Since Beliefnet last spoke with Neale Donald Walsch in 2002, the author has transcribed more of his "conversations with God," the most recent of which appears in his latest book. "Tomorrow's God" (read an excerpt) contains a prediction about a global spiritual shift Walsch believes will occur within the next 30 years: Humanity will embrace a "new spirituality" based on "the oneness of all things," a belief in the unity of all life and the divine.In the introduction to your book you say, "This book contains the most exciting news of the past 100 years." What's the news?
That humanity is going to create a new God for itself in the next 25 to 30 years, that this new God will result in the emergence of a new spirituality on the planet, and the new spirituality will in turn result in, at last, a movement toward that time of peace and harmony for all humankind, which has been so long predicted and so long awaited. You're not just talking about a change at the level of individual consciousness, but something on a global scale?
I'm talking about the creation of a new God on the earth and by that I mean a new understanding of the only God who always was, is now and always will be-but an understanding so radically different, an enormous departure from our present understandings that for all practical intents and purposes, it will seem like a new God. And that the creation of this new God by humanity will cause to emerge a new spirituality on the earth, across the planet.
Could you describe the difference between this new understanding of "tomorrow's God" and the understanding that we have right now?
[Our] biggest fallacies about God are:
1. God needs something.
2. God can fail to get what God needs.
3. God has separated you from God because you have not given God what God needs.
4. God still needs what God needs so badly that God now requires you, from your separated position, to provide it.
5. God will destroy you if you do not meet God's requirements.
[Whereas] this is what God is actually like:
1. Tomorrow's God does not require anyone to believe in God.
2. Tomorrow's God is without gender, size, shape, color, or any of the characteristics of an individual living being.
3. Tomorrow's God talks with everyone, all the time.
4. Tomorrow's God is separate from nothing, but is Everywhere Present, the All in All, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the Sum Total of Everything that ever was, is now, and ever shall be.
5. Tomorrow's God is not a singular Super Being, but the extraordinary process called Life.
6. Tomorrow's God is ever changing.
7. Tomorrow's God is needless.
8. Tomorrow's God does not ask to be served, but is the Servant of all of Life.
9. Tomorrow's God will be unconditionally loving, nonjudgmental, noncondemning, and nonpunishing.
Taken collectively, those differences will produce a strikingly different form of spirituality, which in turn will produce a strikingly different form of life, a different way of being with each other.
What is the message you say is missing from the world's religions?
"The missing message" is that we are all one. That is, that we are one with God, no separation between us and God whatsoever. That message is not being sent to the world by the Islamic faith, by the Christian faith, or by the Jewish faith-the world's major exclusivist organized religions. None of them say, "God and we are one." In fact they teach quite the opposite. Not only do they fail to bring that message, they actually teach a message which opposes that message.
What will make followers of these religions adopt this new spirituality in the next 20 or 30 years?The leaders and the figureheads of the world's largest exclusivist organized religions will not suddenly wake up one morning and say, "You know, we've got it all wrong." Or "We have been incomplete in our understandings, therefore we have to offer a new encyclical or a new proclamation." It will not happen that way. It will happen exactly the way political changes have occurred on this planet in the past 20 years that no one would have ever thought would occur. It will happen from the ground up. Just as communism fell in Eastern Europe. Just as political changes have happened all over the world in the past 30 or 40 years. From the ground up, not from the top down.
And what I'm suggesting is that one of two things is going to happen. Either the religions themselves will find themselves shifting and changing, enlarging their belief system to include the missing message, or those religions that fail to do so will simply disappear.
From its worst idea about itself. Save the world from the outcome that most of the world's people say they do not desire, which is the slow but sure destruction and disassembling of life as we know it.
Literal physical destruction?Not simply physical destruction-psychological, emotional, and spiritually as well. The slow but sure disassembling of life as we know it at every level.
I'm not talking about the end of the world here. I'm not talking about the planet stopping to revolve or the world destroying itself in the sense that it will become uninhabitable. I'm talking about life as we know it. That is, life may continue in 30 or 40 years but it won't be anything like the life that we now know. We will not have the freedoms, we will not have the enjoyments, we will not have the happiness. In fact, it will be worse than George Orwell's worst nightmare.
This is an opportunity for humanity to reinvent itself. I think most human beings can now see that we cannot continue in our present direction. I don't see that there are many human beings of any culture who would seriously question that. The question then before us seems to be a rather simple one: In what direction then should we be moving?
My theory is that an insufficient number of people are actually addressing that question. Which way should we move collectively as a human society? In the next 20 to 30 years, these changes will occur: Humanity will in fact create a new idea of divinity, a new idea of itself and a new idea about life. The only question is whether it will do it as a result of the next great calamity or as a preventative measure.
What will the world look like in 20 to 30 years?
First of all, our politics will change dramatically. From the politics of attack and condemn to a politics of collaborative creation. So that we will say ours is not a better way; ours is merely another way: "My opponent, the person who is running against me in this election simply has a different point of view from me. He is not a villain and I am not his victim nor are any of you; we simply have two different ideas on how to approach a problem." The political process will be utterly and totally transparent as well.
You say our educational system will also embrace this new spirituality. For those who value the separation of church and state, this might seem like a very controversial idea.
I don't think that the changes that will occur in education as the emergence of a new spirituality will violate the separation of church and state. The church is an "institution"-a word broadly used to mean organized religions which teach certain dogmas. But we're talking about spirituality and state. And spirituality is nothing more than a fancy word meaning the highest and best beliefs that a culture holds. And if that isn't what education is about, then what is it about?
[I'm not suggesting] that the schools will become launching points for a particular religious dogma or message, but rather that education will be the place in which our highest collectively held values and the highest message-which is simply the message of the unity of all of life-is sent to our young people.
The beauty of the new spirituality is that it will not be doctrinal but experiential. And because it will be experiential it will allow people and in fact, entire cultures, to grow within it to create it and recreate it anew really, almost from moment to moment, but certainly from period to period as we experience what's true for us.
