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Do you want to speak to God? He is always speaking with you, revealing that life’s highest ambition is self-realisation. By living a life of love and creation, we come to recognise our identity with God and the power of our own thoughts, words and deeds.
Life had not been kind to Neale Donald Walsch. While he had met with early success, a car accident would soon steal whatever solace he had placed in his circumstances, for the resulting broken neck would cost him both his career and marriage. As if by cosmic design, a fire destroyed what remained of his possessions. Now homeless, alone and unemployed, Walsch eked out a shell of his former existence by collecting and recycling aluminium cans and dwelling in a tent. While circumstances would eventually improve, the frustrations with his life and the God who allowed it to happen remained. Writing out his disappointments, he demanded answers of God: Why had his life failed? Why couldn’t he find happiness? What had he done to deserve this? To his astonishment, God did not remain silent. The pen began to move on its own, replying, ‘Do you really want an answer to all these questions or are you just venting?’
And so a conversation began, one that would eventually become the first part of a nine-volume series of dialogues directly with the Divine. The books would spark an international phenomenon. The first volume alone would garner millions of sales, remaining a New York Times bestseller for 137 weeks, even being adapted into a theatrical release. Walsch himself has since produced dozens of other works and risen as a prominent spiritual leader and thinker, appearing on Larry King’s and Oprah Winfrey’s networks and having his works translated into 37 languages and counting. What remains remarkable is that this global sensation began with a simple exchange between one discouraged man and a God who spoke back.
Walsch claims his experience is not unique. God is always speaking, but it is we who do not listen. Our feelings, not our words, are the means through which God speaks most directly. Yet how do we know these feelings derive from God? Only that which is ‘highest, clearest and the grandest’, containing all joy, truth and love, can possibly come from God. And what is this truth? God does not have some preordained will for your life. ‘Your will for you is God’s will for you’, and God has ‘no preference in the matter’. Religions that impose a moral code upon their believers do so out of desire to stoke a fear of God, yet fear is the opposite of love. Too much of life is motivated by the former rather than the latter even though God is nothing but pure, open love. All of our choices equally please God, for why would he give us freedom if he did not want us to use it? However, to realise who we truly are, we must give up on fear and embrace a love that expands, opens up and gives freely.
The answer lies in the fact that love is, in fact, all there really is. Love is reality itself, yet something cannot exist without its opposite (just as heat cannot exist without cold nor light without darkness). Love cannot exist without the possibility of fear. Thus, we ought to love not because it is a moral command but because it is the only means to bring about our true self – a self we have forgotten and been given the freedom to create. Consequently, there are no ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots’; we can do as we please without condemnation, for this is the only path to discovery and creation and therefore the only means to achieving our identity as love itself. However, we should not judge or condemn others who are likewise upon their own path of self-creation.
While there are no moral codes, two laws do, in fact, govern this level of spiritual development: ‘The First Law is that you can be, do and have whatever you can imagine. The Second Law is that you attract what you fear.’ Regarding the First Law, we are reminded that our thoughts are, by their very nature, creative. Rather than pray in the hope that you will receive something, declare it with the statement ‘I am’. State and believe that you are whatever you want to be and the universe will respond. Your very declaration will help to shape your mind, freeing you from the self-imposed slavery of fear that traps you within cycles of pain and misery. The more you change your thoughts, the more you will change your words and, ultimately, your deeds. The world itself will become the vehicle for your own self-realisation. In this act, you come to love creation simply for the pleasure of creating rather than for any result you obtain from it. Failure dissipates when you give up expectations and learn to love every moment as a new opportunity for self-creation. In so doing, you come to experience real joy, just as the spiritual masters of old have always shown us. Thus, the Second Law reveals how the alternative to a life of love is one of self-created fear and failure. Overcoming this will take effort, but you do not have to worry about achieving this new state in one lifetime. Since God’s plan never fails, you’ll have however many lifetimes you need to achieve your own self-realisation (Walsch himself claims to have had 647 past lives).
If we would only choose this higher path, one motivated by love rather than fear, we would experience the joys of the highest truth of all – that we in fact are God. It is through us that God engages in God’s own path of self-realisation. Unlike the dogmas of established religions, we do not ‘get to’ heaven; heaven comes to us in our present life. Heaven is not an ethereal plane resting neatly beyond the physical world but is available here and now – if only we had the will to grasp it.
As one of the most popular works of the late-20th century, Conversations with God, Book 1 provides a brisk, readable and engaging overview of Walsch’s spiritual insights. The work is grand in scope yet highly personal, transcending all religious traditions while attempting to maintain the essence of them all. Those desiring a work dancing the line between devotional and intellectual might find it a worthy undertaking. However, there will be those who will wonder if Walsch really did commune with the Divine. It is a question Walsch himself wonders throughout his own work. Yet God is not without reply: ‘Even if everything I’ve said is “wrong”, can you think of a better way to live?’ The answer, of course, is left for you, as the reader, to decide.
