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).
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