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:

• • 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?

========================================

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…

=====================

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.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

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: Many people think that God is their friend, but they don’t know how to use that friendship. They see it as a distant relationship, not a close one.

GOD:  Many more people do not even think of Me as a friend at all. That’s the sad part of it. Many people think of Me as a parent, not a friend — and a harsh, cruel, demanding, angry parent at that. A Father who will tolerate absolutely no failure in certain areas — such as, for instance, how to worship Me.

In the minds of these people, I not only demand your worship, I demand it in a specific way. It is not enough that you come to Me. You must come to Me by a particular path. Should you come to Me by another path — any other path — I will reject your love, ignore your entreaties, and, indeed, condemn you to hell.

NEALE:  Even though my search for You was sincere, my intent pure, and my understandings the best I could reach.

 GOD: Even though. Yes, even though. In the minds of these people, I am a stringent parent who will accept nothing less than absolute correctness in your understandings of Who I Am.

If you are not correct in the understandings at which you have arrived, I will punish you. You can be as pure in your intent as possible; you can be so filled with love for Me that you overflow.  I will cast you into the fires of hell nonetheless, and you will suffer there forever, if you come to Me with the wrong name on your lips, the wrong ideas in your head.

NEALE: It is sad that so many people see You that way. This is not how a friend would behave at all.

GOD: No, it is not. And so the very idea of having a friendship with God, the kind of relationship you have with your best friend, who will accept anything given in love, forgive everything done in error — that kind of friendship — is unfathomable to them.

Then, among those who do see Me as their friend, you are right; most of them hold Me at a great distance. They do not have a working friendship with Me. It is, rather, a very distant relationship that they hope they can count on if they should ever have to. But it is not the day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute friendship that it could be.

NEALE:  And You were starting to tell me what it would take to have that kind of friendship with You.

GOD:  A change of mind and a change of heart. That is what it would take. A change of mind and a change of heart.

And courage.

NEALE: Courage?

GOD: Yes. The courage to reject every notion, every idea, every teaching of a God who would reject you.

This will take enormous bravery, because the world has contrived to fill your head with those notions, ideas and teachings. You will have to adopt a New Thought about all of this, a thought that runs counter to virtually everything you’ve ever been told or heard about Me.

That’ll be tough. For some, that’ll be very tough. But it will be necessary, because you can’t have a friendship — not a real, not a close, not a working, give-and-take friendship — with someone you fear.

NEALE: So a big part of forging a friendship with God is forgetting our “fearship” with God.

========================================

Editor’s Note: If you would like to COMMENT on the above excerpt, 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…

=====================

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.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

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: This idea of using death as a tool is brand new to me. A tool is something that one uses on purpose, it seems to me. It’s something that one wants to use. But I don’t want to die. Nobody wants to die.

GOD: Everybody wants to die.

NEALE: Everybody wants to die?

GOD: Of course, or nobody would. Do you think that dying is something that occurs against your will?

NEALE: It sure seems that way to plenty of people.

GOD: Nothing occurs against your will. That is impossible. So here is…The Third Remembrance: You cannot die against your will.

NEALE: That is so comforting. That is so wonderfully healing for me to know. Yet how can I embrace this as my truth if it is my experience that lots of things happen that I do not want to have happen?

GOD: Nothing happens that you do not want to have happen.

NEALE: Nothing?

GOD: Nothing.

You can IMAGINE that things happen that you do not want to have happen, but this is not what is so, and merely allows you to think of yourself as a victim.

Nothing holds you back in your evolution more than this single thought. The idea of victimization is a certain sign of limited perception. True victimization cannot exist.

NEALE: It’s pretty darn hard to tell someone whose daughter has been raped, or whose entire village has been wiped out in a vicious act of “ethnic cleansing,” that no one has been victimized.

GOD: It would be non-beneficial to speak in this way to people while they are in the midst of their suffering. During those moments simply be with them with deep compassion, true caring, and healing love. Do not offer spiritual platitudes or intellectual excursions as a remedy for their pain. Heal the pain first, then heal the thought that created the pain.

Of course it is true that, in the ordinary human sense, there are those who have been the “victim” of terrible occurrences and circumstances in life. Yet this experience of victimization can only be real within the context of normal—and therefore extremely limited—human awareness.

When I say that true victimization does not exist, I am speaking from an entirely different level of awareness. Yet this is a level of awareness that human beings can achieve, once their pain has been healed.

NEALE: Thank you, dear God, for such clarity and such wisdom. Yet your statement that true victimization cannot exist will, I know, still be difficult for many people to embrace, whether they are in emotional pain or not.

GOD: Yet what I am saying here is nothing more than what nearly all of the world’s traditional religions have said for many centuries. “Mysterious are the ways of the Lord,” they have proclaimed.

===========   Excerpt # 2…  ==========

GOD: You will choose to “die” when your life on earth is complete. Your life on earth will be complete when you have experienced all that you came here to experience.

NEALE: Or when I realize that I have not experienced all of it and that there is no other way to experience all of it along the path I have taken.

GOD: No. Emphatically, no. That cannot happen. No one dies having failed to experience all that they came to the physical world to experience.

NEALE: What?

GOD: I said that no one dies having failed to experience all that they came to the physical world to experience.

There is no such thing as being “incomplete”. That is what is meant by…The Eleventh Remembrance:

The timing and the circumstances of death are always perfect.

NEALE: I believe that. But how does the parent of a child who has been raped, mutilated and murdered call the circumstances of such a death “perfect”? How do people who saw their loved one perish on 9/11 accept such a death as “perfect”?

You are asking an awful lot here. This is stretching credibility of most people to the absolute limit.

GOD: I have already said that the elegance of life’s design is like that of a snowflake. It seems almost too perfect to be believed, too good to be true. Yet I tell you this: Comfort for the bereaved will be found in the sure knowledge of the certain perfection of God.

God is perfect, always and eternally. Now there is only one thing left for you to understand: who and what “God” is.

I have told you over and over again in our conversations, and I will tell you here and now, once more, and finally:

GOD and LIFE are one and the same.

Therefore when I say that “God is perfect,” I am saying that Life is perfect. And it is. The “system” rests in perfect balance with itself.

All things happen in their perfect timing and in their perfect way. It is not always possible to see this, to perceive this, from the extremely narrow perspective of human experience. That is a limitation of the physical world. It is a limitation that can, however, be overcome.

Many “prophets” and “sages” have overcome this limitation of perception by choosing a different perspective, by looking at life a new way. Alas, their messages are often ignored. Their insights are frequently belittled. Often, they themselves are condemned. And so the blind continue to lead the blind, because you will not listen to those who can see.

Therefore, let those who have ears to hear, listen:

Imperfection is impossible in the Kingdom of God.

NEALE: Yes, but what about here on earth?

GOD: “Here on earth” IS the Kingdom of God. There is no place that exists that is not part of that kingdom.

NEALE: You see, we have this all “separated out” here on earth. We’ve got it that life on earth is the trial and the tribulation enabling us to get INTO the Kingdom of God. And it’s our idea that death is the way we get in.

GOD: There is no way to get into the Kingdom of God. It is not a place you get into or out of. It is a place where you always ARE. It is the only place that you can ever be.

NEALE: It sure doesn’t seem that way sometimes.

GOD: That is because you do not remember who you are, and you do not treat others as who they are. If you did, you would experience heaven on earth. You would be Home with God everywhere. And always.

NEALE: Is there any way that people will ever, can ever, “get” that?

GOD: Conversations such as this are one way. Do not keep this conversation to yourself. Make sure it gets into as many hands as possible. Share it with the world.

========================================

Editor’s Note: If you would like to COMMENT on the above excerpt, please scroll down to the end of the blue, 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 HOME WITH GOD in a Life That Never Ends.

Now, may we tell you about a very easy way that you can share these wonderful messages with others? Please keep reading…

=====================

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.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

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).

GOD: There is only One Soul, One Being, One Essence. Some of you call this “God.” This Single Essence “individuates” Itself as Everything In The Universe—in other words, All That Is. This includes all the sentient beings, or what you have chosen to call souls.

Neale: So “God” is every soul that “is”?

GOD: Every soul that is now, ever was, and ever will be.

Neale: So God is a “collective?”

GOD: That’s the word I chose, because it comes closest in your language to describing how things are.

Neale: Not a single awesome being, but a collective?

GOD:  It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Think “outside the box”!

Neale: God is both? A single Awesome Being which is a collective of individualized parts?

GOD: Good! Very good!

Neale:  And why did the collective come to Earth?

GOD: To express itself in physicality. To know itself in its own experience. To be God. As I’ve already explained in detail in Book 1.

Neale:  You created us to be You?

GOD: We did, indeed. That is exactly why you were created.

Neale:  And humans were created by a collective?

GOD: Your own Bible said, “Let Us create man in Our image, and after Our likeness” before the translation was changed.

Life is the process through which God creates Itself, and then experiences the creation. This process of creation is ongoing and eternal. It is happening all the “time.” Relativity and physicality are the tools with which God works. Pure energy (what you call spirit) is What God Is. This Essence is truly the Holy Spirit.

By a process through which energy becomes matter, spirit is embodied in physicality. This is done by the energy literally slowing itself down—changing its oscillation, or what you would call vibration.

That Which Is All does this in parts. That is, parts of the whole do this. These individuations of spirit are what you have chosen to call souls.

In truth, there is only One Soul, reshaping and reforming Itself. This might be called The Reformation. You are all Gods In Formation. (God’s information! )

That is your contribution, and it is sufficient unto itself.

To put this simply, by taking physical form you have already done enough. I want, I need, nothing more. You have contributed to the common good. You have made it possible for that which is common—the One Common Element—to experience that which is good. Even you have written that God created the heavens and the Earth, and the animals who walk upon the land, and the birds of the air, and the fishes of the sea, and it was very good.

“Good” does not—cannot—exist experientially without its opposite. Therefore have you also created evil, which is the backward motion, or opposite direction, of good. It is the opposite of life—and so have you created what you call death.

Yet death does not exist in ultimate reality, but is merely a concoction, an invention, an imagined experience, through which life becomes more valued by you. Thus, “evil” is “live” spelled backward! So clever you are with language. You fold into it secret wisdoms that you do not even know are there.

Now when you understand this entire cosmology, you comprehend the great truth. You could then never demand of another being that it give you something in return for your sharing the resources and necessities of physical life.

Neale: As beautiful as that is, there are still some people who would call it communism.

GOD: If they wish to do so, then so be it. Yet I tell you this: Until your community of beings knows about being in community, you will never experience Holy Communion, and cannot know Who I Am.

The highly evolved cultures of the universe understand deeply all that I have explained here. In those cultures it would not be possible to fail to share. Nor would it be possible to think of “charging” increasingly exorbitant “prices” the more rare a necessity became. Only extremely primitive societies would do this. Only very primitive beings would see scarcity of that which is commonly needed as an opportunity for greater profits. “Supply and demand” does not drive the system of Highly Evolved Beings.

This is part of a system that humans claim contributes to their quality of life and to the common good. Yet, from the vantage point of a Highly Evolved Being, your system violates the common good, for it does not allow that which is good to be experienced in common.

Another distinguishing and fascinating feature of Highly Evolved Cultures is that within them there is no word or sound for, nor any way to communicate the meaning of, the concept of “yours” and “mine.” Personal possessives do not exist in their language, and, if one were to speak in earthly tongues, one could only use articles to describe things. Employing that convention, “my car” becomes “the car I am now with.” “My partner” or “my children” becomes “the partner” or “the children I am now with.”

The term “now with,” or “in the presence of,” is as close as your languages can come to describing what you would call “ownership,” or “possession.”

That which you are “in the presence of” becomes the Gift. These are the true “presents” of life.

Thus, in the language of highly evolved cultures, one could not even speak in terms of “my life,” but could only communicate “the life I am in the presence of.”

This is something akin to your speaking of being “in the presence of God.”

When you are in the presence of God (which you are, any time you are in the presence of each other), you would never think of keeping from God that which is God’s—meaning, any part of That Which Is. You would naturally share, and share equally, that which is God’s with any part of that which is God.

This is the spiritual understanding which undergirds the entire social, political, economic, and religious structures of all highly evolved cultures. This is the cosmology of all of life, and it is merely failure to observe this cosmology, to understand it and to live within it, which creates all of the discord of your experience on Earth.

========================================

Editor’s Note: If you would like to COMMENT on the above excerpt, please scroll down to the end of the blue, 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 Conversations with God-Book 3.

Now, may we tell you about a very easy way that you can share these wonderful messages with others? Please keep reading…

=====================

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.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

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).

I, as God, will never interfere with your choices—but I will always know what they are. Therefore, you may assume that if a thing happens to you, it is perfect that it did so—for nothing escapes perfection in God’s world.

The design of your life—the people, places, and events in it—have all been perfectly created by the perfect creator of perfection itself: you. And Me . . . in, as, and through you.

Now We can work together in this co-creative process consciously or unconsciously. You can move through life aware, or unaware. You can walk your path asleep, or awake. You choose…

…If all you desired is what your soul desired, everything would be very simple. If you listened to the part of you which is pure spirit, all of your decisions would be easy, and all the outcomes joyous. That is because . . .

. . . the choices of spirit are always the highest choices.

They don’t need to be second-guessed. They don’t need to be analyzed or evaluated. They simply need to be followed, acted on.

Yet you are not only a spirit. You are a Triune Being made up of body, mind, and spirit. That is both the glory and the wonder of you. For you often make decisions and choices at all three levels simultaneously—and they by no means always coincide.

It is not uncommon for your body to want one thing, while your mind seeks another, and your spirit desires yet a third. This can be especially true of children, who are often not yet mature enough to make distinctions between what sounds like “fun” to the body, and what makes sense to the mind—much less what resonates with the soul. So the child waddles into the street.

Now, as God, I am aware of all your choices—even those you make subconsciously. I will never interfere with them, but rather, just the opposite. It is My job to ensure that your choices are granted. (In truth, you grant them to your Self. What I have done is put a system into place that allows you to do that. This system is called the process of creation, and is explained in detail in CWG-Book 1.)

When your choices conflict—when body, mind, and spirit are not acting as one—the process of creation works at all levels, producing mixed results. If, on the other hand, your being is in harmony, and your choices are unified, astonishing things can occur.

Your young people have a phrase—“having it all together”—which could be used to describe this unified state of being.

There are also levels within levels in your decision making. This is particularly true at the level of the mind.

Your mind can, and does, make decisions and choices from one of at least three interior levels: logic, intuition, emotion—and sometimes from all three— producing the potential for even more inner conflict.

And within one of those levels—emotion—there are five more levels. These are the five natural emotions: grief, anger, envy, fear, and love.

And within these, also, there are two final levels: love and fear.

The five natural emotions include love and fear, yet love and fear are the basis of all emotions. The other three of the five natural emotions are outgrowths of these two.

Ultimately, all thoughts are sponsored by love or fear. This is the great polarity. This is the primal duality. Everything, ultimately, breaks down to one of these. All thoughts, ideas, concepts, understandings, decisions, choices, and actions are based in one of these.

And, in the end, there is really only one.

Love.

In truth, love is all there is. Even fear is an outgrowth of love, and when used effectively, expresses love…Everything expresses love, when the expression is in its highest form.

Does the parent who saves the child from being killed in traffic express fear, or love?…Here we see that fear in its highest form becomes love . . . is love . . . expressed as fear. Similarly, moving up the scale of natural emotions, grief, anger, and envy are all some form of fear, which, in turn, is some form of love.

One things leads to another. Do you see?

The problem comes in when any of the five natural emotions become distorted. Then they become grotesque, and not recognizable at all as outgrowths of love, much less as God, which is what Absolute Love is.

========================================

Editor’s Note: If you would like to COMMENT on the above excerpt, please scroll down to the end of the blue, 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 Conversations with God-Book 3.

Now, may we tell you about a very easy way that you can share these wonderful messages with others? Please keep reading…

=====================

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.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

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).

GOD: Let Me address Myself specifically, and at length, to human love relationships—these things which continue to give you such trouble!

When human love relationships fail (relationships never truly fail, except in the strictly human sense that they did not produce what you want), they fail because they were entered into for the wrong reason.

(“Wrong,” of course, is a relative term, meaning something measured against that which is “right” —whatever that is! It would be more accurate in your language to say “relationships fail—change—most often when they are entered into for reasons not wholly beneficial or conducive to their survival.”)

Most people enter into relationships with an eye toward what they can get out of them, rather than what they can put into them.

The purpose of a relationship is to decide what part of yourself you’d like to see “show up,” not what part of another you can capture and hold.

There can be only one purpose for relationships—and for all of life: to be and to decide Who You Really Are.

It is very romantic to say that you were “nothing” until that special other came along, but it is not true. Worse, it puts an incredible pressure on the other to be all sorts of things he or she is not.

Not wanting to “let you down,” they try very hard to be and do these things until they cannot anymore. They can no longer complete your picture of them. They can no longer fill the roles to which they have been assigned. Resentment builds. Anger follows.

Finally, in order to save themselves (and the relationship), these special others begin to reclaim their real selves, acting more in accordance with Who They Really Are. It is about this time that you say they’ve “really changed.”

It is very romantic to say that now that your special other has entered your life, you feel complete. Yet the purpose of relationship is not to have another who might complete you; but to have another with whom you might share your completeness.

Here is the paradox of all human relationships: You have no need for a particular other in order for you to experience, fully, Who You Are, and. . .without another, you are nothing.

This is both the mystery and the wonder, the frustration and the joy of the human experience. It requires deep understanding and total willingness to live within this paradox in a way which makes sense. I observe that very few people do.

Most of you enter your relationship-forming years ripe with anticipation, full of sexual energy, a wide open heart, and a joyful, if eager, soul.

Somewhere between 40 and 60 (and for most it is sooner rather than later) you’ve given up on your grandest dream, set aside your highest hope, and settled for your lowest expectation—or nothing at all.

The problem is so basic, so simple, and yet so tragically misunderstood: your grandest dream, your highest idea, and your fondest hope has had to do with your beloved other rather than your beloved Self. The test of your relationships has had to do with how well the other lived up to your ideas, and how well you saw yourself living up to his or hers. Yet the only true test has to do with how well you live up to yours.

Relationships are sacred because they provide life’s grandest opportunity—indeed, its only opportunity—to create and produce the experience of your highest conceptualization of Self. Relationships fail when you see them as life’s grandest opportunity to create and produce the experience of your highest conceptualization of another.

Let each person in relationship worry about Self—what Self is being, doing, and having; what Self is wanting, asking, giving; what Self is seeking, creating, experiencing, and all relationships would magnificently serve their purpose—and their participants!

Let each person in relationship worry not about the other, but only, only, only about Self.

This seems a strange teaching, for you have been told that in the highest form of relationship, one worries only about the other. Yet I tell you this: your focus upon the other—your obsession with the other—is what causes relationships to fail.

What is the other being? What is the other doing? What is the other having? What is the other saying? Wanting? Demanding? What is the other thinking? Expecting? Planning?

The Master understands that it doesn’t matter what the other is being, doing, having, saying, wanting, demanding. It doesn’t matter what the other is thinking, expecting, planning. It only matters what you are being in relationship to that.

The most loving person is the person who is Self-centered.

========================================

Editor’s Note: If you would like to COMMENT on the above excerpt, please scroll down to the bottom of the ancillary copy below.

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 Conversations with God-Book 1.

=====================

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 matter of weeks. So I invite you to participate in the Book-On-A-Bench program and spread ideas that could create a new cultural story far and wide.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

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 beginning his now-famous conversation with God. His With God series of books has been translated into 27 languages, touching the lives of millions and inspiring important changes in their day-to-day living.

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.

Neale grew into an insatiably curious child whose comments about life seemed to possess a wisdom beyond his years, and often caused relatives and family friends to ask, “Where does he come up with this stuff?” While attending a Catholic grade school, Neale would often pose questions in catechism class that would extend past the traditional grade school curriculum.

Finally, the parish priest invited Neale to his rectory to answer the difficult questions that he didn’t wish to address in front of the rest of the class. This meeting turned into a once-a-week visit that blossomed into an open forum in which Neale learned not to be afraid to ask questions about religion and spirituality—and also learned that his asking these types of questions did not mean that he would offend God.

Joyless spirituality is observed.
Is rigidity and anger sometimes produced by religion?

By the age of 15, Neale’s involvement with spiritually based teachings led him to observe that when people got involved in religion they too often seemed less joyful and more rigid, exhibiting behaviors of prejudice, separateness, and even anger. Neale concluded that for many people the collective experience of theology was not positive.

After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, but academic life could not hold him and he dropped out of college after two years to follow an interest in 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 reporter and, ultimately, 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 life was in constant turmoil, and his health was going rapidly downhill.

A life-changing accident.
A desperate questioning that touches the world.

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.

More than 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 the better part of a year to pull himself together and get back under shelter. He found, at first, modest part-time jobs, once again in broadcasting, then worked his way into full time employment and an eventual spot as a 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. 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,” he angrily scratched across a yellow legal pad, “to make life work?”

The books that began a spiritual revolution.
The words that opened doors again.

Now well chronicled and widely talked about, it was this questioning letter that received a divine answer. Neale tells us that he heard a “voiceless” voice, soft and kind, warm and loving, that gave him an answer to this and other questions. Awestruck and inspired, he quickly scribbled these responses onto the tablet.

More questions came, and, as fast as they occurred to him, answers were given in the same gentle voice, which now seemed placed 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 that the process was “exactly like taking dictation,” and that the dialogue created in this way was published without significant 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 renowned With God series, 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 seven million copies worldwide and have been translated into 37 languages.

The With God series has redefined God and shifted spiritual paradigms across the planet. In order to deal with the enormous global response to his writings, Neale formed the Conversations with God Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to inspiring the world to help itself move from violence to peace, from confusion to clarity, and from anger to love.

The work expands.
A movement begins.

Neale founded the School of the New Spirituality and its CWG for Parents program to bring parents the tools to share new spirituality principles of a loving, non-condemning God with their children. He also founded Humanity’s Team, with branches in over 30 countries, now promoting the concept of the Oneness of all people and of all of life.

What Neale calls his “final creation” is The Global Conversation, an Internet Newspaper dedicated to exploring day-to-day events on our planet within the context of The New Spirituality, and offering people across the globe the opportunity to not only witness the playing out of humanity’s Cultural Story in the news, but participate in re-writing that Story, through their contributions and posted comments on the newspaper’s site.

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 Donald Walsch lives in Ashland, Oregon with his wife, the American poet Em Claire (www.emclairepoet.com).)

Understand that you are living An Illusion, and that none of it is Real. Yet The Illusion points to what is Real, and can give you an experience of it.

How can you see The Illusion as an Illusion when it appears to be so real? And how is it that it seems so real if it IS an Illusion?

The second question will be answered first.

The Illusion seems so real because so many people believe that it is not an Illusion.

In your Alice in Wonderland world, everything is as you believe it to be.

There are thousands, millions, of examples of that. Here are two.

Once, you believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth — and, indeed, for you it did. All of your evidences proved that it did! So certain were you of this “truth” that you developed an entire science of astronomy around it.

Once, you believed that everything physical moved from one point to another through Time and Space. All of your evidences proved it!  So certain were you of this “truth” that you built an entire system of physics around it.

Now listen carefully. The wonder of these sciences and these systems is that they worked.

The astronomy that you created out of your belief that the Earth was the center of the universe worked to explain the visual phenomena you saw in the movement of the planets in your sky each night. Your observations supported your belief, creating what you then called “knowledge.”

The physics that you created out of your belief about particles of matter worked to explain the visual phenomena you saw in the physical world around you. Your observations supported your belief, creating what you then called “knowledge.”

Only later, when you looked more closely at what you were seeing, did you change your mind about these things. Yet that change of mind did not come easily. The first persons who suggested such a change of mind were called heretics or, in later times, foolish and mistaken. Their ideas of a new astronomy, with the Earth revolving around the sun, or of quantum physics, in which particles of matter did not move in a continuous line through time and space, but were seen to disappear in one place and reappear in another in what came to be known as “the quantum leap,” were labeled spiritual and scientific blasphemy. Their proponents were discouraged, denounced, and, in some of the early years, even put to death for their beliefs.

It is your beliefs that were “true,” the majority of you insisted. After all, were they not supported by every observation? Yet, which came first, the belief or the observation? That is the central question. That is the inquiry you did not wish to make.

Is it possible that you see what you want to see? Could it be that you observe what you expect to observe? Or perhaps more to the point, look right past what you do not expect to observe?

And I tell you, the answer is yes.

========================================

Editor’s Note: If you would like to COMMENT on the above excerpt, please scroll down to the bottom of the ancillary copy below.

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 the book: Communion with God.

=====================

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 matter of weeks. So I invite you to participate in the Book-On-A-Bench program and spread ideas that could create a new cultural story far and wide.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

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 beginning his now-famous conversation with God. His With God series of books has been translated into 27 languages, touching the lives of millions and inspiring important changes in their day-to-day living.

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.

Neale grew into an insatiably curious child whose comments about life seemed to possess a wisdom beyond his years, and often caused relatives and family friends to ask, “Where does he come up with this stuff?” While attending a Catholic grade school, Neale would often pose questions in catechism class that would extend past the traditional grade school curriculum.

Finally, the parish priest invited Neale to his rectory to answer the difficult questions that he didn’t wish to address in front of the rest of the class. This meeting turned into a once-a-week visit that blossomed into an open forum in which Neale learned not to be afraid to ask questions about religion and spirituality—and also learned that his asking these types of questions did not mean that he would offend God.

Joyless spirituality is observed.
Is rigidity and anger sometimes produced by religion?

By the age of 15, Neale’s involvement with spiritually based teachings led him to observe that when people got involved in religion they too often seemed less joyful and more rigid, exhibiting behaviors of prejudice, separateness, and even anger. Neale concluded that for many people the collective experience of theology was not positive.

After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, but academic life could not hold him and he dropped out of college after two years to follow an interest in 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 reporter and, ultimately, 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 life was in constant turmoil, and his health was going rapidly downhill.

A life-changing accident.
A desperate questioning that touches the world.

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.

More than 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 the better part of a year to pull himself together and get back under shelter. He found, at first, modest part-time jobs, once again in broadcasting, then worked his way into full time employment and an eventual spot as a 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. 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,” he angrily scratched across a yellow legal pad, “to make life work?”

The books that began a spiritual revolution.
The words that opened doors again.

Now well chronicled and widely talked about, it was this questioning letter that received a divine answer. Neale tells us that he heard a “voiceless” voice, soft and kind, warm and loving, that gave him an answer to this and other questions. Awestruck and inspired, he quickly scribbled these responses onto the tablet.

More questions came, and, as fast as they occurred to him, answers were given in the same gentle voice, which now seemed placed 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 that the process was “exactly like taking dictation,” and that the dialogue created in this way was published without significant 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 renowned With God series, 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 seven million copies worldwide and have been translated into 37 languages.

The With God series has redefined God and shifted spiritual paradigms across the planet. In order to deal with the enormous global response to his writings, Neale formed the Conversations with God Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to inspiring the world to help itself move from violence to peace, from confusion to clarity, and from anger to love.

The work expands.
A movement begins.

Neale founded the School of the New Spirituality and its CWG for Parents program to bring parents the tools to share new spirituality principles of a loving, non-condemning God with their children. He also founded Humanity’s Team, with branches in over 30 countries, now promoting the concept of the Oneness of all people and of all of life.

What Neale calls his “final creation” is The Global Conversation, an Internet Newspaper dedicated to exploring day-to-day events on our planet within the context of The New Spirituality, and offering people across the globe the opportunity to not only witness the playing out of humanity’s Cultural Story in the news, but participate in re-writing that Story, through their contributions and posted comments on the newspaper’s site.

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 Donald Walsch lives in Ashland, Oregon with his wife, the American poet Em Claire (www.emclairepoet.com).)