GOD’S Messenger

An interview with Neale Donald Walsch

by Leo Drioli

Neale Donald Walsch has literally inspired and changed the lives of millions of people worldwide through the power of his “Conversations with God” book series.

His last ditch effort at truly making sense of the suffering in his life forced him to pour his anger and his longing out in a question to God: What does it take to make life work? To his amazement, he began receiving messages, which became the book; the rest is history.

I caught up with Neale for the following interview. He will be visiting Australia in March to launch the new film “Conversations with God”, adapted from the pages of his own amazing life story.

InnerSelf: I last interviewed you in 2001 for another publication, what’s taken place in these last 6 years?

Neale Donald Walsch: I’ve created “Humanity’s Team” which is a worldwide organization that has been placing on the ground a civil-rights movement for the Soul, which we are calling the “Last Great Civil Rights Movement for Humanity” The Civil Rights Movement for the Soul seeks to release humanity, release the soul from the oppression of its beliefs in a violent, angry… a vindictive and exclusive God.

There are now 15,000 members of the “Humanity’s Team” worldwide. That’s a very exciting part of how I’ve tried to place the messages of “Conversations with God” on the ground.

I’ve also created “The School of the New Spirituality” which is an organization that is attempting now to place classroom and home-schooling kits in cities, towns, and villages around the world, so that we can change the story that we are telling our children about ourselves; so that we can change and create a new cultural story for humanity, about humanity. With perhaps another 10 or 12 years we will begin to send into the world a new wave of young people with entirely different foundational ideas about God, about who we are in relationship to each other and frankly about life itself on earth.

So that’s the second project we’ve launched since we last saw each other, and finally I’ve created a third group: an organization called “The Group of 1000” which is a very small, select handful of people around the world who are supporting the other outreach activities that I’ve mentioned. This is a rather small handful of people who have chosen to engage in some very powerful support groups on earth.

What you might say is I really tried to put the message on the ground in some functional ways so that it can come out of the clouds and not be just a wonderful philosophy or a series of nice books. In fact, to have some practical support impact, some lasting functional impact in the lives of people.

IS: I read recently that “The Group of 1000” came out of a meeting you had in The Netherlands. You stated “Give me 1000 people from across the globe dedicated to Spirit rather than violence and we’ll change the world." In those couple of years since that meeting what’s happened with these people, what have you been doing?

Neale Donald Walsch: We have a 3- pronged approach. We’ve asked them to contribute one percent of their time, one percent of their financial resources each month and one percent of their spiritual energy, if you will. We’re asking for one percent to change the world, the other 99% you can go on with life just the way you always have. But if you’re willing to give one percent to these endeavours, then we believe we can really shift the ground of being on the planet in some very practical ways through the classroom, the home schooling kits, through the activities of “Humanity’s Team”, which we’ll be creating, in 2007, a regular weekly event all over the world. People can go to wherever they want to connect with the “Conversations with God” experience.

So what the 1000 people have been doing is gathering their energies, focusing their intent. We have in fact – funny you should ask me – a conference here in about a week and a half, in Oregon where members of the Group of 1000 will be gathering for their first annual conference in order to decide what specific activities and functions they wish to undertake, as we now seek to counter-balance some of the energies that exist in the world that would seek to move us as a humanity in a different direction.

IS: What is this “New Spirituality” that you speak of?

Neale Donald Walsch: I define the New Spirituality as a way for us to honour our natural impulse towards the Divine, without making others wrong for the way in which they are doing it. So I talk in terms of a larger understanding of God in life. It is not an attempt to, nor do I encourage that anyone abandon their present religion or reject their present religion. That’s not necessary in order to embrace the New Spirituality. What we are simply suggesting is not that our traditional religions are wrong, but they might possibly be incomplete, that it is just possible that our religions don’t have all the data in; just as we are saying that is possible in the area of science, in the area of medicine, in the area of our political activities and so forth. We’ve never stopped exploring new ways of recreating ourselves in any other area. If we had stopped exploring new ways of moving forward in our science or in our technologies or in our medicine, we would have made scarce progress, if at all in the past several thousand years. We would still be living in the caveman era.

For some reason or another we have been loath to explore new possibilities in the area of religion and on the subject of God. We are content to stand firm with the answers that we have been given, hundreds and hundreds, and in some cases thousands of years ago. And trying to apply those thousand year old answers to the life we are experiencing on earth in the 21st century.

If we did that in medicine for instance we’d be walking into a modern operating room carrying a very sharp stick. You cannot do surgery with the instruments of 2000 years ago. We are trying to live our lives with the moral equivalent.

So what I think we are asking for in the New Spirituality is to simply have permission: Could we please have permission to just ask some questions and to consider, merely as a possibility, that there might be something we don’t fully and completely understand here about God… and about life, the understanding of which would change everything.

IS: In this New Spirituality you speak about coming to an “End of Better” what do you mean by this?

Neale Donald Walsch: I think one of the most destructive notions ever entertained by humanity is the idea that somehow we are better than someone else… Our political party is better, our religion is better, our gender is better, our race is better… that betterness is a quality of humanness. And what we are inviting people to consider is that perhaps we really are all one single family. And perhaps in some unique way that we have not fully understood – we really are all one. I know that “We are all one” is a kind of catchphrase these days but, supposing at some deep fundamental level that it were true – as the wonderful motion picture “What the bleep…” suggests – that it might be exactly that. That the entire universe might very well be an out-picturing or a physical manifestation of a single essence in multiple forms.

Well if that in fact were true, or if it's at least close enough that we would explore it and examine it and take a close look at it… then the idea of better or better-ness simply disappears because a thing cannot be superior to itself.

And so we then begin to truly understand what is meant by the statement from the American political tradition, “All men are created equal”. And it turns out in fact that that’s true and that better-ness or superiority is an idea that if we eliminated it from human consciousness we would suddenly eliminate the source of an enormous amount of conflict and violence in our world today.

So much violence is created by the idea that “our way of looking at things is better than your way of looking at things.” And its basis – that’s what’s going on right now between the Sunnis and the Shiites in Iraq. Of course there are now political overtones and the other kind of “get-backs” and revenges… but at its basis, at the beginning, the differences between the Sunnis and the Shiites, which are both sects within the Muslim religion, have to do with simply one idea that our holding of the Islamic faith and our tradition and the basis from which our understandings emerge, is somehow better than yours. That of course was the basis in Ireland as well, for the fifty years of war – the killing on the streets between Catholics and Protestants. Both Christian sects I might add, but Christianity could not solve the problem for fifty years, of the Catholics imagining that at some level they were better than the Protestants and vice versa.

So we have this whole notion of “Betterness” which by the way, is not just a religious notion, but a political and cultural one as well… Blacks are better than whites or whites are better than blacks, men are superior to women or the other way around or whatever… we are to grow up as a species and to say, “You know what the fact is… Men are not better than women; blacks are not better than whites; Jews are not better than the Christians and the Christians are not better than the Muslims…” and we can just drop it!

IS: We all know the story by now that at around 50 years of age you had a major shift that ended up bringing “Conversations with God” into the world… what was the real essence of that turning point? What happened within you?

Neale Donald Walsch: It’s in the movie of course…

IS: Is there a pivotal turning point you can share?

Neale Donald Walsch: Well sure, I broke my neck in a car accident and found myself out of work and wound up living on the streets, walking the pavement pan-handling for a few coins… picking up soda pop bottles for the 5c return deposit and trying to live out of garbage cans and trash containers… And then, when I finally did pull myself up by my own bootstraps and found a job again and got off the street and got back into day-to-day life… that’s when the hammer fell in a sense, because that’s when I realised the vacuousness of life. Here I thought I had rescued myself from being on the street – and by the way I wasn’t on the street for a week or two, or even a month or two, but for the better part of a year… that’s a long time to live in the weather with nothing but a small tent and sleeping bag and one or two changes of clothing, and that’s it – but I managed to pull myself up out of that and then I really confronted the disaster of my life… I was working again, I had my own apartment again and I was going back into the dating game again and by golly I was back into real life and for about two or three months I was pretty happy about that but then I kind of hit the wall as I realized, “My God… this is as empty as empty can be… there’s nothing here. Surely… surely there must be more than this.” Peggy Lee’s song from 30 years ago is absolutely true “Somebody send in the clowns."

IS: Are you happy with the way the film “Conversations with God” turned out?

Neale Donald Walsch: I’m very happy. The film is a remarkable depiction of the essential experience that I went through as I had my conversations with God. It’s done very tastefully, very accurately. The performance by Henry Czerny is just remarkable… he really captured it and reflected it on the screen. The direction by Steven Simon is superb, he was very careful to never go over the top, he handled it with extreme care, and is also the producer of the movie, and I’m grateful for the job he did in shepherding the scripting process through from the beginning to end, making certain that it was true to life and that it did not allow the movie to become “Hollywoodized”.

Yes. The answer to your question is… I suppose my answer is somewhat predictable but there are those authors who have not been happy with what Hollywood did with their books once they turned it over. But in this case, I’m very, very happy. And I think the book (and the movie) carries some very important message for all humanity to receive which is that God is talking to us, all of the time. Not just to saints and sages but also to regular, ordinary people like you and me. So we hope that people will walk away with the feeling of, “Hey, you know what – it happened to him, it can happen to us.” And as a matter of fact, it is happening to all of us all the time.

All of us are having “Conversations with God” all the time, we’re simply calling them something else: serendipity, coincidence, a moment of inspiration, creativity, good-luck, women’s intuition… whatever we think we can get away with in this society that refuses to allow for the possibility that God might still be talking and communicating in a variety of ways, directly with human beings.

IS: And what do you say to the critics who feel what you’re really offering is just a fabrication from your own imagination?

Neale Donald Walsch: They’re right. That’s why I say to the critics “You may be right”

IS: And what is God in your definition?

Neale Donald Walsch: The question is more easily answered “What is God not?”… This is not “what is God?” but “what is God not?” And the answer is – nothing. There is nothing that God is not. And even religion teaches us that by the way. Traditional religions say that God is the Alpha and the Omega.Well there’s nothing else, that’s it. The Beginning and the End… He is All in All… the Unmoved Mover… and by various other descriptions the traditional religions of the world have sought to help us understand that God is the sum total of everything.

Now there’s only one interesting aspect above that. If in fact we accept traditional religions’ point of view that God is All in All; the Alpha and the Omega; the Beginning and the End; the Unmoved Mover; the sum total of everything, then how is it possible for God to be over there and us over here, unless we are not a part of everything that God is the sum total of? In fact, if we are a part of the Everything, that is, if you and I do not stand outside of Everything then we must stand inside of Everything, which means we must stand inside of God! And that’s the only place where traditional religion and the New Spirituality find itself holding different points of view. Because the New Spirituality invites us to look at the glaring contradiction in the way traditional religion holds the experience of God. For it says on one hand that “God is the All in All” and on the other hand it says “Except for us of course – we are not part of that, we’re over here and God is over there and if you say that you are a part of God, then you are a blasphemer, an apostate, an unworthy one and you shall roast in everlasting fires of damnation.”

IS: Do you get any of that?

Neale Donald Walsch: Oh, I get it all the time.

IS: And how do you deal with it?

Neale Donald Walsch: I say, “Thank you very much for your point of view. If that point of view serves you and brings you happiness and joy and wonderment in your life, then I invite you to hold to that point of view, even for all the days of your life. But if you are willing to look at the world and what that point of view has done to shape and create the global experience through which we are now moving, and if you find that global experience disturbing in any way, perhaps we might benefit from looking at some of the fundamental understandings that undergird and create that global experience, to see if there might be something that we don’t fully comprehend, the understanding of which would change everything.”

IS: So, what is your primary focus today?

Neale Donald Walsch: My primary focus is, changing the world’s mind about God. I’m on a global mission, and I truly mean a global mission: I’m leaving here in February and I’m going all over the world… from Japan to South America to Europe and I’m even coming to Australia. And my intention is to change the world’s mind about God. I think that we need it – and if I have to do itbecause no one else wants to, then I will – I don’t mean to sound grandiose here, but I think we need on the planet a new messenger, a person who is willing to stand up for the larger God, and allow us to no longer masquerade as children of a lesser God. And I think that a new idea about life needs to be brought to humanity. My friend, we need to tell our children and our children’s children something different from what we’ve been telling them for all these many years. We need to tell them something different about life, something different about the purpose of life, something different about who they are in relationship to everything else. Surely we need to tell them something different about God, for we can no longer afford to continue expressing ourselves as people who believe in a God of vengeance, violence, war, damnation and exclusivity.

IS: Thank you for your time and your energy…

Neale Donald Walsch: You’re very, very welcome. Its good to talk with you, perhaps we’ll see each other when I’m there!