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phenomeNEWS: We
welcome back one of our favorite folks out there stomping for God. Neale
has more than 20 books out; he’s been talking with God for quite some
time! They’ve been translated into 27 languages and have sold over 7
million copies worldwide. That’s a lot of books. Conversations with God,
Book 1 was on the New York Times bestseller list for 2 years. That says
a lot to us about people wanting to know what God is all about and
getting some inside information. Walsh’s new book is Tomorrow’s God: Our
Greatest Spiritual Challenge, by Atria Books. We are pleased to welcome
back, Neale Donald Walsch.
Hi Neale.
How are you guys doing?
We’re doing fantastic.
How are you?
Terrific!
We see that you are
still talking to God, that’s great.
Well, we all are, every one of us,
everyday, we’re just calling it something else.
Absolutely. Now you say
this book is a little different from the rest of them. How is that so?
Well it contains a lot of the same
information. It’s full of scriptures, contemporary spiritual messages
but it also contains some new ideas, the most striking one, a
prediction. And the prediction is that humanity is going to create a new
God in the next 20-30 years. The book also creates a recipe for that new
God and gives people a chance to participate in the process and it tells
them how to do it. So that’s brand new and that gives people the chance
to say, “There is a role that I can play in shifting the premier reality
on this planet, which right now needs to be change dramatically, or
we’re going to march right straight to our own self-destruction.”
Tomorrow’s God is a God that describes the God of our tomorrow, the God
who’s on the way, who will be placed in humanity’s experience by
humanity itself. It describes the difference between Tomorrow’s God and
yesterday’s God and it talks in terms of the impact that the emerging
new spirituality will have on politics, religion, economics, business,
commerce, relationships, education and just about every important aspect
of human endeavor.
Neale, a lot of people
will hear this and they’ll think, what’s wrong with the old God?
Nothing is wrong with the old God, if
the old God is working for you. If our beliefs in yesterday’s God are
producing the kinds of outcomes in our world that we want to see
produced, then we shouldn’t change a thing. But if in fact our beliefs
in yesterday’s God can be demonstrated to be gaining more harm than good
in some cases, then we may want to look at those few beliefs that are no
longer functioning and that are in fact dysfunctional. What we are
saying is not that humanity should abandon wholesale or completely
reject our current safe traditions but rather we should take those faith
traditions, 90 percent of which teach of things that are wonderful, good
and true, look at them objectively and ask, “Is it possible that some of
what we hold to be true about God and about life, simply is not true and
is no longer working?” If that’s the case, can we now forge a new kind
of spirituality that allows us to live together in peace and harmony.
What would it take to do that?
Those are the questions confronting
humankind. These are not simply theological questions. They are
questions that have to do with all of life. Theology creates an impact
and produces its effect in all of life as we see all around the world in
our economics, in our politics, in religions, in our education, in our
relationships, in every aspect of every human endeavor. If we think that
theology is separate or divorced from the day-to-day events of life, you
haven’t been listening to people.
You mention in the
book, New Spirituality. Is it like the Cultural Creatives, those people
that want a better world, have worked for it and worked to create a
peaceful energy within themselves? Is this perhaps not more of a
maturing spirituality? Should we look at it that way where a number of
us create a critical mass, (like the 100th monkey), where there will be
a shift in perception at a certain level?
You can call it whatever you want to
call it; a rose by any other name is still a rose. It’s called the new
spirituality in the book to differentiate it from the spirituality of
our yesterdays and to allow people to see that we are talking about some
new applications of old and ancient ideas. That’s what the new
spirituality is. It’s a new form of spiritual expression that allows
humanity to follow its impulse towards the divine in a way that does not
make each other wrong for how we are doing it. That’s an important
difference between yesterday’s God and tomorrow’s God, because
yesterday’s God, the God of whom the largest number of people believe
in, that God says, “There’s only one path to the mountaintop and it’s
the path that I tell you to take.” That is the person who is currently
in charge, whoever it happens to be. So what we’re going to see is in
the new spirituality is a new idea about God that says, “There’s more
than one path to the mountaintop. No path is the one path and no way is
the one and true way.” In fact, if God is your target, congratulations,
he’s so big you can’t miss! (laughter)
Actually, this is what
the Eastern philosophies and religions have been saying.
Well, of course, they’ve been saying it
from the beginning of time. The reason why Hinduism hasn’t become as
popular among people and those other religions is because it does not
teach superiority. Superiority is the most seductive idea ever
precipitated upon the human race. We love to feel superior. It’s a great
feeling for some people to imagine that they are better than others are.
Few people would admit that it makes them feel good. That’s what other
religions teach their followers, is that they are in fact superior in
the eyes of God, that God somehow loves them more, because they come to
God along a certain and particular path, the path of their religion. In
fact, not only does God love them more, it goes further than that, God
condemns to everlasting damnation and to eternal torture anyone who does
not come to him along a prescribed path. This is the problem that
everyone is standing up saying, “No, no, it’s my way,” “No, no, it’s my
way and I will kill you if you don’t agree with me.” We’ve been doing
that for thousands of years.
If I understand this,
at least in my reading of it, the New Spirituality means a more personal
relationship with God, improving yourself and allowing all others to
find their path whatever way that may be.
Well, that’s the most important part,
yes. The new spirituality means that we say to each other, believe what
you believe, hold to be true what you hold to be true. But can we adopt
an overarching belief that all of us will ultimately return to that
which we call divinity if we simply have a deep, sure and honest desire
to do so? Ninety percent of the things that the world’s religions teach
us are good and true. It’s eternal wisdom and we recognize it as that.
That’s why we respond to it so positively. But there is that 5 or 10
percent of what humanity’s religions teach us which we just recognize at
the level of our soul, cannot be how it really is. The problem is, we
don’t have the courage to stand up and tell our religious leaders, “Hey,
cut it out!”
As I was brought up,
Sunday, you go do your church thing and the rest of the week you are
doing something else. Now to me, I equate the New Spirituality with
being spiritual in whatever it is that you are doing, 24/7, whether you
are at work, doing the laundry, whatever, have this New Spirituality
impact every area of our lives including economics, politics and other
areas. That brings me to the next question. Since this is a political
year, how can we have this most impact those that are making major
decisions for our lives?
By taking our dearest and most
important spiritual truths into the voting booth with us.
By not separating spirituality and
politics, by not separating spirituality and economics, by not
separating spirituality and religion, which most people do. By not
separating spirituality from education or from our sexual expression,
from our relationships or from any other aspect of life. So when we go
into those voting booths in November or send in our absentee ballots as
we do in Oregon, we need to come from the place of our deepest spiritual
understanding and then vote for the person and party that we assess to
be expressions of our innermost spiritual truths. Are we our brother’s
keeper? Are we the light of the world? Are we to be hope of humanity?
What is in fact our biggest and highest spiritual truth about ourselves
and about each other?
Neale, there’s a
television show on called, Joan of Arcadia. Joan finds God in different
people. They come through to her and she’s making the public more aware
of God being in our lives and within each other. This a really wonderful
show.
I took that idea to the networks four
years ago; I went to CBS television and proposed an idea of a show in
which everyone was having Conversations with God. The show was going to
be called Conversations with God. The idea I proposed was of a person
who walked through life and then God showed up in a different form every
week. Our job at the end of the show was to figure out who was God that
week. They loved the idea. I’m sure I convinced them of it. They created
Joan of Arcadia out of that conversation that I had with CBS television
about three and a half years ago. I am delighted that they have done so.
It’s an extraordinary program. It’s sending exactly the message that the
Conversations with God books send.
And we need more
programming like that, absolutely. Because it touches normal, everyday
circumstances and anybody can relate to these situations.
That’s exactly right.
Now you’ve traveled all
over the planet, what kind of questions are people asking?
“Why can’t we stop ourselves from doing
this to each other? What will it take for us to bring some sanity back
to which the way in which we live our lives?” Beginning at our own
kitchen tables, bedrooms, place of business, in our own community, in
our own state, in our own nation and then of course extending out to
include all the world. What will we need to understand? What is missing
from our current understanding that could cause us to stop this
insanity? We ask those questions and humanity is now beginning to lose
patience with itself and is beginning to demand answers from those
leaders among us, government, spiritual or political leaders who say
they have the answers but in fact provide nothing but more and more
questions. That’s what humanity is asking, What will it take before the
world stops and says to itself, “OK, already, what is it that hurts you
so much, that you feel you have to hurt me in order to heal it?”
And the answer would
be?
Superiority. What hurts them so much is
the idea that some people in the world feel they are superior to other
people in the world and because of that, they act in very superior ways.
And our answer through the New
Spirituality is what, to love more?
First of all, to eliminate a thought of
spiritual, political or economic superiority.
Let’s just understand something here,
when I talk to you about superiority, I’m talking about something that
is devious. It produces a world in which 5 percent of the people hold 80
percent of the world’s wealth.
So it’s insidious what this idea of
superiority produces and puts into the world at large. Those people who
are downtrodden; those people who are being overrun by the system of
economics, the system of political power and the system of spiritual
superiority that has been put into place by others in power, are now
rising up and they’re saying, “Excuse me, but this no longer works for
us. You’ve going to have to start paying attention to us or we will
force you to.”
So here we are throwing spears at each
other, each of us saying that the other person is wrong for throwing
their spear, but we are totally right for throwing ours. It’s an insane
situation that’s created by our thoughts of superiority. We’ve done the
same thing with our economic system, by the way. We imagine that we can
export our economics and our politics and that the whole world should
bend down and say our way of doing things is the right and proper way of
doing things and is the best way of doing things. Some political
commentator a few years ago said something quite astonishing, “You know
how the world could get along? Just leave everybody alone.” (laughter)
We just don’t know how to leave each other alone.
What a profound idea.
Entire humanity is acting like kids in
the backseat of the car. Let’s just leave each other alone.
Stop the judgments on
each other.
Why can’t we do that? What is so hard
about that?
At the end of the
book you have challenge for us to join humanity’s team. There is a
website:
www.humanitysteam.com. It sounds like a great
thing if we want to feel like we’ve got brothers and sisters out there
who are joined in the cause of creating a higher spirituality, a New
Spirituality and doing business in a different way, this is a great
place to begin and to find like minds.
What last pearl would
you like to leave with us today Neale?
Let’s change our idea about God. If God
had one sentence that he could say to the world, I am often asked this
by the media, what would it be? I often answer, “You’ve got me all
wrong. Can we start again?”
Or “Don’t make me come
down there!” (laughter)
Or God would say, “I’m already down
there. Would you open your eyes and see?”
Excellent! Thank you so
much Neale. We hope you keep on talking to God. The books are wonderful.
Thank you so much for what you do to enlighten the world. God bless!
And you.
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