Welcome to Simply Consciousness…. I am honored today to have the opportunity to interview Neale Donald Walsch, 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. The Conversations with God series of books that emerged from those encounters has been translated into 37 languages, touching millions and inspiring important changes in their day-to-day lives. Neale has written 38 books on spirituality and its practical application in everyday life. His newest title, The Essential Path, releases June 4, 2019 from St. Martin’s Essentials.
Can you please tell us a bit about yourself?
Gosh, what to say…?
I’m an Old Man Who Found His Way. That’s how I would describe myself. I spent the first half of my adult life making error after error on every important personal level.
From age 25 to age 50 I thrived professionally, with multiple mini-careers in various fields of communication. On a personal level, however, my life was a different matter. I could not keep a relationship together, and I hurt far too many people as I tried to make what I called “love” work from what I now know was a place of incredible selfishness, self-serving emotional immaturity, and spiritual bankruptcy.
Finally, my 50th birthday brought me moments of painful self-reflection, which produced weeks of sleeplessness. One particular night, after tossing and turning for what seemed liked hours, I threw back the covers in angry self-recrimination and marched out to the couch in the living room, plunking myself down in a fit of despair.
I called out to God inwardly: “What does it take to make life work? Why can’t I get it right? Somebody tell me the rules! I’ll play, I promise! Just give me the Rule Book! And after you give me the rules, don’t change them.”
Spotting a yellow legal pad on the coffee table in front of me, I took to scribbling my questions in anguished hopelessness. I don’t know who I thought was going to read them…I’m sure that at some level I imagined, or hoped, it might be God.
Thus began my conversations with God, with me asking question after question, and receiving answers to every inquiry.
Never, ever intending to “write a book,” but simply wanting to keep a private journal of the thoughts that were occurring to me, I wrote down everything I was thinking, and everything I was “hearing” in response.
That brings us pretty much up to date, with this process having continued for 25 years.
What is your definition of consciousness?
To me “consciousness” refers to a personal awareness of Life at the level of energy. It is a way of describing the degree to which any sentient being knows, experientially, its unity with all things. It is the quality of being aware of the Awareness of one’s singularity with every aspect of Life—including that energetic expression which many people call Divinity.
What are you the most aware of in your daily life?
My reason for being here, and the purpose of every expression of life under the heavens. It is my understanding that this agenda is the same for every sentient being. That agenda is to experience and become the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are.
In a word: evolution.
What was the deepest internal change that you have personally experienced from transforming your consciousness and how it did impact your life in both spiritual and practical ways?
That would be the knowing—and the shift that has occurred from the knowing—that my life has nothing to do with me. It is about everyone else whose life I touch, and the way in which I touch it.
This is meant in the “local” sense of the word “me.” In other words, my life is not about “little” me, or “local” me, but is about “universal” me—that huge part of me, that unlimited part of me, that is unified with every other sentient being.
This shift in my experience has impacted my life in both spiritual and practical ways, opening my mind to motivations I had never had before, and changing my daily priorities in a way which shifted my feeling about what is important, and altered my energy exchange with every person I encounter in my life.
What is the best advice, what are the words of wisdom, that you would like to share with our readers about the importance of becoming more conscious?
I would not presume to offer advice to others about what should be important to them. I only share what the messages of Conversations with God have meant to me, and I invite people to explore the messages themselves to see if they hold any meaning for them, or have any relevance to their lives at all.
It may be extremely beneficial however, for all of us to ask a probing question: Is it possible, just possible, that there is something we don’t fully understand about God, about Life, and about Ourselves—the understanding of which would change everything?
Please tell us about your current project or projects.
My team and I have created an internet platform at www.CWGConnect.com where people from all over the world may quickly and easily access condensations of the messages in the 38 books of the CWG body of work. This website includes a place for readers to ask me, directly, any questions they may have about passages in those books. I respond personally to site visitors every day.
As well, we have produced an Advanced Integration Program, which may be enrolled in by anyone wishing to explore at a very deep level the spiritually revolutionary messages of Conversations with God, and apply them in their lives.
What is the biggest problem in the world today?
The biggest problem in the world today is that most people don’t know what the biggest problem in the world today is.
Everyone can see the impact of the problem, but few people appear to know what is creating this impact. The effect that we are seeing all over the world can be put into one word: alienation.
Suddenly we are living in an Us Against Them world. It’s those unwanted immigrants, those unsatisfied minorities, those unhappy women, those right-wing radicals, those left-wing nut jobs, those unacceptable gays, those uninformed students, those dumb conservatives, those empty-headed liberals, those unmotivated government assistance recipients. It’s those ‘others’ who just keep making things difficult.
Not everyone feels this way, of course, but everyone can feel everyone who feels this way. So it’s affecting all of us. Each day it’s producing distressing headlines, angry blogs, name-calling speeches, childish rants, attacking tweets, bullying diatribes, finger-pointing tirades, and violence-laden actions.
What—if anything—can be done about this heightened level of global alienation? That is the subject of The Essential Path, the latest book I have written based on the messages in the Conversations with God dialogue series.
It would take a small book to answer that question here, as this new text explores not only the cause of our increasing alienation, but offers a solution that every person on Earth may apply to their lives tomorrow to bring an end to the problem worldwide.
The Essential Path may be obtained from major online booksellers after June 4. I urge everyone who is concerned about the state of the world—and, indeed, some of the circumstances in their own lives—to obtain and read this very short book. It could change everything.
The below excerpt is from THE ESSENTIAL PATH: Making the Daring Decision to Be Who You Truly Are. Copyright © 2019 by Neale Donald Walsch and reprinted with permission from St. Martin’s Essentials.
The Proposition
We’re one decision away from a solution to humanity’s biggest problem.
This is a decision so powerful in its impact that it would solve not only our species’ biggest collective problem, but the largest problem faced by every individual reading this right now.
But be warned. This decision may not be what it seems—and it definitely will not fall in line with what is most widely expected or most generally accepted.
That makes it a daring decision. Perhaps the most significant decision of your life. And don’t think you didn’t know that when you started reading here. You knew exactly what you were doing.
And why.
Nobody has to tell us that life on our planet is not what we had hoped it would be. All we have to do is take a look at what’s happening every day around the world—and in some cases, in our own lives.
There are very few among us who have not found ourselves shaking our head in discouraged dismay at the latest tweet or online news bulletin or newspaper headline. And sometimes—too many times, perhaps—at the challenges confronted in our home.
This leads to a compelling question: Is it possible—just possible—that there’s something we don’t fully understand about ourselves, about life, and about God, the understanding of which would change everything?
To me the answer is obvious. Is it to you?
If your answer is yes, you’re invited to now undertake a very quick but deeply revealing explanation of everything—why things are the way they are on Earth today, when our biggest problem arose, what has blocked us from the obvious solution, and how we can dissolve the problem virtually overnight.
We begin with some additional compelling questions.
The Questions
What if the most wonderful ideas you ever had about life were true?
What if the most wonderful ideas you ever had about yourself were true?
What if the most wonderful ideas you ever had about God were true?
What if the most wonderful ideas you ever had about what happens after you die were true?
What would then be true for you?
Do you think there would be any difference between how you might then experience life and how you now experience life?
Your answers to these questions are now setting the course and direction of your experience on Earth, did you know that?
Not to be overly dramatic about it, but it’s true. They are determining the path you will take.
And humanity’s collective answers to these questions are now creating the future of our species by determining the path we will all take.
Will it be the path that our species has taken for thousands of years—the one that got us here, where our lives and the world is today? Is this where we want to be? Is this our most wonderful idea about life? About ourselves? About God?
Ideas are important. It is ideas that create beliefs, beliefs that create behaviors, behaviors that create experience, and experience that creates reality. And if our most wonderful ideas become our beliefs, life on our planet would look much different than it does today.
Cognitive scientists tell us that all it takes is one in ten people to emphatically embrace an idea, and the mass will follow. What, then, could cause just one in ten people to believe that the most wonderful ideas we ever had are true?
A single decision.
We’re one decision away.
Really.
But we must make that decision now. Not doing so is starting to have, on all of us, a very real effect.