Communicating with God: An interview

with Neale Donald Walsch

Rarely has an author touched so many lives with a single theme. Neale Donald Walsch
transformed a late-night self-described conversation with God into an international best seller
by the same name. Walsch says his books are Gods actual responses to his own soul-
searching questions. More books in the series soon followed. To date, Conversations With God,
Book One (G.P. Putnams Sons, 1996) has sold more than 1.5 million copies and spent an
astonishing 130 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. In each piece of the trilogy, God is
presented not as a wrathful and judgmental being to be feared, but a kind, loving and
understanding entity who wants us to be happy. Walsch says he was recently summoned by
God to write Friendship With God: An Uncommon Dialogue (G.P. Putnams Sons, 1999), which
details how to turn a relationship with God into a friendship. Communion With God, which tells
how to elevate that friendship into a communion, is scheduled to be published by Putnam in the
fall. Here, Walsch has a conversation with Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema.

RD: What is the primary message you received in the Conversations With God books?

NDW: It was, to put it poetically, Go forth and teach ye all nations the new gospel. The first
sentence of the new gospel is We are all one. And that is really where Books 1, 2 and 3
completed. And Book 4 in the series, Friendship With God, adds to that and says that it is time
now for us to bring an end to better. The new gospel is two sentences: We are all One, and
Ours is not a better way; ours is merely another way.

RD: An end to better?

NDW: An end to better. That the idea of superiority is one of the most seductive ideas ever
visited upon the human race. The idea that we are somehow superior to the next person in
some way, by virtue of the color of our skin or our understanding of the right way to God or our
gender or our national origin or our economic status. Its very seductive to the human race.

RD: What makes it so seductive?

NDW: Because it allows us to have more of what we imagine we need to be happy. It all began
with a false thought that theres not enough of the things that we need in order to have a happy
life on this planet. As long as we hold in our minds that theres not enough of the stuff we need,
were going to be in competition for it. But worse yet, weve decided before the competition
begins who the winners are going to be. Going into the competition we say Oh, by the way, if
youre black and Im white, I win before we start. If youre a male and Im female, you win before
we start. What Friendship with God says is that weve declared ourselves to be better out of
our root thought that there is insufficient stuff to go around. And we also have a thought that not
only is there not enough on Earth, but in fact theres not even enough of God. So weve set up a
worldwide competition for God and for Gods attention, and for Gods love. We call that
competition religion.

RD: Are religions really in competition?

NDW: Listen to the sermons of any religion. Most say We are the chosen people; you are not.
Ours is the fastest and best way to heaven, and yours is not. In fact, its worse than that. Not
only is yours not the fastest way to heaven, religions say, if you continue to believe as you
believe, you will literally fail to go to heaven. Youll go to hell, and be damned for the rest of all
eternity. Ninety percent of the worlds religions start from the point of view I have the way to
God. Ours is the better way. In fact, religions were the first institution on the planet to convince
people that there was such a thing called better.

RD: Where else does that betterness show up?

NDW: It has permeated all of our society. From religion, its moved into political parties,
economic systems, philosophical constructions and social inventions, all of which come from the
place that says Ours is the better way. In Friendship with God, God invites not only every
minister, rabbi and spiritual teacher, but also every politician, every national office holder, every
worldwide economist, every worldwide philosopher, every person who has any kind of impact on
opinion making in the world, to say to their followers, Ours is not a better way. Ours is merely
another way. Im waiting to see some politician say, Oh by the way, with regard to my tax plan,
it isnt the better way. Its just my idea about it. See what you think.

RD: You seem to think that some harm is resulting from this premise.

NDW: Look around you. All the wars that we havephysical wars, as well as emotional,
economic and psychological warsare based on someones idea that they have the better way
in some area. We even go further than simply saying Ours is the better way, and were willing
to defend our idea about that. We say to people across the border, Were going to attack you
because we notice that you dont agree with us. Look at Kosovo and Serbia. Anyone who
thinks that was a political war does not understand the on-the-ground reality there. That was
and is a war between Eastern Orthodox Christians and Muslims. It was a war of religion,
disguised as political misunderstanding.

RD: Bring it a little closer to home. What harm is resulting from this premise of better in our
homes here on the front range of Colorado?

NDW: About 100 miles from here in Wyoming, we just strung a kid up and put him on a fence
and let him die because we thought that not being gay is better than being gay. So Matthew
Shepherd paid with his life. Not because two kids went crazy, but because an entire segment of
our society fueled the engine of the experience of those two kids who strung up Matthew
Shepherd, and caused those two kids to think what they were doing was okay. The idea of
betterness sows the seeds of hatred that create their own outcomes in our society.

RD: How does that idea of betterness start in our society?

NDW: Our competitive constructions begin in the first grade on the playground, and it begins so
innocuously that we dont see what were doing to ourselves. We put kids in uniforms and send
them out on the soccer field and say Oh, arent they cute? Until the kids start kicking each
other, and we wonder, Where did that come from? It comes from a root thought of
betterness. Superiority does not exist in Gods world. It cannot exist if we are all one.
Differences do not mean divisions, and individuality does not mean superiority. But weve
confused the two. In an effort to assert our individuality, we assume its necessary to assert our
superiority. And that is the grandest mistake made in the human experiment. When we step
away from that concept and no longer allow it to drive the engine of our experience, our
experience itself will change forever, and well create the paradise on Earth for which we have
so long yearned, and of which we are, in fact, totally capable.

RD: I hear and read that last statement often: that we are capable of grand things, of Utopian
civilization, of peace. Do you really believe it?

NDW: Absolutely. But it will take a consciousness shift. It wont come about through legislation,
through any exterior action by government. We dont take candy from babiesnot because its
against the law, but because we know its wrong. Its that inner law that drives the experience of
man. When we change the inner law, which I call consciousness, then we change the exterior
experience. And were now in the process of changing those inner laws. Were beginning to see
the human race reaching very nearly now toward critical mass, the first domino to fall. Once the
first domino falls, all the rest of them will follow.

RD: How are you and the others going to go about building the critical mass you describe?

NDW: The only way I know how: by using the tools of mass media and the internet and
publishing, and by forming worldwide alliances of people who find themselves, if only
temporarily, in positions of leadership with regard to the formation of public opinion. Through
those kinds of activities, were trying to create a reunification of the world itself, with itself. If
there ever was an original sinsin being a mistakeits the idea of separation, that we are
separate from each other and separate from God.

RD: So the alternative to seeing myself as better is seeing myself as one with whomever Im
looking at. As youve said, Theres only one of us in the room. But most people see the world
as other. How do we deal with that ongoing perception of separateness?

NDW: First we extend our understanding of other to a deeper level. We do see other stuff,
other people, places and things, but we dont understand what they are other of. They are
other manifestations, and other expressions of the One thing that there is. When we understand
that, we can hold the dichotomy of there being another, and it still being One. Its like going into
a clothes closet and noticing that there are other clothes, many kinds of clothes. But theyre
still all clothes, and in fact all my clothes. And so when one looks around the world and sees
other people, places and things, one says Ah, yes, these are other expressions of who and
what I am. And I am another expression of who and what that is. And I am not divergent from
that, even though I am different from that.

RD: What happens when we come to that awareness?

NDW: As soon as you change the way you look at something, your decision about it changes
automatically. And how you shift your perspective away from those negative judgements that
cause you to think of things as better and things as worse is to say to yourself, You know, I
had a suspicion, even though I may not be able to reach it right now, that if I shifted my
perspective on what Im now observing, I may come to a different conclusion. Therefore,
perhaps I shouldnt jump to the conclusion Ive now come to, but allow myself to be
conclusionless, or as kids would say, clueless. Be clueless.

RD: If you get an inkling that your perspective may not be the whole picture, then you would
want to suspend your judgments until you have a clear picture, or even suspend them
perpetually.

NDW: Or do better than that. Come to a judgment that what you are currently experiencing is
the best it could possibly be. Say This is perfect for me right now. Thank you, God for the
perfection of my life in this moment. Clearly its perfect, or it wouldnt be happening, since God
hasnt made a mistake in a very long time. And so on the days when I begin to see my life as
imperfect, I do what God invited us to do, with three magic words that will change our lives: See
the perfection. And I see the perfection of things as they are, just as they are right here, right
now.
RD: That brings to mind what you say in one of your tapes: that one great expression of love is
to say to your partner, As you wish.

NDW: Exactly. True love says to another, My will for you is your will for you. I have no desire for
you other than your desire for you. And to the degree that I do assert that I have desires for you
that are not in concert with your own, and to the degree that I try to assert those desires and
make you subservient to them, to that degree I do not love you at all, but merely love me
through you. So people who truly love each other give each other the only gift that there is to
give, which is the gift of total and complete freedom, where you say, Your will for you is my will
for you. As you wish. Which is what God says to us, of course. But we cant understand that,
because we cant imagine a God who does that with us. We think that instead of saying, As you
wish, God says If you break my commandments, youre going straight to hell.

RD: But doesnt a healthy society, a humane society, require that people learn morals and
ethics?

NDW: There are no such things as morals and ethics. They exist only in the moment because
we agree that they do. As soon as one more than half of us changes our mind, its not ethical
anymore. Anyone who thinks morals and ethics are some kind of a standard that exists like an
immovable pole stuck in the ground, has no idea about how life works. Nor have they been a
very astute student of the history of the human race. Travel to Salem, Massachusetts, next
week, and ask people whether its okay to burn or hang witches in the town square. Theyll
probably say No. But isnt that interesting, because the people who lived in that same city less
than a couple of generations ago, did exactly that, and called it right, by the way.

RD: And as you pointed out, the culture inside the minds of the murderers of Matthew Shepherd
thought that it was the good thing to do.

NDW: Of course. So morals and ethics are really the agreements that the largest number of
people reach, and therefore hold in common. And they change, as they should, as time
changes. As rightly they should, because a shift in a societys morals and ethics merely
indicates growth and evolution. That doesnt mean that we should abandon our morals. We
should live the moral constructions with which we agree. But we should not try to force
someone else to be with us.

RD: So a problem arises when it appears to me that a person is living their morals, but also
causing destruction or harm to another.

NDW: We have to understand that there are two people involved in every transaction, you and
me. If you say, I wish to punch you in the nose right now, or hurt your child right now, I would
say, if I were a highly evolved being, So be it with you. That is your choice. Now let me
announce my wish for me. My wish for me is to stop you from punching me in the nose. My wish
for me is to not allow you to hurt my child. Now well see which one of us gets our wish.
Instead, we say No, you will agree with my point of view on this, or youre going to die here,
even when the other persons point of view has no apparent ability to damage or hurt us. In the
end, each of us must remain responsible for ourselves. We have to live our truth, and allow
other people to live theirs. If you say, Im going to go murder your child right now, and if I stop
you, Im not sure that that is failing to allow you to live your truth so much as it is inviting you to
decide on a different one. But Im going to live my truth no matter what you do, and my truth is
that I will always protect my children from harm.

RD: Tell me some other ways that I and my readers might see the Oneness, the common
source, that you suggest we all share, that in turn transforms our decisions and our perspective.
NDW: Thats like saying Show me a way to fall in love. I dont know that I can show you a way
to fall in love. And I dont know that I can show you a way to see the Oneness or to sense the
Oneness. The best I can do is share my own experience. First is meditation. I notice that in my
life, when I meditate, in the morning and in the evening of every day of my life, I find myself
getting in touch with the actual experience, not a conceptualization, not a mental construction,
not some idea of some philosophical framework, but the actual experience of my Oneness with
All That Is. And when I emerge from that meditative experience, I know cellularly that I am one
with the stove and the linoleum and the tree outside and you and everything else. That theres
no difference. And I cant find words to explain how I know that. Its just a knowing-ness that has
come to me through the meditative processone way, not necessarily the better way, but one
way to come to that awareness.

RD: Did that start happening as soon as you started meditating, or did you meditate for years?

NDW: I didnt meditate for years, but I meditated for a while. A year, maybe two. But it can
happen to somebody overnight. It can happen on the first meditation, or on a walk through the
woods. It can happen to somebody just communing with nature, camping out by a stream.

RD: Do you think it does? Do you think that awareness happens to people who dont recognize
it?

NDW: Of course! And sometimes they recognize it and sometimes they dont. People have
transcendent experiences and dont even know what they are, or become so afraid of them that
they run from them.

RD: How common do you think that is?

NDW: Very, very common. People have had moments of illumination that have changed their
lives just driving down the road, standing in the shower stall, making love, eating a good meal,
whatever. You just suddenly know: Whoa! Im one with this glass of wine. Weve all had those
kinds of flashes of transcendent wisdom. Its not uncommon at all. But I think what is uncommon
is for people to latch onto that and hold it and cause it to be their truth, their functioning truth,
their day-to-day, hour-to-hour reality. Thats not easy in a world which seeks to deny that reality.

RD: When you have that experience you described in meditation of being one with whatevers
there, and you said it comes fairly often, that implies that there are times when thats not your
experience.

NDW: Absolutely. The majority of time.

RD: And assuming youre not seeing that Oneness now, it hasnt gone away. Its still there, its
still a realityyou just dont happen to be seeing it right now. But does it still influence your
decisions?

NDW: Yes, because I retreat then to my intellectual understanding of what Ive experienced.
Suppose the attendant at the parking lot is yelling at me to move my car. In that moment I
cannot honestly say that Im experiencing Oneness with him. But at those times, I retreat to my
intellectual capacity to retrieve what I have previously experienced and known on this subject.
And I remember, Ah, yes. This guy and I are one. Im just not seeing that now. But if I were
seeing that, how would I react now? Or as Conversations With God puts it, What would Love
do now? Or as Friendship With God puts it, Is this who you are? If I can have the presence of
mind to ask those questions, the answer will be given before I finish asking.

RD: Just asking that will catalyze your experience?

NDW: Often it will. And then Ill go to that experience of Oh, I know what its like to be frustrated
with somebody whos not doing what you asked him to do. Hes trying to operate this whole
200-space garage, people are driving in and thumbing their noses at him, saying I can take any
space I want, and then his boss is going to come down in a half hour and say Hey, those cars
in reserved spots? Whyd you let them do that? Hes trying to do his job, and I understand
where hes coming from. He and I are one in this, because Ive done exactly that in different
circumstances. And then I can walk up to him as he approaches me, and I can meet his
belligerence with awareness of our Oneness. And I can say to him, Hey, you know what? I
totally get where youre coming from, and Im going to move my car now, because the truth is I
was just trying to one-up you and get away with something here. Hope theres no hard feelings.
And he looks at me like Im from Mars, and just blinks his eyes and says Oh, alright.

RD: Are there other experiences that helped you see this Oneness in daily life? And were there
teachers who were influential to you?

NDW: Well, everybody in my life has been a teacher, and some have been incredibly influential.
If I were to name a few that had enormous impact on me, I would say Warner Erhard, Terry Cole
Whitaker, Elizabeth Kbler-Ross, the Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, now deceased, my
mother, Barbara Marks Hubbard, Carl Rogers and Buckminster Fuller.

RD: Can you name a few enterprises in the world you believe are working toward goals which
are similar to yours?

NDW: Well, there is the United Religions Initiative out of San Francisco, undertaken by Bishop
William Swing, the Episcopal Archbishop of California. He has had a vision of a one-world
religionnot a single religion, but a united religions organization to which delegates from all the
worlds religions would come, much as they do to the United Nations. They would discuss the
worlds issues and challenges from a religious perspective and then present to the governments
of the world the viewpoints of the worlds religions meeting collectively. The point is to see what
would happen if we applied spiritual principles, the highest spiritual principles held in common
by man, to the deepest problems being faced by the human race.

And there are others. The Center for Visionary Leadership in Washington D.C. is doing some
marvelous work. And theres Dennis Weavers Institute for Ecolonomics in Colorado, which is an
effort to merge the economy and ecology into one unified effort to create a better life for all of
us. And theres the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, in which Barbara Marks Hubbard is
working toward creating an International Peace Room. Michael Lerners Foundation for Ethics
and Meaning is another extraordinary organization. And Marianne Williamsons Global
Renaissance Alliance is so inspiring that I decided to become a partner with her in it. There are
many, many huge undertakings now occurring all over the planet, as theres a huge
consciousness shift right now.

RD: Are you seeing a moonbeam of interest in the perspective that there is not really better
and that Oneness is possible?

NDW: I think the human race is losing patience with itself. We are becoming aware now that
there has to be another way. And we do not know what the so-called right way is, but we do
know what the wrong way is, wrong meaning its simply not working. We are now able to
admit that certain of our institutionsreligion, economic institutions, political institutionshave
not gotten us where we had intended or hoped. So its time to re-examine these constructions,
pull the best out of them that we can and slough-off those aspects that have not worked. Its a
time of great change, as we begin to look with courage at all of these institutions. Thats why
weve seen communism fall in the past 20 years. Thats why weve seen certain forms of
capitalism coming to an end. Thats why we see religions making massive changes in the way
they now relate to the people. Pope John Paul II just announced on the 20th of July to the
Catholics of the world that there is no such physical place in the universe as Hell. God is not a
punishing God. God is not a deity that punishes or avenges.

RD: The Pope was saying that?

NDW: You bet. And what he said was the experience of hell is the experience of separation from
God, which is self-imposed, not imposed by an avenging deity. So were seeing some huge
changes as even institutions as established as the Roman Catholic church are re-evaluating.
That process of re-evaluation, which some people call evolution, is picking up steam

RD: Do you think the new millennium has influenced that?

NDW: Of course. At the end of every year of our lives, theres a natural built-in mechanism that
causes us to be retrospective. We ritualize the ending of a cycle, and it gives us a chance to
look back and say Well, how was that past year and how would we like our next year to be? At
the end of a ten-year cycle, were even more retrospective. We realize Oh, Im not 40 anymore.
Now Im 50. Whoa. What does that mean? And how do I want the next ten years to look? At the
end of every hundred year cycle, we become even more introspective and reflective. And if we
happen to be one of the tiny, miniscule number of human beings alive at the turning of a
millenniumwhich, relative to the overall number of people who have ever lived on this planet,
is about .000001 percent of the peopleits inevitable that we will become more reflective, and
say to ourselves My God, this is not a small shift here. This isnt like from the 1800s to the
1900s. This is from the one thousands to the two thousands. Now is a time to look back over
what weve done this past 1,000 years, and to see if there isnt another way to get to where we
say we want to go.

RD: I felt that, too.

NDW: People all over the world are experiencing it. Those of us who are alive at this critical
seminal point in the history of the human race are enormously lucky and incredibly empowered.
It is up to us now to consciously create, rather than just simply stand by and observe the
evolution of the human race. How do we choose to evolve? Not how are we watching ourselves,
not how are we observing ourselves evolving, but if we could choose the way in which we
evolve, what would that choice be? Thats the question were asking ourselves now, and were
answering it.