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September/October 2006 Featured Stories
What Does God Really Want?

Neale Donald Walsch and Henry Czerny, who plays Neale in the film, by Ben Lipsey courtesy of Spiritual Cinema Circle

Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best selling Conversations with God series, shares some answers with Miriam Knight.

Miriam: Home with God, the latest in your Conversations with God series, shot to the best seller list in about a week. What do you think that says about the hunger out there for that kind of information and what is it about?

Neale: The book is about the entire life experience. The full title of the book is Home with God in a Life that Never Ends, and it is about just that – it is about the experience of life from birth to what we call death and beyond. It’s about what many people popularly call the afterlife. It talks about the whole process of death, the realm of heaven or paradise, how those experiences are brought to the human soul, and the reason that we have those experiences. It talks deeply about the realm of the spiritual and the realm of the physical and our eternal, almost figure-eight journey between those two realms throughout all eternity. It describes the purpose for it, and how we can get the most out of each cycle.

It’s a very healing look at death, talking about the ultimate question that we are all given a chance to answer at some point in that transition process. It’s the final book in the Conversations with God series. It was given through me like the previous books in the series, and it will be the last brought through in that way, completing the cosmology, and freeing me now to undertake the life mission that I have agreed with myself to embrace.

M: And what is that life mission?

N: To change the world’s mind about God and about who we are. To bring people a new cultural story about themselves, about life and about God.

M: People seem to be very concerned with death and what comes after. How does your interpretation differ from that of most religions?

N: Well, I think the biggest difference is that there are no condemnations. There is no such thing as the final judgment day. The “new spirituality,” as it is now coming to be called, is a cosmology that has no “pay back” so to speak – there is simply a life everlasting in a glorious expression of divinity itself…a second way that we return, in this cosmology, to physical form on repeated occasions. Although there are certain belief systems that do include reincarnation, Christianity, Judaism and Islam do not include this possibility as part of their teachings.

M: What about reward in the new spirituality?

N: There is no reward in the classic use of the word. There is an experience of constant joy, ultimate fulfillment and grand knowing and even an experience of bliss that occurs with ultimate reunion with the divine. But those experiences are not given to us as reward or as kind of a quid pro quo: we act in this way and then God acts in another way that allows us to feel rewarded. Those experiences are a natural consequence of the life process itself, and incidentally available now, not just after death. We can experience the bliss of union with the divine and the experience of that divinity expressing through us in any moment of the life that never ends - in physicality or in spirituality.

M: Don’t you need to engage in any deep study or meditation to achieve that?

N: No. You don’t need to do anything. That is not to say that mediation and study wouldn’t be useful and helpful, but it is not required. In fact there is nothing that is required. The ability to have those experiences has to do, I think, with our willingness to have them. The truth is (and this is very difficult for many people to believe) we’re having the experience that I just described, that is the experience of our own divinity, right now. The fact of the matter is that most human beings don’t know it. It’s not really a question of stepping into an experience so much as it is allowing it to flow through us more fully and more completely. It is quite possible for anyone to do that without any sort of training, without any particular sort of discipline without any study, but with just a willingness to have the experience. And the first step is to allow the possibility that it could occur, because of course if you don’t think it could occur, then it cannot.

M: If people can achieve union with God without any mediation, this could actually turn much of the claim to power of some of the religions on its head.

N: Well, that is of course why this is called the new spirituality.

M: I understand that you have a new book in progress called The Holy Experience, and that it has a brand new take on the Conversations with God messages. What prompted you to start this, when you said you had just finished the Conversations with God series, and what kinds of insights are you putting forth here?

N: All the insights that I’ve been given, and the insights that are still coming to me in a brand new way, on a daily basis. Discussing what the holy experience is, how we can access that experience, how each of us can have our own conversations with God, and the purpose and the nature of life itself, and of who we really are.

M: So it’s trying to get people past that emotional barrier of direct communication with God, their feeling that they are not worthy or they can’t do it themselves?

N: Yes. The point of the book The Holy Experience is to allow people to not only notice what is true about themselves but to give them tools and techniques with which they can move themselves into the actual experience. I’m always amazed to see where each chapter takes me. I’ve just finished chapter 12 and posted it on the website. So it’s coming through about a chapter every other month. I imagine that it will wind up being a 20 or 21 chapter book, and it will all be available for the downloading at no charge.

M: I read on your blog your reflections on the terrible things that have been happening in the Middle East. You said that you feel that mindset is the true enemy of peace. Here we see so many people using the promise of the afterlife as a justification for doing hideous acts now. Do you think that your books could have an impact in moving people away from that kind of consciousness?

N: Well I hope so. You know, in the days following 9/11, I had looked very deeply at the questions that surround the area of conversation that you’ve just now ventured. I have looked very deeply at the most fundamental questions facing humanity including the largest question, which is “What does God want from us anyway?” And out of my search has emerged a trio of books. The first is called the New Revelations, the second is called Tomorrow’s God, and the third book is called, in fact, What God Wants. Those three books post-9/11 books really take a look at how we got there, but even more so, how we can get ourselves out of this absolute global nightmare we’ve gotten ourselves into.

I feel it’s not irretrievable, we can still get out of this mess, but we have to look very carefully at how we got into it and what it would take to get out. So I hope that the answer to your question is yes, and if there is a single book that could do that, it is the book, What God Wants. It’s very short, but it answers the question “What does God want from humanity and from life itself?” And what God really wants releases us from all of our previous understandings and allows us to venture into a whole new relationship with the divine.

M: And what is the central thought of What God Wants?

N: Well, it’s contained in chapter 13, and that chapter is a series of blank pages.

M: So is it up to us to write the answer?

N: We are invited to write nothing at all, and to consider the possibility that God wants nothing at all. Now where does that leave us? What is it really like to have free agency - not make-believe free choice where if we do the wrong thing, we’re going to be condemned and judged and sent to everlasting damnation? If I tell you that you can do A, B or C, but if you don’t do A you’re going to have everlasting torture and torment, that’s not free choice, that’s coercion and duress. But in our religions we see that as a fair choice - that God has allowed us to do whatever we want, but if we don’t do certain things, then we will go right straight to hell.

So imagine what you would choose to do if you had absolute free choice. What then would motivate us if we are not motivated by fear of God, or even for that matter by love of God and by a desire to do what God wants? But if that’s off the table, then what reason would we have to be, do or have anything? And that’s the central question of all human existence. When that question is answered, we suddenly realize what we’re doing here on the Earth and the purpose behind all of life.

M: Real freedom can be scary. It’s much more comfortable to fall back on tradition and on well-tried truths.

N: You’ll excuse me if I don’t’ see it quite that way. The so-called well-tried truths of religion have brought us to the edge of extinction. If these truths have been so well tried and have worked so well, why is the world where it is today? What I notice is a planet that is about to annihilate itself - if not physically, environmentally, scientifically, technologically and every other “ly” that we can think of. You know something – if we were scientists in the laboratory and looked back on how well these truths have served us, we would have concluded long ago that this experiment has not succeeded, and we would begin to ask ourselves new questions, and to devise new ways to approach the life experience. These well-tried truths have failed us time and time and time again. More people have been killed... more misery has been created in the name of God than in any other way.

M: Sobering, isn’t it. Well, you’re certainly trying to reach the masses with your messages. I understand that the movie of “Conversations with God” is premiering shortly. How on earth did you manage to capture all of this in a single movie?

N: We didn’t capture all of it; we captured the essence of it, which is that God is speaking to all of us all the time. I think that the producers, the Spiritual Cinema Circle and the director Steven Simon just did an extraordinary job of capturing that message and placing it on film. I’m very proud of the movie, and I think it will really impact people’s lives in an extraordinary way.

Conversations With God opens in theaters nationwide and in Canada on Friday, October 27, 2006 (www.cwgthemovie.com). New Thought Ministries of Oregon is hosting a sneak preview on Saturday, September 9th, 2006 at 6:00 p.m. at the Bagdad Theater, located at 3207 SE Hawthorne Blvd in Portland. Admission is $15; tickets can be purchased online at www.ntmo.org or at www.spiritualcinemanetwork.com, or by calling 503-296-9922. Advance ticket purchase is recommended.

Conversations With God, the movie, is a production of The Spiritual Cinema Circle, the DVD club specializing in inspiring and uplifting films coming from film festivals around the world. (The DVD is yours to keep.) Conversations With God will be sent to Circle members in early 2007 as part of the monthly DVD collection. You can join The Spiritual Cinema Circle and receive your first month FREE (paying just $4.95 shipping) at www.newconnexion.net. Click the button on the home page.