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Sunday is Message Day on the blog. Monday through Friday we look at contemporary events and day-to-day occurrences at the intersection of Life and the New Spirituality…but on Sunday, we reserve this space for a specific teaching derived from the material in Conversations with God
Through the years I have given hundreds of talks and written scores of articles revolving around this material. Every seven days we will present in this space a transcript or reprint of one of those presentations. We invite you to Copy and Save each one of them, creating a personal collection of contemporary and uplifting spiritual thought which you may reference at any time. We hope you will find this a constant source of insight and inspiration.
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This week, an Internet Radio Interview with Neale Donald Walsch by SpiritualGrowthMonthly.com
Matt: Welcome, everyone.
This is Matt Clarkson of SpiritualGrowthMonthly.com. With me today is someone we might call a modern-day prophet. He’s a best-selling author; in fact, his books have been translated into many languages and sold all over the world.
They’re actually about to bring out an up-and coming film, which we’re all really looking forward to. He’s literally helping to redefine the world’s understanding of God and spirituality. So without any more mystery, let me introduce our guest today, Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God. Welcome, Neale.
Neale: Thank you, Matt, and let me correct you right at the top of the show. I would not be called a “modern-day spiritual prophet,” and I hope that no one ever, ever, ever uses that label.
I think I would be called a modern-day spiritual messenger, and I think that there’s a huge nuance of difference between the word “messenger” and the word “prophet.”
The word “prophet” is largely understood to be applied to people who somehow know about the future or have some kind of insight, awareness or wisdom that is greater than anyone else. That would be the opposite of who I am.
On the other hand, a messenger is simply someone who walks into the room and hands you a telegram. Often, the message is not even written by him, but he carries a message from someone else.
That far more aptly and accurately describes who I am in the world, so let’s not say “Neale Donald Walsch, the prophet,” but I’m really fine with saying “Neale Donald Walsch, the messenger.”
Matt: Okay, “the messenger” you are. How did you end up having a conversation with God and writing a book about it? Can you tell that story, for anyone who hasn’t heard it?
Neale: Well, I ran into a period of time in my life when nothing was going well. My life was falling apart at every level—my health was going rapidly downhill, I had lost my employment and all hope for immediate employment.
I had lost my relationship with my significant other. Nothing was working in my life, so I
turned to God, as often we do in moments of sheer desperation. I called out, in the middle of the night, one day when I was awake at four o’clock in the morning.
I was walking around, pacing really, in the larger part of my house, in the darkness, and I
called out in my mind, “What does it take to make life work? What have I done to deserve a life of such continuing struggle?
Somebody, help me! Give me some rules—tell me the rules of the game here. I’ll play; I just need to have the rulebook.” It was at that point that I found a yellow legal pad on the coffee table in front of me.
I sat down on the couch, and by the moonlight, just picked up the yellow legal pad and began writing a very angry letter to God. Then I heard a voice—it was as simple as that—over my right shoulder, that said, “Neale, do you really want answers to all of these questions or are you just venting?”
With that, I began what has resulted in a 14-year conversation with God. That’s what I’ve chosen to call it. It’s an experience of communion, I think, with the place of higher wisdom that lies within all of us, and it is accessible by and available to all of us.
I have simply written down what I’ve experienced in my mind as a result of those connections and conversations, and put them in what has turned out to be a series of books that have caught the attention of apparently a large number of people in the world.
Over seven million people have read the Conversations with God books. They’ve been
translated into 34 languages.
Matt: So when you were going through this process, how did God communicate with you?
Neale: As I indicated, it was a voice that I heard, first in the room, and then in my mind. It comes to me as the voice of my own thoughts, if you please, and that’s really how that communication takes place. I will simply have a thought of my own, I’ll ask a question or look deeply into a topic, and suddenly, thoughts and words will come to me, and if I get them down on paper fast enough, they begin to make sense and have some consistency.
Now there have been 10 books produced by that method, which have an amazing continuity and consistency from the first book to the last. The most recent, and final, of those books is Home with God: In a Life That Never Ends.
Matt: I noticed in your second book you were talking about the process of engaging with God, and how sometimes, it can take quite a long time for the answers to come. Is this something where you sat at your desk and communicated with God, or is it something that comes to you all the time? I’m just curious to learn more about how that process of
communication works.
Neale: The process, for me, does not take a long time, although there may be gaps or pauses in the process. If I ask a question and I really feel deeply connected with eternal wisdom, the answer comes immediately, like lightning. So it does not take a long time for the answer to come, but I have experienced that there have been, in my life, huge gaps in the process itself. That is, there may be times when I simply do not feel connected with eternal wisdom, with the Divine, if you will, and when I’m lacking that connection, then the process simply does not work. I have done two things in my life. One, I’ve done
whatever I can to stay connected with that source of divine wisdom. Number two, I’ve used that connection to continue to ask the kinds of questions that I think would most benefit the largest number of people.
Matt: Obviously, there are a lot of people in the world who claim to be in communication with God, and they’ve put forth various systems and theologies. It seems like there’s this view and that view of God. How do we actually discern what is really God’s communication from communication that comes from some other source?
Neale: By going within. The ultimate truth lies within, and all great spiritual teachers will tell us that. Only lesser spiritual teachers, including false teachers, will tell us that the truth lies outside of ourselves. Only false teachers will say, “Ultimately, listen to what I’m saying.” The true teachers will say, “Listen to what your Self – capital ‘S’ — is saying to the self. You may want to consider some of the words I have said, but ultimately, look inside and see if they ring true for you. If they don’t, then reject them.”
I tell everyone that, both in my books, and when I’m speaking about my books. If anything I’ve written does not feel true to you, then reject it quickly and out of hand.
On the other hand, if something I’ve said rings true to you and feels that it is in harmony with your own, deepest, inner truth, then embrace it at the next level; that is, fully embrace it and allow yourself to live it as fully as well.
Matt: Does that imply that we experience God in a relativistic kind of way, and that God doesn’t have any kind of objective reality, that there is no right and wrong?
Neale: There is no such thing as objective reality. Everything is subjective; that is, everything is experienced through you and nothing is experienced objectively, outside of you. Quantum physics is now making that very clear and has been making that clear for the past 25 or 30 years.
It is quantum physics, not new spirituality, that says, “Nothing that is observed is unaffected by the observer.” That is, everything that exists is affected and impacted by the person who is looking at it, depending on the way they’re looking at it, the angle from which they’re viewing it, the perspective they hold.
That is profoundly true and it is true in this case as well, but it’s not a spiritual truth
solely or exclusively; it’s a scientific truth as well.
Matt: One of the big questions you talk about in your book is: “If I am really talking to God, why don’t you prove yourself in some irrefutable way”…
Neale: Well, you see, there are no irrefutable ways. That’s the whole point of what I’ve just said. There are no irrefutable ways because there is no such thing as objectivity; that is, complete objectivity. Once again, everything that’s experienced is experienced by you, and you may experience it any way you wish because it is experienced through the filter that is you. You may experience it differently from the way I’m experiencing it, therefore,
everything I say is refutable by someone else.
Even if God came down, God would ask the question, “What way would you find irrefutable? I’ve already come down, I’ve already made my presence known, I’ve already made my reality (the reality of God) known in a million ways,” but there are a million people who would disagree with each of those ways and claim that it is not the truth.
So it looks as if you have to find your own way, which is, of course, what I’ve been telling you from the beginning!
Matt: You’re saying that God is constantly speaking to us, but we don’t listen.
Neale: Unless we do.
Matt: Unless we do!
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