting, eventual landing a spot as a nationally syndicated radio talk show host.
He had seen the bottom of life living outside, gathering beer and soft drink cans in a park to collect the return deposit, but now his life seemed to be on the mend. Yet, once more, Neale felt an emptiness inside that he could not define, and the daily difficulties that everyone faces continued.
In 1992, following a period of deep despair, Neale awoke in the middle of a February night and wrote an anguished letter to God. “What does it take to make life work?” he angrily scratched across a yellow legal pad. “And what have I done to deserve a life of such continuing struggle?”
What followed has been well chronicled and widely discussed around the world. Neale says his questioning letter received a Divine answer. He tells us that he heard a voice just over his right shoulder—soft and warm, kind and loving, as he describes it—that offered a reply. Awestruck and inspired, he quickly scribbled the response onto a yellow legal pad he’d found on a coffee table before him.
More questions came, and as fast as they occurred to him, answers were given in the same gentle voice, which now seemed to have moved inside his head, but also seemed clearly beyond his normal thinking. Before he knew it, Neale found himself engaged in a two-way on-paper dialogue.
He continued this first “conversation” for hours, and had many more in the weeks that followed, always awakening in the middle of the night and being drawn back to his legal pad. Neale’s handwritten notes would later become the best-selling Conversations with God books. He says the process was “exactly like taking dictation,” and that the dialogue that was created in this way was published without alteration or editing. He also says that God is talking to all of us, all the time, and that he has come to understand that this experience is not unusual, nor does it make him in any way a special person or a unique messenger.
In addition to producing the With God series of books, Neale has published 18 other works, as well as many video and audio programs. Available throughout the world, seven of the Conversations with God books made the New York Times bestseller list, with Conversations with God: Book 1 occupying a place on that list for more than two-and-half years. Walsch’s books have sold more than 7.5 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 37 languages. Anecdotal evidence suggests that CWG is one of the most widely distributed hand-to-hand books ever published, with estimates that, on average, at least two people have read every copy purchased — meaning that something more than 15 million people worldwide have read the CWG messages.
The With God series has redefined God and shifted spiritual paradigms around the globe. In order to deal with the enormous response to his writings, Neale has created several global outreach projects dedicated to inspiring the world to help itself move from violence to peace, from confusion to clarity, and from anger to love revolving around their core messages.
The projects include: (1) the Conversations with God Foundation, an adult education outreach; (2) Humanity’s Team, a global spiritual activist outreach; (3) CWG for Parents, an outreach providing resources to those who wish to bring their children the messages of CWG; (4) the Changing Change Network, a CWG helping outreach to persons facing major life challenges; (5) The Global Conversation, an internet newspaper outreach relating the spiritual messages of CWG to the news of the day; and (6) CWG Connect, a multi-media communications outreach creating a worldwide CWG community featuring Video and Audio On-Demand services, together with ongoing personal interaction with the author of CWG. Access to all of these programs will be found at the gateway internet site: www.CWGPortal.com
Neale’s work has taken him from the steps of Machu Picchu in Peru to the steps of the Shinto shrines of Japan, from Red Square in Moscow to St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City to Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Everywhere he has gone—from South Africa to Norway, Croatia to The Netherlands, the streets of Zurich to the streets of Seoul—Neale has found a hunger among the people to find a new way to live; a way to co-exist, at last, in peace and harmony, with a reverence for Life Itself in all its forms, and for each other. And he has sought to help them develop a new, expanded understanding of God, of life, and of themselves that allows them to create and experience this.
Neale’s latest book, The Only Thing That Matters, was published in October, 2012. He lives in Ashland, Oregon and is married to the American poet Em Claire (www.emclairepoet.com).
