Notes from Neale…
My dear friends…
Former Vice President Al Gore, in testimony before the U.S. Congress this week, suggested that the planet will soon reach an irreversible “tipping point” of damage to the climate, a news report from CNN said.
The network said that Gore told the Congress that the United States needs to join international talks on a treaty. “This treaty must be negotiated this year,” Gore told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The CNN report noted that committee chairman John Kerry of Massachusetts said public policy must change and respond to warnings from scientists who fear that a buildup of greenhouse gas emissions may prove permanent. “Frankly, the science is screaming at us,” he said. “Right now, the most critical trends and facts all point in the wrong direction.”
The prospective harm from climate change includes permanent coastal flooding from rising sea levels, agricultural deterioration and the spread of tropical diseases to temperate climates, CNN reported that scientists are saying. I hope that you will do all that you can to promote the health of our planet.
I know that these can be scary times. Yet if we stand firm in our understanding of the world and why it is the way it is, and of God, and how God is working with us every day to produce the experience of our own highest benefiting, we will not be frightened of the future—nor will we see the future as something that we are enduring. We will see it as something we are creating. And that will make all the difference.
I hope you will join with me in Creating Tomorrow. There is a process by which we can do that—and that is much of what we will discuss in May when I present my next 5-day Intensive for the Conversations with God Foundation. The program will be offered May 20-24 in Baltimore, and will also feature a special opportunity for you to experience your own conversation with God.
The Creating Tomorrow program will be laid out at this retreat—a way for you to recreate yourself anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about Who You Are. I’ll share with you new and powerful tools, specific steps you can take, right now, to alter the course of your life. Every day I try to think of new ways to make the extraordinary messages of CwG come alive in the 9-to-5 experience of regular people. The program I have designed for May is my latest permutation of that. Do come and join us! If ever there was a time to pay attention to the callings of your soul, this is it!
Hugs,
Neale.
The CwG Reader
Further explorations of the Conversations with God material from the author
Neale Donald Walsch through the years has given hundreds of talks and written scores of articles revolving around the messages he received in his Conversations with God. Now, every seven days, we will present in this space a transcript or reprint of those presentations. We invite you to Copy and Save each one of them, creating a personal a collection of contemporary and uplifting spiritual thought which you may reference at any time. We hope you will find this a constant source of insight and inspiration.
This week’s offering: In an article written on May 1, 2001, Neale answers critics who ask:
How dare you say that you speak with the Voice of God?
A few days after Communion with God — a book written entirely from God’s point of view — hit the bookstores back in October, reporters began calling me for interviews, and many of them led with the same question:
Where do you get off speaking in the first person voice of God? Isn’t that just a bit presumptuous?
It’s a fair question. While I am not the first person to have produced such a book (far from it, in fact), inquiring minds still want to know: how can I — or for that matter, anyone — dare to place words in God’s mouth in this way?
The first thing I answer when asked this question is that I am not placing words in God’s mouth. God is placing words in mine.
Furthermore, God is doing the same thing with all of us. I am not the only person on the planet speaking God’s words. All of us are in Communion with God all of the time.
If you have ever spoken of love to any other person, you have spoken in the First Person Voice of God.
If you have ever spoken of compassion to a person in need of compassion, you have spoken in the First Person Voice of God.
If you have ever spoken of forgiveness to a person who seeks forgiveness (or even to one who does not — perhaps especially to one who does not), you have spoken in the First Person Voice of God.
If you have ever argued for fairness, called for justice, pleaded for peace, recommended mercy, or proposed a win-win solution to anyone, you have spoken in the First Person Voice of God.
If you have ever consoled or comforted, you have spoken in the First Person Voice of God.
If you have ever encouraged or motivated, you have spoken in the First Person Voice of God.
If you have ever uplifted or congratulated, you have spoken in the First Person Voice of God.
If you have ever renewed another’s faith (especially in themselves), restored another’s hope, revived another’s dream, you have spoken in the First Person Voice of God.
If you have ever respected another’s truth, resolved another’s doubt, removed another’s fear, recalled another’s goodness, recited another’s attributes, reduced another’s apprehension, relieved another’s mind, re-lived another’s pain, or remained another’s friend, you have spoken in the First Person Voice of God.
It is not difficult to speak in the First Person Voice of God. It is more difficult not to. You have to step way out of Who You Really Are.
When you let God place words in your mouth, you always speak the truth, you always speak with sensitivity and awareness, you always speak of ways to resolve, not who to blame.
You always speak your mind, but you always speak from the heart, and you always speak with the gentleness of your soul.
Every moment is a moment of Communion with God, and we can experience it as that if we truly wish to. That is the great promise of God, and that is the greatest experience in Life.
Q&A with Readers
Exchanges from the Ask Neale section of the Messenger’s Circle at Neale Donald Walsch’s personal website, and from the book Question and Answers on Conversations with God.
Dear Neale: Thank you for your wonderful book! I have read it again and again, and given it to so many friends that the lady at the bookstore must think I own stock in the publishing company! I am wondering about something. I know what I’ve gotten out of the book, but I’m curious to know what you got out of it! Would you give us your personal experience of this? Thanks! Mary, De¬troit, MI.
Hi, Mary! Well, you’ve asked a question that is just about the most frequently asked of all. Every talk show host who has inter¬viewed me has asked me that question, and every newspaper reporter. You’re the first reader, though.
First, let me tell you that I read the book nearly every day. To me, it is like a book written by someone else. I often read it and feel no sense of connection with it at all, in the sense of an author re-reading his work. It has been that way from the very beginning. Always it has felt as it I had very little to do with this process, except to be there for whatever was supposed to happen. So the book has taught me a great deal, and been a source of continued in¬spiration to me.
I think the most important thing I got out of the book was a deep sense of God’s abiding love. I learned in an extraordinary way of God’s unremitting, unconditional love and total acceptance of us, even the worst of us. This came through to me even as I was “writing” the book by the bare fact that I was writing it. I mean, by the earthly standards of many people (including my own), I am the last person who deserves to have been chosen to put this informa¬tion into a book. Yet I was chosen, and I have put it into book form. So by that measure alone, I am clear that God loves without condi¬tion, that God rejects not even the least or the worst of us, and that all we need do to understand and experience that salvation is to ac¬cept it, claim it, honor it, and hold it as true.
Now, there are those who disagree with me, Mary. Many, in fact, do. They say that God’s word and God’s law and God’s love is worthless and pointless if there was no such thing as the possibility of God’s rejection. They say that the only way to God is through obedience to God’s commands, adherence to God’s laws, and, in some theological constructions, acceptance of God’s Son. Failure to do any or all of these things means certain damnation, they say, and we’d better be aware of that, and ready for it, because we’ll get what’s “coming to us” if we don’t watch out.
In fact, we not only had better watch out, we’d better not cry. We’d better not pout, I’m tellin’ you why . . .
Oh, sorry . . . that’s a different myth.
You see, Mary? Every myth we create, we create around a sys¬tem of judgment, around a construction of reward and punishment. It is inconceivable to us that there is a being in the universe, in re¬alty or in my theology, who could accept us just the way we are, and just the way we choose to be. That is because we cannot believe in the ultimate purpose of life. We believe that the purpose of life is to follow God’s law, do as God wants, and, essentially, please God.
Yet pleasing God is not the purpose of life. Only an egomaniacal deity would create beings whose essential purpose was to please Him. And only an insane ego maniac would then add such treachery and misery to the mix as life contains in order to make it virtually guaranteed that his created beings would stumble and fall. And only an incredibly cruel insane ego maniac would go further, say¬ing it doesn’t matter whether they fall or not, because they have already fallen! Before birth!
As improbable as this scheme might seem, that is the theologi¬cal construction which millions upon millions of people have laid upon their so-called “loving” God. So I think the most important thing the books did for me, and do for me daily, Mary, is free me from the shackles of a belief in an angry, vindictive, judgmental God. I am now more open to creating my life as I want it, not as I imagined it had to be.
The ironic part of all this is that I am now acting more in ac¬cordance with what the old teachings asked of me than I was when I was told to act that way or else. In other words, I am find¬ing that “being good” (whatever “good” means) feels, well . . . good, when it isn’t having to be done because I’ll be condemned if I don’t.
Put another way, I tend to rise to higher expectations of me, and aspirations for me, when those expectations and aspirations are mine, not someone else’s. This is a great secret which God un¬derstands, but which man refuses to believe: we are basically good, not basically bad. We do not need an angry, vindictive, punishing God to scare us into doing what is “right,” act in the in¬terests of others, or “show up” grandly. Our basic nature—human nature—is loving, and kind. We are taught greed. We are taught fear. We are taught ugliness, prejudice, violence. We are love, and we are taught to be some thing else!
The second most important thing I learned from the books is that there is only one reason to do a thing—any thing—and that is to be and to decide, to create and to fulfill Who I Really Am, and Who I now Choose to Be. You see, I thought there were all sorts of reasons that I was supposed to do this or that. My father told me. The world expects it of me. God demands it of me. Whatever. Now I’m clear that God demands nothing, the world’s expecta¬tions are distorted and misplaced, and my father’s orders no longer need to be followed.
We are in this cosmic game of golf, and there’s no one keeping score but us. Who we are, and who we turn out to be, is a matter be¬tween us and ourselves. No one else cares. No one else even knows. Not really. And God, who does know, simply observes, without judgment, all the while, of course, making all of His power available to us, if we will but use it. We are left to our own choices. No instructions, no orders, no commandments. That makes us wholly responsible, completely in charge, and totally at cause in the matter of Who We Turn Out to Be.
This can be empowering, or terribly scary, depending upon a lot of other thoughts a person might have about the universe and how it works. For me it was terrifically empowering.
So the book has served me in these two important ways, and many other ways, of course, too, but in these ways in particular. I hope that has answered your question.
Neal Donald Walsh
NOTE: The Weekly Bulletin is sent free of charge to anyone who asks for it. It is a publication of the ReCreation Foundation, a non-profit organization undertaking the work of sharing the message of Conversations with God with the world. That message is that the purpose of life is to recreate ourselves anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are.
The CwG Weekly Bulletin is prepared by Neale Donald Walsch, m.Claire, Geek Squared, LEP Graduates and other friends.
