NEALE DONALD WALSCH

"...God is with us all the time, in all ways...God is having a conversation with us in every moment."

Neale Donald Walsch is a modern day spiritual messenger whose words continue to touch the world in profound ways. His With God series of books has sold over seven million copies and has been translated into 34 languages, touching millions of lives and inspiring important changes in their day-to-day lives. Neale Donald Walsch devotes his time to sharing the messages of his books through writing, lecturing and facilitating spiritual renewal retreats. He is the creator of the School of the New Spirituality and founder of The Group of 1000, a nonprofit group supporting global spiritual awakening. The movie, Conversations with God opens in theatres on October 27, 2006.

phenomeNEWS: We are here in the presence of Neale Donald Walsch again, our third or fourth interview. Last time we talked it was on the Revelations book. Since then you have brought out quite a few things, like the movie, Conversations With God and your new book Home With God: In A Life That Never Ends. About Home With God, you said this was your last book?

NEALE DONALD WALSCH: It’s going to be the last book in the Dialogue series.

Will you still be connecting with the energy of God?

We all are, every day. That couldn’t stop if I wanted it to and I wouldn’t want it to.

How can people know that they’re connecting with God?

First of all, they’re always connected with God and how they can know that is by a five step process, that I have developed as an answer to that question. One, they have to be willing to acknowledge that such a connection is possible, that is, that in fact it’s not fiction, it’s not an illusion, it’s not someone’s imagination. It’s actually possible such a thing could happen. That’s not a small step, because half the world or more than half the world, would not acknowledge that. They would say that in fact God, in the first person, does not connect with us, does not talk to us, does not have conversations with us. So that’s not a small step. It’s a step that over half the human race has failed to take and refused to take, because their theology teaches them exactly the opposite, that God would never communicate directly or connect directly with any human being, other than the founders of those religions themselves, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed or perhaps in some form the Buddha or people of that stature, but that God does not connect directly with Joe Smith of Topeka, Kansas. So if such religion teaches exactly the opposite of that, a huge majority of the world’s people do not even take the first step.

If you are one of the minority who has been willing to take the first step and acknowledge the possibility that such a thing could occur, then we take Step Two, the accepting and embracing the understanding that such a thing is occurring with you, right now. That is also a very large step for people to take because people are reluctant to imagine themselves to have been included in the circle of God’s most intimate friends, that God would communicate in such a personal, direct and immediate way.

Three, if we can accept that God would, in fact, have such a connection with us – not just the guy across the street or not just the Neale Donald Walsch’s or the Marianne Williamson’s or the Eckhart Tolle’s of the world, but in fact with the Joe Smith’s of the world from Topeka, Kansas. Once we accept that then it goes to Step Three, the fact that not only is it possible for us to have that experience, but that we are having the experience right now. And possibly, heretofore, have simply not understood, not accepted it or not realized it in any functional way.

Once we take Step Three and realize that this process of God’s communication, conversation and connection, is going on right here, right now, then we go to Step Four. What is the communication? That is, we finally begin to start listening more intently and more closely, listening more specifically, because we are now coming from a different kind of place, a place of deep awareness, of “Oh my goodness! I’m involved right now, in this very minute, in this very moment, in the process of God’s communication with me.” When I begin to see that in each moment is a communication of one sort or another, from life to life about life, through the process of life itself, then I appreciate, that is, I make larger – like land appreciates in value. I appreciate, I enlarge every moment, expanding it so huge as to make it more possible, more visible, make myself more able to reach into that moment and pull out the part of that moment that offers me a direct message from the divine.

Then I’m going to Step Five, which is the final step. Having received the message from the divine, I have to go into a place and take the final step of removing myself from denial. That is, if I’m not careful, I will go through all the four steps, receive the message from the divine and then deny that I did receive it or deny that it’s really what it is, call it something else dismiss it as a misinterpretation or misunderstanding or wishful thinking or whatever other device I would use to step away from the very message that I have struggled so hard to hear. And Step Five is not a small step, either, because often the messages that we receive from the divine are messages that we find ourselves challenged to embrace and not just because they may be negative or challenging in the sense of requiring us to be, do or have something, but often because they’re so positive.

Often because it’s almost too good to be true or because it feels arduous. God says meditate every day for an hour and a half or do this or do that, in the sense of what the pathway would be to a higher experience of the divine. We might say, “Oh, gosh, I’m not sure I’m ready to do that.” Or you might hear God saying to us, “This is not the right relationship for you or you’re not behaving in a way that represents your highest self in this moment or do you really think you should be eating that third piece of apple pie,” or in some other way God’s communicating something that we don’t want to hear and so we deny it. Or in the positive way, God is saying, “Do you realize how magnificent you are? Do you realize how extraordinary you are? Do you realize how glorious is the very essence of your being and do you deeply understand that you may actually have anything you choose to be, do or experience if you simply understood who you are and how to use the tools that I’ve given you?” That is such incredible news, it’s almost, for many people, too good to be true. And because it’s too good to be true, for the oddest and weirdest of reasons, we reject it.

Those are the five steps that I would give anyone who asks me “How can I know that I’m having an experience and a connection and a conversation with God.”

Can you actually hear a voice, a soundless voice?

It would be a mistake to characterize or to describe the communication in particular terms, because it occurs in each person in an individual way and in each moment, in a way that is specific to that moment. So as Conversations With God, the book says, it may on one occasion come to you in fact, as a voice, either interior or exterior. You may feel as if, “Hey, that felt as if someone was whispering in my ear. I would have sworn someone just said something to me there.” And we whip around, because we actually think we heard something. Or it could be a voice inside of our mind. And our mind is suddenly filled with elevated thoughts we never thought we would have. But it could also come in the form of lyrics in the next song you hear on the radio. I recall one day turning on the radio and hearing Joan Osborne, “What if God were one of us? Just a slob like one of us?” “Just a stranger on the bus. Trying to make his way home.” So it could come in the lyrics of the next song you hear on the radio. Or it could occur in the chance utterance of a friend or on a billboard around the next corner that you turn and there it is. Or the magazine lying at the hairdressers on the table, as you’re waiting to be called in. So it would be a mistake, I think, to say, “Does it happen in the form of a voice?” Well, the answer is yes and no. God will use whatever form of communication is available to life itself.

The answer could be in a magazine.

Absolutely. Many is the person who has gone deep inside to ask a life-important question, a life-changing question, only to turn on the radio and hear the lyrics of the next song and go, “Oh my God, that’s impossible! How can those lyrics be on the radio right now?”

I remember a lady wrote to me. She was an elderly woman, around 86 and her husband had passed away. She lived by herself in a retirement community in an apartment. She was quite self sufficient and she was very spry, chipper, very intellectually alive and alert. She had read all of my books. And she said, “One day, I thought I would just test it. You keep talking about we’re all having conversations with God, this can happen to anyone, God is present in the lives of all of us in every moment and I thought one day, ‘You know, I’m just going to see if it’s really true.’ So I decided to sit down in my rocker and I wasn’t going to get up until somehow God communicated with me, in some way, shape or form. So there I sat in my rocker for two or three hours. I had some coffee. I had a donut. But I didn’t do really very much. I was kind of waiting for the sky to fall or something, any kind of a sign. Give me a sign that you’re here.” And she said, “You know what? I didn’t get any sign. I sat there and I begged God and I pleaded with God and I challenged God and I finally cursed God and did everything I knew. ‘Come on! Show up! At least if you’re there, if Neale is right, give me a sign!’ Nothing,” she said. “Finally, out of disgust, I thought, ‘The hell with it. I’ll go back to what I normally do during the day at my house, turn on the television set and watch a few soap operas.’ I turn on the TV set and just in that moment, the credits were rolling for an old film with George Burns and John Denver and on the screen, just as the screen warmed up, were the words ‘Oh, God.’”

Wow! What timing!

And she said, “It just threw me back on my heels. Just when I had said, ‘OK, forget it. Never mind. Can’t even get a little sign.’ I turn on the TV set and there are the words ‘Oh, God’ on my television screen.” She said, “I almost bowled over. I just sat back down in that chair and I started to cry and I said, ‘OK, I get it. I totally get it.’”

So actually every moment that we used to call synchronicity is really a moment with God.

All moments are moments with God. Moments of synchronicity are when we know it.

Ah-ha moments!

When we realize it. Every moment is a moment with God. There’s no such thing as a moment without God. But moments of so-called synchronicity are moments when we realize it. That is, when we make it real. You realize God.

Even though there are three of us in a conversation here, there are many more of us in a sense and whatever comes out will be a realization. God is speaking through you, for sure and sometimes through the rest of us as well.

Even with the questions you’re asking, what do you suppose is stimulating you to ask the questions that will allow me to give the answers that produce the outcome that we’re experiencing here? So understand that communications from God are not simply in answers or wonderful, pontifical statements. They’re often in the most profound questions that are being asked. God stimulates you to ask the question, another person to give an answer, a third person to expand on the discussion and a fourth person to move into the experience of it. That’s the process! It’s a process that informs life, about life, through the process of life itself.

Beautifully put. There’s a flow to that. Your websites are awesome. One of them is www.cwg.org and the other one is www.nealedonaldwalsch.com and both of them are visually beautiful but also there’s an essence and an energy about them that we both felt when we were on them. Thank you to whoever is co-creating with you these wonderful sites. Well, God is, of course!

We also would like to talk about the movie, Conversations With God. We’re so excited. It’s coming up in October. We saw the preview and it was fabulous! It’s produced by Stephen Simon, the producer of What Dreams May Come and Somewhere in Time (our favorite romantic movie of all time). How did you hook up with Stephen?

Stephen and I have been friends for a number of years. I first met him prior to the release of the motion picture What Dreams May Come. He and his co-producing partners contacted me and asked me if I would take a look at the film and perhaps offer some suggestions prior to its final edit and even more, give them a reaction to it. I did and we became friends. I was invited to the premier of the movie in Hollywood with Robin Williams and the other stars of that film. I was there at a wonderful red carpet reception and premier evening. We reconnected again and our friendship continued to grow. I was asked if I would be willing to make the rights to the Conversations With God story available to be transformed into a movie and I said I would under certain circumstances, not the least of which was I would have entire creative control over the project. There was no Hollywood production company, to that point, that was willing to give me complete creative control, but Stephen Simon was and he said, “Of course, it’s an extraordinary story and you couldn’t afford to lose control over it so that it might be misinterpreted or placed on film in a way that was not appropriate or not entirely accurate, so we would be happy to give you that kind of control.” The result of that, many years later, was the production of Conversations With God, the movie.

It was done very well. There was a very poignant part, where you went back to the place you had been in the park and you wanted to acknowledge your friends and they were gone. Have you ever seen them again?

No. I lived in the park, I was a street person, for about a year. I ran out of money. I broke my neck in a car accident, to make a long story short and I wound up living in a campground and walking the streets, begging for quarters and dimes, searching through dumpsters for bottles and cans to retrieve for the deposit. I lived on that from day to day. When the Conversations With God experience occurred, I was offered a publishing contract which changed my life forever. It was my intention to go down to that park where I used to live with other street people who had been there for a long time and share a bit of that generosity the universe had bestowed upon me. But the park was no longer being used as a campground. It had been sold and was being turned into a different kind of facility and street people were no longer allowed there. So all the tents and the campground where I had been was gone and the street people dispersed. I never saw any of them again.

You were like a family.

Oh, yes. When you’re surviving on the street for a year or two, you do become extremely close very rapidly or you don’t. One or the other. It’s a very abrupt line. Some people get very distant and they don’t want to have anything to do with you and never will. Others become extremely close in a very short period of time. As one of the characters in the movie says, “On the street, friends are tough to make and even tougher to lose.”

That was a poignant moment. Another interesting part was when there was the ad in the newspaper. Can you tell us about that?

I was living in the park and just dying for a way to get out of there. It was a nice family to be around, but I had no intention of spending the rest of my life living on the street in a tent, making my meals on a Coleman stove. So I was searching for and hoping for some kind of a way out of there. Every night I would pray, “God, don’t let me die in this park.” And I couldn’t believe it was happening. I was 50-years-old. If I had been 35 or 42 or 29, I would have just taken it with a grain of salt and said, “I’ll bounce back. I’ve got plenty of life ahead of me.” But I was running out of runway here. I was 50-years-old and this was no time to be living in the park, opening cans of cold beans, eating food that was left in the dumpster behind the restaurant.

I was depressed and upset, but also determined that I was not going to stay there. As it happened, I was collecting newspapers out of the dumpsters to lie on the floor of my tent. It’s a wonderful way to insulate and to also provide a soft cushion to sleep on. So I would run around on Sundays, in particular, when people who came to the campground just to camp out, vacationers and so forth, they would leave their Sunday paper in the trash. You could get a lot of newsprint that way. I was picking up these newspapers and lining the floor of my tent with them and one morning I rolled over and as it happened, right in front of my face, were the classifieds. There was a job, it said, “Help Wanted: Radio announcer, weekend DJ.” I spent years in broadcasting, did exactly that on a full time basis and I couldn’t believe it, in this tiny town in which I lived, between Medford and Ashland Oregon, here was a job in broadcasting, which was a job that I could do, even if I did have a broken neck, which I did and something I could accomplish and achieve. It was right there in front of me. It was a miracle.

The real miracle was not that I found the ad in the paper, but that the paper was five or eight weeks old. When I called the radio station, the lady said, “That ad isn’t supposed to run for another couple of weeks.” What I discovered was, I had picked up an old ad from the last time they had advertised for someone and that person had left in the eight-week interim. She explained to me later that it had been like a revolving door around there. The weekend guys would come and go and it was hard to find someone who would take the job and stay, who was half way decent. If they were really good, they moved on. If they were not that good, they’d either get fired or they’d leave. So I was calling from an old newspaper and she’s shocked because the new ad isn’t supposed to go in until the next week. So she invited me in. What a serendipitous situation. Come on in for an interview. She scheduled me for an interview with the program director, who hired me on the spot.

We liked that part, especially, in the movie. That the ad was there for you, like God’s want ad put there for you!

Like, “Even before you have asked, I will have answered.”

Right! Some of us went on a picnic last weekend and we took a can of beans, but no can opener. We asked lots of people, but no one had a can opener. A couple drove up in an SUV and a man got out. He was looking at the water. We asked him if he had a can opener and he took out is pocket knife and opened the can. Then they left. He came there for the purpose of opening the beans for us, I guess!

That’s exactly how life works.

How do you think it will affect people’s lives, when they see the movie? What message do you expect them to go home with?

I have some hopes and thoughts about it and I hope that they will be filled with deep understanding that what has happened to me can happen to them and is happening to them. That God is with us all the time, in all ways and that God is having a conversation with us in every moment. The point of the movie is not that one person’s life was dramatically changed. The point of the movie is that everyone’s life can change, that everyone is having, right now, a conversation with God. The final words of the film are something to the effect of “I will always be there, always and in all ways. So just call on me and I’ll be there.” And I’m hoping that people will leave the theater deeply moved by that message, “Oh my gosh, God is much closer than I imagined, must more present than I could ever have dreamed and much more real in my life than I had ever thought and all I have to do to experience that is to reach out and allow myself to have the experience.”

Absolutely. We even think a thought and we get an answer.

Of course. That’s what I hope they will experience when they leave the theater. I don’t want them to experience it as a biopic, the story of one man’s life. I hope that they see it as the story of their life and that they see that we are almost split in our personalities, between the part of us that is human, living within the illusion and the part of us that is divine, living an entirely different kind of life. That’s why that particular device was used in the film, showing the two Neale’s, the so-called homeless Neale and the Neale who was clearly on a different path.

That was beautiful, how that was done. How has your life changed since the movie was completed?

I don’t think it has changed. The making of the movie hasn’t changed my life in any way. It’s just made me more excited about the experience that I’m having, because now I know that many, many thousands of people will be made aware of it in a new form, a much more accessible form than books. Motion pictures are very powerful and people will experience this possibility of having a conversation with God, in a whole new way, as a result of the movie. My personal life hasn’t changed, even a little bit.

It may after the movie is released.

It’s possible. I have people walk up to me on the street all the time and ask me if I’m Neale Donald Walsch because they’ve seen my picture on the back of one of my books. I’ve written 22 books and somebody’s bound to recognize you sooner or later.

I imagine when the movie Conversations With God comes out – although I’m not in the film, so they won’t recognize me from the movie – but the story will become more widely known and it might have some effect on my life. But I really hope that the major effect will be on their lives. I’m more concerned about what occurs in their lives and what occurs in the life of the world at large, because that’s my mission now and my purpose in life, to change the world’s mind about God, which I believe will change life forever on this planet. It would change our politics. It would change our economics. It would change our education systems. It would change religion, of course, religion itself. It would change very aspect of our social interactions with each other. If we simply changed our mind about God, about life and about ourselves and about each other. So I’ve embarked on a life-long mission to see what I can do to help the world change its mind about itself, to help the world change its mind about God, to help the world create a new thought and a new cultural story around the life that we’re living.

You had mentioned thinking a thought and being open to receive. What about prayer? Do you just keep praying and praying or do you pray and then let go? How does that work?

Pray without ceasing is my motto. But you asked two different questions. I don’t think that because one lets go, one stops praying. I think that one lets go of our expectations or requirements or any particular need to turn out in a particular way. But that doesn’t mean one stops praying. Prayer and expectation are, in fact, two entirely different things. I believe that life itself is a prayer. If we understand deeply that every thought, word and deed is a message that we are sending to the universe – it’s an asking, life is an asking of a question. Whatever we think, say or do, we’re sending a memo to the front office. Can I have this? And the guy in the front office has only a one word vocabulary. He only knows how to say yes. So you can depend on her to produce that response to every one of the requests that we send. She’s going to say yes to everything, whether it’s good for us or not, she’s going to say yes. The universe only knows how to say yes.

Life is a constant prayer. The prayer never ends. That’s important for people to understand, especially in the context of the question you’re asking. We’re always praying in the sense that ever thought we have, everything we do and every word we say, sends a request to the universe, sends a message to the universe, which says, “This is what I would like. May I please have this?” So I believe in prayer without ceasing. I believe in what I call intentioned prayer, as opposed to unconscious prayer. Unconscious prayer is when we send messages to the universe without thinking about it or without doing it intentionally. Intentioned prayer, on the other hand, is when we sit down and deliberately pray.

I’ve learned to pray in an entirely different way than I used to pray as a child. I don’t go to God with a wish list as I used to go to Santa Claus. I pray in the form of thoughts that I arrange in my head, visualizations and mental constructions that allow me to see and emotionally experience the outcome that I would choose to move through my life, that I would choose to call forth. And then I say, at the end of those prayers, “Thank you, God. Thank you, God, for helping me to understand that this problem has already been solved for me. Thank you, God, for giving me the insight and the wisdom and the clarity to know that what I choose I may have. And thank you, God, for helping me to become deeply aware that however the present circumstance turns out, it will turn out for the highest and best good of all concerned, because all is perfect in God’s universe. I feel protected, embraced, secure, safe and eternally loved in the everlasting embrace of God.” And those are the kinds of prayers I say to myself routinely throughout the day. I pray without ceasing. I’ve also learned to surrender the result and the outcome and to step away from expectation and requirement of any kind.

Yes. Could we also do this as group consciousness, Neale, as far as world conflicts are concerned?

Of course. The technology, so to speak, is available to everyone and anyone and may be applied on both an individual and a group consciousness level. There are some wonderful books now being written about how the whole thing works or what I call the mechanics of life or the mechanism of creation. Some of the best are being produced by Esther and Jerry Hicks, such as their book Ask and It Is Given. They are coming out with a new book very soon, called The Law of Attraction.

I think that all the tools have been given us and prayer, in its many forms, is one of those tools and we should never put that tool down.

We’ve been following Jerry and Esther and Abraham for a long time. The message is fabulous yet so simple, as it should be.

Neale, this is all so wonderful, what you’re continuing to do and holding that clarity and that understanding and sharing with the rest of us, who are still making our way through all of it and coming to understand what it’s about being human and what it’s about being connected. In that state, like you said, of constantly feeling that strong presence. We applaud you for what you continue to keep on expanding into and love watching it happen!

I don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression that this is the way things are for me on a 24/7 basis. I, too, am continuing to struggle. I, too, am continuing to move through in my own personal process. And I, too, have moments when all I just said to you is either not being applied by me for me in my life or when it seems hopeless for me to even bother with it. So I’m very deeply enmeshed in my own personal process around all of that. The only difference between the me of today and the me of my yesterdays is at least now I know the path. At least now I know the way out of the forest. At least now I can climb out of the briar patch and that’s different from the way it was in years past. But I find myself in there, just like all the rest of us do and probably just as much as the rest of us do.

You come across very humbly, too.

Thank you! I have to tell you that the truth is humbling. As long as I’m willing to speak my truth and not try to present myself as something I’m not, I come across as very humble. I’m not trying, it’s just that truth is very humbling. I move through stuff on a day by day basis and I’m confronting my own challenges, hourly, just as everyone else is.

Wonderful! The web sites are www.cwg.org and www.nealedonaldwalsch.com. Is there another one?

The one that I’m focusing on right now is thegroupof1000.com. That’s an organization that I’ve created to gather together a thousand people from around the world, from each and every village on the planet, who would be deeply committed and personally determined to make an extraordinary difference in the world. And those thousand people are gathering now. We already have a number of members from countries all over the globe. They’re now coming together in order to leverage individual intent, magnifying it to globally impact in proportion. The method by which we are going to be doing that is too detailed to describe in this limited space, but if a person is interested in playing at the next highest level in the game of world transformation and world change, they may wish to take a look at thegroupof1000.com. At the website, they will find a doorway into a wonderful opportunity for the fullest and grandest expression of who they really are, in terms of the work that needs to be done on our planet right now, to shift the prevailing notion about our collective reality.

OK! That sounds fabulous. We’re so honored to have had you here today sharing with us. Always and all ways, as you say, God is good all the time and all the time, God is good! If you had a last word of wisdom for our readers, what would that be?

Be impatient. Be impatient with yourself. Be impatient with life. Be impatient with the universe. Clamor for change. Clamor for growth and clamor for love. Then be the source of that for which you yearn. And never forget that one person can change the world. Indeed, it’s never been changed in any other way. It’s always been a single individual who’s simply risen to a new level and said, “I will do this.” Remember the essence of leadership. A leader is not one who says, “Follow me.” A leader is one who says, “I’ll go first.”

Thank you very much! We know our paths again will cross and all the best with the movie!

Thank you very, very much!