#542 How to Talk to God + Healthy Spirituality
with Neale Donald Walsch
Neale Donald Walsch
When we really become powerful is when we use gratitude in advance, not just after the fact. Not just, thank you God for a good night’s sleep, after we had one, but thank you God for a good night’s sleep before we go to bed. True spiritual masters use gratitude as an announcement of what they expect to receive from life and so gratitude in advance can become a very powerful way of using the metaphysical energy that has been placed in every sentient being, an energetic that can produce specific outcomes in one’s life, including, as you said, even outcomes relating to our health and our psychological and emotional and spiritual well being.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers detox podcast. And on the show today, we have an amazing guest. We have Neale Donald Walsch, who I just love so much. I read his book Conversations with God. And it just really opened my eyes to the true nature of God, and also at healthy spirituality. And we talk about the nature of God. On the show. We talk about Neale Donald Walsch, his new book called God talk, and we talk about how to talk to God, how to develop a relationship with God really is such an interesting conversation, and that I’m just so thrilled to have him on the show. Neale is the best selling author of conversations with God series, which seven of the nine books have made the New York Times bestseller list, and Book One remains on that list for 134 weeks. And his books have been translated into 37 languages and run by millions of people. You can learn more about Neale at www.nealedonaldwalsch.com
Neale, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Neale Donald Walsch
Well, thank you, Wendy. It’s lovely to be here, and I appreciate the invitation and the opportunity. How may I serve the moment?
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes. Well, I’ve read your book, Conversations with God, and it really resonated with me so much. It was life-changing for me and showed how simple it is to talk to God and create a relationship with God outside of the constructs of religion that man has devised. So, I wanted to have you come on and talk about your new book, “God Talk” which is actually your 40th book. Tell us about your new book and how it’s different from your previous books.
Neale Donald Walsch
Well, the first big difference, Wendy, is that I didn’t write it and then looked for a publisher. Most authors, myself included, write a book and then see if they can find a publisher who is interested in putting it out. That’s how it went for my first 39 books. This was unusual, but my phone rang one day about a year and a half ago, maybe not even that, and it was the publisher calling me. That’s never happened before. I asked how I could help, and she said they would like to ask if I’d be interested in writing a book for them. I said, “wow, that would be interesting. What did you have in mind?” They said they would like me to write a book about how people might increase their opportunity to have their own personal conversation with God, just the way I did. Everyone wants to know if there’s a process or how it all works. I said, “interesting, sure, I could write that.” So, I wrote a book for the first time in my life at the request of a publisher. What makes it different is that in no other book have I ever explained step-by-step how people might, or how I did, have my own conversation with God. It also offers something else different. The publisher put an invitation out on the internet, asking the general public and said “if you ever felt they had an experience of divine intervention where God intervened in your life in a personal way. Talking to you, or creating some kind of outcome, send us your story.” They told me, they received many, many emails from people telling their stories of how God intervened in their lives in a direct and personal way. They included seven or eight of those stories in the book for a very important reason: to make the point that it’s not just this guy in Oregon who has conversations with God. It’s not just a particular person or a singular individual. The point they wanted to emphasize and authenticate was that all of us are having conversations with God all the time, already, without even knowing the process. We’re simply calling it something else. We call it women’s intuition, a psychic hit, an epiphany, or whatever words we can find to avoid saying, “I got a message from God.” Very few people feel easy about saying something like that because we don’t want to be ridiculed or made fun of or marginalized. So, we use other ways of describing the same experience that I’ve had. The only difference is, I called it a conversation with God, and other people call it an epiphany, sudden awareness, or a psychic hit. What I love about the book is that it makes the point that there is no one way to have a conversation with God and that all of us are having them all the time. The other point I’d like to make, since you asked, is that the book points out that God is not something that’s way over here someplace, outside of us. In fact, the essence of the universe that we call God, the higher power, if you please, that essential essence, which is really energetic, exists within all of us. It’s part of every single sentient being in the cosmos. So not only are we having a conversation with God, but we are, in fact, a part of God—not just figuratively speaking, but literally. Each of us is an individuation of the divine. Now, that’s hard for some people to believe. Looking at you, it’s pretty easy to believe. We just take one look at you and go, “Wow, look at this. Obviously, she’s an individuation of the divine.” But when somebody shows up not quite as miraculously extraordinary as you, we have a hard time believing it, especially when we look into the mirror. Most people look into the mirror and they can’t really see themselves as who they really are. All kidding aside, we like to deny the highest part of ourselves. In fact, Wendy, we’re in such a rut around that, we have such a habit of denying the highest part of ourselves that many people have a hard time even accepting a compliment. You tell someone, “Wow, what an intelligent thing you said, or thank you for being so generous, or you’re a wonderful person” and we say, “oh, shucks.” The old saying, “This old thing?” When someone says, “What a great dress, what a great outfit you have on today,” we respond with, “This old thing?” We can’t even accept a compliment on the clothes we’re wearing for fear that someone will think we’re boastful or think too much of ourselves. And you know what’s sad about that? The average person does not think too much about themselves. The average person doesn’t think enough about themselves. So what we need to train ourselves to do when someone gives us a compliment is to say, “Thank you for noticing that, thank you for seeing that,” and at least say to themselves in their own mind, “I see the same thing. I see wonder and magnificence when I look into the mirror, even when I’m looking at myself.” It’s not an ego statement. It’s a simple statement of fact: God doesn’t make junk, and here I am, a wave on the ocean of divinity.
Dr. Wendy Myers
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I don’t think people realize how powerful they are and how they are always connected with God. They do get these messages where they can create the best version of themselves or are guided to step into their life purpose or take baby steps toward that. But they don’t realize that these messages were talked about in Conversations with God, how God is even speaking to us through our feelings, and those are really powerful messages or ways to tap into how God is speaking to us. Can you talk to us a little about that?
Neale Donald Walsch
Yes. Thank you, Wendy. It’s been my experience, and I was told as well, that God speaks to us in really a hundred different ways across a thousand moments in many, many different lifetimes, if you please. It’s my awareness and understanding that we also have more than one lifetime. That is, I embrace the notion of reincarnation. This does not seem to be my first time here. I’ve had a direct experience of that. I was walking down the street a few years ago, eight or ten years ago, in Hamburg. My wife and I were there, and I was there to give a lecture. As we were walking down the street in Hamburg, having a nice time visiting the city during the day, I said to my wife, “Oh my gosh, there’s a huge pillar around the next corner. There’s a huge, wonderful building, I’m sure of it, with three pillars in front, and it’s a gorgeous piece of architecture. We’ve got to go look at it.” So we turned the corner, walked down the street, and about four blocks down, you couldn’t see it from the corner, but four or five blocks down, there it was, exactly as I described it. My wife looked at me and said, “How could you possibly know? Have you seen a postcard or something?” I said, “No, honey, I’m really clear. I’ve been here before. I had a whole lifetime in this place, in this country. Now I understand how when I took German in school, I got straight A’s for three years. I didn’t do well in my other classes. I couldn’t get mathematics, algebra, and geometry for love or money, but when I went to German class, I just picked up the language like that. And now it’s all coming back to me. So not only does God speak to us in a thousand different ways but across all the lifetimes that we have experienced on the earth. And some of the ways, as you mentioned, are feelings. I was told in Conversations with God that feelings are the language of the soul. But that’s only one other way God speaks to us. Let me give you an example. Here’s another way we get messages from the divine. I’m in the menswear department of a major store a few years ago, and I’m looking for a sports jacket for a man, but I’m smelling perfume. I said, it smells like gardenia here. So I said to the guy, is the department store fragrance section nearby? He said, “no, no, no. The perfume counter is down below on the floor below us.” I said, on the floor below us? I’m smelling gardenia all over the place. He said, sorry, I don’t smell that. I said, “You don’t smell the gardenia?” Maybe somebody walked by wearing that fragrance. He said, “I don’t smell it.” I thought, oh, interesting. Then it dawned on me, gardenia was my mother’s favorite fragrance. It was her signature fragrance. She wore it for 30 years. I gotta call my mom. I picked up the phone and called my mom. We had a wonderful conversation. It wasn’t like I was talking to my mother every other day or even every other week, for that matter. She lived in a whole different state, half a country away. So I talked to her maybe four or five times a year, maybe every other month, just to check in. How’s everything going, Mom? But this time, we had this meaningful conversation. She shared so many wonderful tidbits with me, parts of her life, things she wanted me to know.
She passed away a few weeks later. Wendy, if I hadn’t made that call out of the blue, I wouldn’t have had that final wonderful conversation with my mom. You tell me how God talks to us. I mean, could God have screamed louder, “Call your mother!” by bringing her signature fragrance into the menswear department of a department store? I only bring up the example to share with people that God speaks to us. That is, we are receiving messages from life, about life, all the time.
Dr. Wendy Myers
And how can we tap more into that? How can we tap into that cosmos and that guidance so we can really experience life the way that we’re meant to?
Neale Donald Walsch
Well, you know what? I’m not quite sure that I want to say to our audience that there’s a way that we’re meant to, in the sense that God has a plan or something. This is how it’s going to go for Wendy. This is how it’s going to go for Neale. Oh, and Charlie is going to be the first baseman for the New York Yankees. And Rudolph is going to be a reindeer or maybe he’ll be the conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra in Augsburg. I don’t think God has a plan for us. So there’s no way that life is meant to be in that sense.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. Maybe it’s more like living our highest purpose or stepping into it.
Neale Donald Walsch
Now, I hear you and I agree. I agree with the words you’re using. I think we all do have a higher purpose. And what I call that is, the agenda of the soul. And you know what, Wendy? It starts with us agreeing with ourselves about who we are. If I think that this body or this mind is who I am, I’ve misunderstood everything—who I am, why I’m here, what’s going on—because I’ve missed the basic awareness that this is not who I am. This is something I have. I have a body, but my body is not who I am. And I have a mind, but my mind is not who I am. My awareness is that who I am is a spiritual being. I’m a soul. I’m a soul that has a body and a mind, and that changes bodies and minds from incarnation to reincarnation, but that has a soul that lives forever, and that incarnates in the physical realm from time to time, over a period of many centuries, in order to complete the agenda of the soul. Which I understand to be evolution. And, not to give a speech here, but just to conclude my thought, that process of evolution, of what you call our higher purpose, in my understanding, is to demonstrate and to express aspects of who we really are. Aspects of our own divinity. We come here to experience ourselves as who we really are, aspect by aspect. To give you an example of what I’m talking about, let’s just say that I know myself to be generous. Okay, maybe I know that, yeah, I’m a generous person. I’m generous with my time, with my talents, even with my money, I’m generous. But if I don’t have an opportunity to experience generosity flowing from me, then it’s just a concept. I have a concept about myself, and that’s how it is in the realm of the spiritual. I know who I am, I know every aspect of who I am, but I come to the realm of the physical because here I can experience it, I can express it. And then I can know myself as that, not just in my awareness, but in my experience. And you know the example I like to use, Wendy. We’re all adults here, so I’m going to use an adult example. The example that I like to use to help people understand what I’m talking about, the difference between awareness and experiencing. When I was 13 or 14 or 15 years old, I began to hear about the opposite sex, and even when I was like 16, I remember getting my first copy of Playboy magazine, and I actually saw a picture of a lady with no clothes on, oh my God, and so I had the experience of knowing that I was a sexual human being, that I had sexual urges, sexual inclinations, sexual energies, and sexual desires, but I never had any experience of it. I simply had a knowing of it. I use this as a simple example of how the soul feels. But sometime between the age of 17 and 21, I decided it was time for me to have the experience. I wasn’t okay with just knowing it. I wanted to experience it. And so I use that as a simplistic example of how the soul feels about every aspect of who we really are. We want to experience ourselves as divinity individualized. And so we find ways to do that if we’re brave enough or courageous enough to even accept the possibility that we are each individuations of the divine. You know what? People who have embraced that notion about themselves have changed the world. We can name them. We actually know who they are by name. So when you decide that that’s your reason for being here, as the French would say, “raison d’être” suddenly everything changes.
Dr. Wendy Myers
What do you feel our purpose is here? I mean, I feel like our purpose is to create love and spread love around and engage with people with love. Do you have any other ideas about what our purpose is here?
Neale Donald Walsch
Yeah. I was hoping that I had communicated that our purpose is to demonstrate and thus experience every aspect of divinity, not just love: compassion, understanding, awareness, generosity, kindness, patience, wisdom, clarity, helpfulness—every aspect of divinity. Our purpose is to experience who we really are through the expression and demonstration of these qualities. I believe that’s our purpose. People who have chosen to use their lives moment to moment for exactly that reason truly touch the world in an astonishing way. So, we decide, before I go into any meaningful interaction with another, I want to make sure that I’m aware and that I remember who I really am and what I’m doing here. That’s why you do this podcast, among other things. You’re not here for ego reasons. You’re not here to become a famous podcaster. You’re not here to gather an audience that’s going to adore you. I mean, it’s nice if you get a larger audience, but that’s not your purpose. Clearly, something else drives the engine of your experience. You’ve decided to be a vehicle through which others may acquire an awareness of who they really are and of what is really going on. And you’re doing it in a very courageous and brave way. I mean, you’re putting yourself out there publicly and giving people a chance to disagree with you and maybe even make you wrong for what you’re putting out there.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. And one thing that I do is I call on God to create, manifest what I want, even with my health. Thanking God for my health and even to sleep, I say, thank you so much for giving me two hours of REM sleep and two hours of deep sleep. I get very granular and specific with what I’m asking. Do you have any advice on talking with God?
Neale Donald Walsch
Yeah. Well, I do. I have a six-step process I’m going to share with you, but I want to say something to what you just said. When we really become powerful is when we use gratitude in advance, not just after the fact. Not just, “God, thank you for a good night’s sleep,” after we had one, but, “Thank you, God, for a good night’s sleep,” before we go to bed. True spiritual masters use gratitude as an announcement of what they expect to receive from life. Gratitude in advance can become a very powerful way of using gratitude. The metaphysical energy that has been placed in every sentient being, an energetic that can produce specific outcomes in one’s life, including, as you said, even outcomes relating to our health and our psychological, emotional, and spiritual well-being. So one of my favorite prayers whenever I’m encountering anything in life that is unwelcome, an unwelcome event or an unwelcome circumstance, I go right to my favorite prayer “Thank you, God, for helping me to understand that this problem has already been solved for me.” What a powerful prayer. When we use gratitude in advance of the outcome we prefer, more often than not, that outcome or something very close to it is what we experience in our life. At least that’s been my experience. Now, I did say a minute ago that we put into the book a six-step process by which people might, there’s no guarantee, but people might find a way to move closer to having their own conversation with God. I can give you that six-step process if you’d like me to.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes, please.
Neale Donald Walsch
The six-step process begins with step number one, called possibility. We have to agree that it’s possible, number one, that there even is a being called God, because not everyone agrees. Not everyone on the planet says, “Oh yeah, there is a God.” Millions of people declare that, “No, there is no such thing as God. It’s just a story we’re making all up.” So we have to agree that there is a God. Then we have to agree to the possibility that if there is a God, that God would actually talk to human beings. The first step is to agree with ourselves as to the possibility that a God exists and that God will speak directly to individual human beings.
Step number two is worthiness. We have to agree that we are worthy to be one of those. If we agree that it’s possible that God talks to human beings, and by the way, most people who do believe in God also believe that God, of course, talks to human beings. God talked to Moses. Most people say, “Okay, I get it.” Millions of people believe that God talked to Moses and actually gave Moses a couple of ideas about how to live your life. They’re called the Ten Commandments. Most people believe that God talked to and through the man called Jesus, and the same is true with regard to Muhammad, bless his holy name. The same is true with regard to other people on the planet, male and female, through the years. Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Joan of Arc. Ladies and gentlemen, through the years we have recognized people to whom God spoke, and we kind of believe, yeah, that happened. There’s no question about it. So people who believe in God don’t have a hard time believing that God talks to certain people, but the belief that God only talks to very special people is not held by the largest number of humans on the planet right now. And that God only talks to very special people. Maybe God talks to the Pope, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Head Ulama, or the Chief Rabbi, but He’s not going to talk to Neale Donald Walsh, this weird guy in Oregon, or some lady in Bermuda. So we have to embrace our own worthiness for God to speak directly to us.
Step number three, willingness. We have to be willing for it to happen, even if we think we are worthy. And you know what, that’s not a small step, Wendy, because our culture tells us there doesn’t have to be. We have a cultural bias against the whole idea. You talk to a hundred people on the street, selected randomly, 78% of them will say, “no, no, no, no, no, come on now, God’s not talking to an idiot, come on.” In fact, most of our major religions teach us exactly the opposite. Most of our major religions will tell you that if you think that, and if you announce publicly, God forbid, much less think that it happened, but if you actually publicly announce that God is speaking directly to you, we’re going to have to call you a blasphemer. We’re going to have to call you a heretic. We’re going to have to call you an apostate. And in certain countries of the world, in certain nations on the planet, we may have to put you to death for committing heresy. We have to be willing to risk announcing or experiencing that we are having our own conversation with God. Not a small step. If you think it’s a small step, write a book one day called Conversations with God and see what happens.
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Neale Donald Walsch
Step number four is wakefulness. Once we have agreed to the possibility, to our own worthiness, and to our willingness, then we have to move into wakefulness. That is, we have to stay awake to the possibility that God is talking to us. As we said a moment ago, in a hundred different ways across a thousand lifetimes. So don’t let it go in one ear and out the other, or not even know that it’s happening. Stay awake. Watch what’s going on. Listen to what life is saying to you through the process of life itself.
Which brings me to step number five, which is acceptance. Once we are awake to the many, many messages we’re receiving from the divine through our lifetime, don’t reject them. Don’t say, “ah, it’s just a coincidence. That’s just serendipity, or I’m making it all up. Just my imagination.” You know what, Wendy, I asked God in my conversation. I said to God, how do I know this isn’t just my imagination? God said, “Sweetheart, it is. Where do you suppose Mozart got his music? Where do you suppose Michelangelo got his artistic imagery to put on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Where do you suppose Pablo Casals, where do you suppose anybody gets any brilliant idea or insight? From their imagination, of course.” They might say they were inspired, but what’s the difference? Do you think I wouldn’t use the tool of your own imagination to bring you the highest thing you could ever possibly imagine? Of course, I would. I said to God, “I never thought about it that way.” God said, “You know what, Neale I’m shameless. I will use any device, including your own imagination, to get through to you.” So don’t reject the messages that you have received from the divine by calling it something else or writing it off or dismissing it, which is why step five in the process is acceptance of the insight that you’ve received.
Finally, step number six is discernment. To be able to tell the difference, to discern the difference between messages that are truly messages from life through a process that I call conversations with God, or simply something that occurred. I reach into my pocket to get my car keys out, and as I pull the car keys out, a five-dollar bill that was in my pocket happens to fall on the ground. And I think, it’s a sign. God wants me to take all the money in my pocket and throw it on the ground. It’s a sign. No, it’s not a sign. So, the sixth step is discernment, to be able to know the difference. And you can tell when you’re really receiving a piece of insightful information from God, or even a clue as to what you might be best doing next in your life. We can feel that. It’s a felt sense of assurance. People have said it many times, it just feels right. So it feels good, or it doesn’t feel right, and we don’t do it because it just doesn’t feel right. How many of us, again, I like to use simplistic examples because everyone gets it, but how many of us have walked into a restaurant? We get in the front door of the restaurant, we’re not there for three seconds, and we just look at the person we’re with and say, “No, this isn’t the place. I don’t want to have dinner here.” We turn around and we walk back out. For no apparent reason, we just know it doesn’t feel like the place we want to be. Or we walk into another place, we go, “Ah, this feels fabulous. Let’s sit down and enjoy a wonderful meal.” Pay attention, use discernment, stay awake, be willing, allow yourself to know that you’re worthy and accept the possibility that these kinds of experiences occur and that they are real. That’s my little step-by-step process. That doesn’t mean that everyone, as I said earlier, is guaranteed to have that experience. When you’re moving through your life, you can, in fact, almost on demand, have a conversation with God. It’s been my experience.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and I try to do that as often as possible. I mean, sometimes the matrix we’re in kind of sweeps us away, and it’s easy to forget to have your morning conversation with God or to spend more time in the spiritual realm, being still to receive those messages. Do you have any advice on how often we should have conversations with God or how to go about that?
Neale Donald Walsch
Yeah, I don’t think there is a “how often.” It’s whenever we choose to feel the need for or the desire for, feel the joyful, happy expectation of having that interaction. Not just when we’re looking for something, not just when we have a problem, not just when something is going wrong, but that we have conversations with God all the time. I want to say that the soul—I’m sorry I’m repeating what I said a little while ago, but the soul is God in us. That’s my awareness. So, really, in a sense, in kind of a metaphorical sense, we’re talking to ourselves. That is, we are not calling on something from on high, “Can you hear me up there? Can you come down and talk?” We’re calling forth something from within. And once again, those people who have been recognized as spiritual masters on this planet have always done that. They call forth wisdom from within. I knew a man a few years ago named Thich Nhat Hanh, a wonderful Buddhist monk, and I was at several events where we co-presented. He had his presentation, and I had mine. Once you meet someone like Thich Nhat Hanh, you realize what it’s like to meet a person who is in a virtually constant conversation with God because he simply sees himself as God, an aspect of the divine. So how often? There’s no such thing as how often. But what if we decided ahead of time that every at least minimally significant moment in our life—we all know what those moments are, we all know when we’re going to have a conversation or some kind of interaction that’s fairly important. What if we decided every time we walk into the room with a significant other, “My purpose here is to demonstrate the highest thought I ever had about myself and about the person I’m now going to speak with.” “What if my only raison d’être, my only reason for being in the room with this person right now, is to give them back to themselves?” What if I came here to give them back to themselves? Now, the irony of it, in my experience, Wendy, is that when we live in that way, we not only give the other person back to themselves, we give ourselves back to ourselves because we have a direct encounter with who we really are. All of us have had those nice feelings once in a while, where we walk away from an encounter with someone else and say to ourselves, “Now that’s who I really am. That felt good. That really felt good.” Although it took me 50 years to even feel good about feeling good about myself, because I was taught as a child not to. So it took me half a lifetime to feel good about feeling good about who I am, and how I am, and what I am. But you know what? I’m done rejecting God. I’m done rejecting others, and I’m done rejecting myself. Game over.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and that’s such a good place to be, too. For me, in finding a relationship with God, I question why I spent so many years in resistance, rejecting God, the existence of God. I think I was fighting the man-made dynamic that is the cultural story. Yeah, the whole cultural story. People who were hypocrites, who claimed they were religious and really were jerks, various people in my life. It created this resistance and delayed my having a relationship with God. Can you talk a little about that or people who are struggling with that?
Neale Donald Walsch
Oh, sure. Who wouldn’t reject a God who we are told is condemning, judging, and punishing? [That’s not God.] But most of us who have any background at all in the whole concept of God—now, some people live in cultures where God is not even mentioned. But I’m going to say 80% of the world’s people live in some kind of culture where a higher power is talked about and discussed. And to God that most of the world, by the way, I was going to say, most of the world’s religions—there are 4,223 religions on the face of the earth right now. Not since the beginning of time, but being practiced right now on the planet. And the majority of those 4,000 religions teach us that God is loving, but also, as a demonstration of God’s love, that God is judging, condemning, and punishing. You have to do the right things, you have to come through the right doorway, you have to say the right words, you have to speak the right credo and that wouldn’t be so bad if everyone agreed. If the ulama agreed with the rabbi, who agreed with the priest, but we can’t even get the religions to agree with each other. They all disagree. So it depends on what religion you belong to. And boy, you better choose the right one because if you choose the wrong one, you’re going to hell. Wendy, I was actually told as a nine-year-old, I was told that if I didn’t stay with and become a practicing Catholic, I would go to hell when I died. It wasn’t even okay to belong to another Christian religion. God forbid I become a Muslim or a Jew or a Buddhist. God forbid I become a Hindu. I couldn’t even be, you know what, when I was 13, I’m going to tell you a sad story from my childhood. When I was, I guess about 14 years old, my neighbor across the street, who was my babysitter when I was a child, when I was eight and nine and six years old, he was a babysitter, but he had grown into a man and he was getting married. He lived right across the street from me. He and his family lived right across the street. And so, of course, he knew me all those years. He watched me grow up, and I guess I was about 15 or so, and he said, “I’m getting married in about two months. Will you be an usher at my wedding?” He wanted to honor me. And I thought, oh boy, I get to wear a white sport coat with a pink carnation. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. I wanted to be at his wedding. And I was all excited about it. I told my teacher at school, she was a nun. I grew up in a Catholic school. She said, “Oh, where is he getting married? I said, “Oh, he’s getting married at St. Agnes.” She said, “St. Agnes Church? That’s a Lutheran church.” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “You are not to go.” I said, “Well, I don’t understand. What’s the problem?” “They do not believe as we believe. If you accept their beliefs, you will go to hell. They do not believe as we believe. There is only one true church. It is the most holy Roman Catholic Church.” Now, this is not just a guy on the playground telling me this. This is the nun in front of the room. And of course, she’s an authority figure in my life. And I’m listening to her like, “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.” “You can’t even go to a church service in another church for fear that they will indoctrinate you with their wrong beliefs?” Come on, guys. I mean, come on, people, please help us out here. So of course, I grew away from the Roman Catholic Church. Not to make the Catholic Church wrong, because it’s not the only religion that insists that their way is the right way, but I grew away from that. I thought, this can’t be the true nature of the divine. I mean, really. So I wrote a book called The God Solution, which says that what would solve all of humanity’s problems is to simply redefine God, give God a new definition. So I’ve come up with a two-word definition for God: pure love. What if God was nothing more and nothing less than pure love? Now, Wendy, when I make that comment in front of a live audience, somebody in the back of the room inevitably stands up and says, “Oh, Neale, Neale, Neale We’ve been listening to you for 20 minutes, you didn’t tell us that God is love. Everybody knows that. Even religions that disagree on doctrine all agree that God is love. Come on, Neale. That’s the best you can do?” I have to say to my friend in the back of the room, “Wait a minute, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. That’s not what I said. I didn’t say that God is love. I said that God is pure love.” Now my friend will say, “Okay, what’s the difference?” The difference is that pure love needs, expects, requires, and demands nothing in return. Wendy, we can’t even love the person on the pillow next to us that way. Much less can we love God that way, or imagine a God who loves us that way. But what if it were true? Well, if it were true that that is what pure love is really about, and that’s how God loves us, without condemnation, judgment, or punishment of any kind ever, it would change the course of human history. If a larger number of people would embrace such a notion and live into the demonstration of such a reality. Which is why, by the way, anyone who wants a copy of The God Solution, where I talk all about this in detail, I’ll send it to you. I’ll send you a— I’ll send—just write me an email, say, “Neale, I want a copy of The God Solution,” and I’ll upload it electronically to your computer. Just send me a note to [email protected], and I’ll send you the author’s manuscript. Because I want you to at least consider the possibility that there may be something we don’t fully understand here about God and about life and about ourselves, the understanding of which would change everything.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and I think it’s really important for people that are kind of new to the game, that are finding God, that are finding their relationship with God. They need to have some discernment because there are a lot of spiritual guides out there that are leading people down the wrong path or overcomplicating things. Do you have any advice on discernment for people that are trying to create a spiritual practice and are looking to other people to guide them?
Neale Donald Walsch
If it doesn’t feel like how you would respond or react in the place of your fullest love for your own child, then it’s probably not accurate. So, look to see how it feels inside. And if it’s fear-based, reject it immediately. I want to tell you another story from my childhood. I’m sorry to bore you with all these anecdotes, but this is a true story as well. I’m nine years old, I’m in third grade in this Catholic school, and the priest comes in once a week to teach us catechism, the doctrines, and the dogma of the Catholic Church. Fair enough. He’s teaching his students that week all about mortal sin and venial sin, the different levels of offending God. At the end of his lecture, I raised my little nine-year-old hand and said, “Father, can you give me an example of what a mortal sin is?” Because he tells me that a mortal sin is a sin that God will not forgive if you die with that sin on your soul. Of course, you can go to confession and have the sin removed from your soul, but if you die with that sin on your soul, you’re going straight to hell. I said, “Father, can you give me an example of a mortal sin?” He said, “Certainly, son. Missing church on Sunday is a mortal sin.” I said, “What? Missing Mass one Sunday in your life is a mortal sin?” He said, “Yes. God says you’re supposed to keep the Lord’s day holy.” So I’m thinking, that of course would be the exact week, Wendy, when I missed Mass. I was an altar boy. I attended Mass almost every week of my life, but that week I missed Mass. There was a playground. I was on the softball team at the playground. And it was citywide, kind of like the World Series of softball. And my teammates said, “, you can’t not go to the game. You got to be there.” Of course, it was on a Sunday afternoon, and I missed my 11 o’clock Mass that I usually go to. And now the priest is telling me I’m going to hell. If I should die before I go to confession and have the priest give me absolution, I’m going to bed. I’m nine years old, and the authority figure, a priest, is telling me this. So I’m praying the prayer that all young Catholic children learn. “Now I lay myself down to sleep, I pray to the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray to the Lord my soul to take.” And I’m crying, “God, please don’t let me get hurt before Saturday.” See, we only had confession one day a week in our parish, Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t every day of the week. So I had to get through till Saturday. I thought if I get hit by a car on Thursday, it’s all over, I’m going to hell. We’re laughing about this now, but when I was nine, it was no laughing matter. I’m actually thinking that if I don’t make it to Saturday, I could go to hell because I missed Mass on Sunday. That’s the kind of God, as a nine-year-old, I was told to believe in. I mean, really? I mean, really? Which is why, when I was 53, I finally had a conversation with God, and I said, “Come on, man. What’s going on? What’s true and what’s not true?” And God replied, “Sweetheart, to talk to your major issue, I’m never going to send you to hell because guess what? There’s no such place as hell. Hell does not exist, and there’s no such being as Satan. You made it all up. Satan, it turns out, is simply an acronym, it’s an abbreviation: S-A-T-A-N, Seeing Anything As Negative.” So, either I’m totally wrong about that and I’m going straight to hell when I die, or God will say on the day of my death. “Welcome home.”
Dr. Wendy Myers
Oh, and we’ve seen that too. There are so many people who have had near-death experiences and talked about this. It just feels like pure love and joy and all of these high-frequency feelings, and then they’re not done yet, and they come back into their physical body. There are countless stories like that of people having those types of experiences.
Neale Donald Walsch
Yes, over and over again. We’ve heard it from others who’ve been there and come back. You’re absolutely right. So, either they’ve all got it wrong, or we have been misled. No, not deliberately. I want to make this clear. I’m not anti-religion. I don’t think religions are out to get us. They simply have an incomplete story. There’s just some data missing. It’s like when we were children and we learned how to add and subtract, and we thought we knew all there was to know about mathematics. But guess what? There’s addition and subtraction for sure, but there’s also algebra, geometry, and higher mathematics. There’s more to the game, the point is. There’s more to the game. So what if there’s more information that we do not have? I think that most human beings have a very incomplete notion about God. That’s what I would say about the world’s religions. There’s great wisdom in the world’s religions, but they wouldn’t have lasted this long. Wonderful insight and great wisdom in all the world’s great religions. We simply have an incomplete picture. There’s more to know on this subject, which is why I’ve been going around the world the past 30 years asking the question that I asked here three minutes ago: Is it possible, just possible, that there’s something we don’t fully understand here about God and life and about ourselves, the understanding of which would change everything? And I think that it is. I think there’s more going on here than meets the eye. Or as Bill said a few years ago when he wrote a play called Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Dr. Wendy Myers
I want to express to people how in control they are of their reality and how people totally create their reality, be it positive and abundant and joyful or negative and…
Neale Donald Walsch
Wendy, I don’t feel that people totally create their reality. I think we totally create our innermost reality, but our exterior reality, I was told in conversation with God, is being co-created. We’re in a collaboratively created process with regard to our exterior reality. Now, how we interiorly receive and experience the exterior circumstance, that’s individually created. So two people can have the exact same experience externally and react and respond to it and experience it in entirely different ways. But the exterior reality is being collaboratively created by the lot of us. Life is a collaborative exterior creation. So if we want things to be changed in terms of our exterior reality, we need to move toward that outcome being produced by all of us, one by one. Now, is it possible for each of us to create certain things, certain outcomes in our exterior individual reality as well? Yes, I think we can do that through what Norman Vincent Peale called in 1949 in his wonderful book, The Power of Positive Thinking, or Esther and Jerry Hicks, who wrote a book more contemporarily, Ask and It Is Given. So it’s really quite simple. We can use the power of positive thinking to produce what I want to call mini outcomes, mini realities, as opposed to the global reality in which we live.
We can produce individual outcomes, I’m convinced of that because I’ve done it in my own life. And most people have when they think positively about something, whether it’s something trivial and meaningless like, “I always find a parking space, no problem.” And by the way, Wendy, I always do find a parking space. And everybody in the car with me goes, “How can you? I don’t understand.” Neale must have the parking gods on his side. He always finds a parking space right in front of the restaurant. Whether it’s something more meaningful, like my life career, or my life partner, or my life mission, or my health, whatever it might be, if someone had told me that I would live to be 80 years old when I was a younger man, I would have laughed because all the men in my life, with the exception of my father, but my two brothers, and all the people in my life, my mom, all passed away in their early 60s: 63, 64, 65. When I made my 80th birthday, I couldn’t believe it, but I know that it’s partly because I have been a positive thinker about life, especially since my conversation with God 30 years ago. So, yep, I believe in the power of positive thinking.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and tell us about your new book, God Talk, and what people can expect to learn in that.
Neale Donald Walsch
Well, I think we can expect to learn the six-step process that I gave people about how they can have their own conversation, and they can expect to learn who and what God really is, in my opinion, in my understanding, in my awareness, and they can explore that to see if they agree with it or if they want to toss it out and think that it’s totally crazy.
They can reject it, and I invite them to reject it as well. But at least be open-minded, and don’t be so closed-minded that you think there’s only one way to think about the divine. So what people can expect to find in the book is how they can talk to God and how God talks to us. That’s why we called the book God Talk.
Dr Wendy Myers
Yeah. And tell us about your, one of your first books, Conversations with God, and just the nature of that book, about how you started having a conversation with God and just like your hand was being guided and just writing down all the words like your…
Neale Donald Walsch
I don’t want people to think it was automatic writing because it was not a question of automatic writing. It was more like taking dictation. I don’t want people to think that it was automatic writing, but I did feel like I was, my hand was moving in the sense because I was hearing what I describe as dictation. I would ask a question, like for instance, I said to God, “Okay, come on. Help me understand why. What is it I don’t understand about life and what makes life work? Come on, I’m 53 years old, help me out here.” “What’s the formula?” And God said, “Okay, sweetheart, take this down.” Because, of course, she knew that I was writing on a legal pad. This all began as an angry letter. I was writing a letter to God. “What does it take to make life work? Dear God, come on. Give me a break. Tell me the rules. I’ll play. Tell me how the game goes.” And so God said, “You want the most important message you could ever receive? Here it is Neale, Your life is not about you. Your life is about everyone whose life you touch and the way in which you touch it. But when you live your life that way, you come to the awareness that in the universal sense, your life is about you because of the way you’ve touched the lives of others. For a very elegant reason. Neale , there’s only one of us in the room.” “Everybody is another version of you, and you will treat yourself that way, and the world will treat you that way. It’s really that simple. Quite simple. Or as somebody said a few thousand years ago, and far more eloquently than I will ever say it, ‘Do unto others as you would have it done unto you.’ Because it is being done unto you. Because there’s nobody else in the room. You think that individuation means separation, but it does not. Your fingers are individual, they look different, they all have different functions, but they’re not separate from each other. They’re not separate. They’re all part of the same hand, which is part of the same body, and so, my dear Neale, you are all fingers on the hands of God.” I could, of course, be wrong about all of that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
And I really, I highly recommend anyone that’s looking to expand or get in contact with God, have a conversation with God and expand their mind about spirituality to read Neale Donald Walsch’s book Conversations with God and his new book God Talk. For me, it was just so eye-opening, and I just felt like all my questions about spirituality were answered. All my questions that you’re asking and answering all the questions that anybody would have about the nature of spirituality, about how to have a relationship with God, how to ask for what you want, how to pray, and all those things. We all have those questions. That’s why there are so many religion and spiritual guides and things like that. So thank you so much for the work that you do and your contribution. You’ve just..for me, you improved my life so much.
Neale Donald Walsch
Gosh, Wendy, it’s so wonderful to hear those words. Thank you for your generosity in sharing your experience with me. And I’m so glad that you’ve felt benefited from the messages that I took when I was taking dictation. All I did was pass it on. Not my teachings, not my messages, but I did take dictation and I did pass it on, and I’m glad that I did. Thank you for letting me know that it’s affected you in a positive way. It’s been lovely to be here with you for that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes. Thank you for your time and tell us what your website is again and where we can learn more about your work. You’ve got 40 books and programs and just all kinds of stuff to dig into.
Neale Donald Walsch
All the people who want to stay connected with CWG, which of course is Conversations with God, CWG, they just have to go to www.CWGConnect.com. That’s how you can stay connected with me. I have a column there called “Ask” that I visit twice a day. I answer people’s questions. We talk back and forth all the time, and there’s much more information there as well. So www.CWGConnect.com.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, Neale, thank you so much for coming on the show. And everyone, thank you so much for joining us today for this very enlightening conversation. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and, a little bit of a segue from what we normally talk about. But I think in order to be healthy and happy, it is really important to develop a spiritual practice in our life and navigate how to do that in a happy and joyful way, having gratitude and love in that respect. So, thanks so much for joining us today.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast including Wendy Myers and the producers disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guests qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have direct or indirect financial interest and products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem consult a licensed physician.
