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Sunday is Message Day on the blog. Monday through Friday we look at contemporary events and day-to-day occurrences at the intersection of Life and the New Spirituality…but on Sunday, we reserve this space for a specific teaching derived from the material in Conversations with God
Through the years I have given hundreds of talks and written scores of articles revolving around this material. Every seven days we will present in this space a transcript or reprint of one of those presentations. We invite you to Copy and Save each one of them, creating a personal collection of contemporary and uplifting spiritual thought which you may reference at any time. We hope you will find this a constant source of insight and inspiration.
This week’s offering: An interview with NDW-Part II
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Internet Radio Interview with Neale Donald Walsch
by SpiritualGrowthMonthly.com
Continued from last week…
Matt: So how can we learn to listen more to God and to get more of God into our lives?
Neale: By wanting to. It’s not a question of learning— there’s nothing to learn. That’s like saying: How can we learn to love? Loving and listening to God are the same thing.
A baby doesn’t have to be taught how to love; a baby is taught how not to love, and we spend the rest of our lives teaching each other how not to love.
Loving and listening to God are the same thing, so the answer to your question is: we don’t have to learn how to listen to God, we simply have to choose to, and once we choose to, the way to do that will be made obvious to us. It will be right in front of us, and there will be a million ways. There isn’t only one way.
That’s why it’s not a simple thing to say, “This is how you can learn to do that,” because there is no one way to love, and there is no one way to listen to God. God will communicate with you every day, in a thousand different ways, from moment to
moment…the words to the next song you hear on the radio, the picture you see on the billboard when you turn the corner, the chance utterance of a friend on the street, words you hear in your mind, dreams you have, and a thousand other ways that God has devised with which to communicate with us.
Matt: Do you believe that God really has a personality that is capable of verbal communication?
Neale: God has a form and a shape that coincides with whatever we choose to imagine it to be. There is nothing that God is not. God is the essence of life itself, the most basic and fundamental energy in the universe.
In a sense, God is a shape shifter. That is, God, or that which we call God, the Essence of Supreme Intelligence in the universe, can take on any shape or form that pleases us from moment to moment.
So the answer to your question is yes and no. Yes, God is a personality that actually speaks to us. No, God is not that; God is the Essence of Life itself, the energy, the most fundamental essence of the universe. God is all of the above and can be excluded by no definition whatsoever.
Matt: In your books you talk about the fact that we tend not to see God in the profane, in the things which offend us.
Neale: That is correct.
Matt: A lot of people feel frustrated and could identify, I think, with what you were saying at the beginning of the book—feeling that somehow, God is trying to thwart them or prevent them from making progress or getting the things they want in their lives. Does God ever not answer prayers?
Neale: The idea of God as a Santa Claus in the sky who says ‘yes’ to some requests and ‘no’ to some others is a very elementary and primitive, simplistic view of God, as is the question that you’ve just asked a very elementary, primitive, simplistic question.
It isn’t God’s function to answer or to not answer prayers; it is God’s function to empower us to create what it is we choose to experience in our lives. Or, if we choose to place blockages in our own way, to stop ourselves from experiencing what we say we want to experience.
God’s job is not to create or uncreate anything, not to say yes or no to anything. God’s job (to use human terms), or the function of life, if you will, is to simply empower all
that life creates, to create more life in whatever way that life chooses. Life is a process that informs life about life through the process of Life Itself.
Matt: In that case, why is it that some prayers go unanswered? This is sounding a lot like your book at the moment.
Neale: Well, for the reason I just gave you. Prayers do not go unanswered. We create the outcomes that we create. Sometimes we create outcomes that coincide with what we say are our highest desires, and sometimes we create realities that do not coincide with what we claim to be our highest desires. That is, sometimes we say one thing and do another. It’s a very common human experience.
Matt: There seems to be a gap between making a request or trying to manifest a change that we want in our lives, or something we want to create, and that event actually taking place. In your view, is there anything that can be done to shorten that gap, or is that just a function of the way the universe works as well?
Neale: I don’t know that there has to be any length of time. Time is a function of our imagination, and I’m not convinced that there has to be a particular period of time that must pass between the time that we choose to call something forth and the time it manifests in our reality.
I don’t think that time is a necessary function of creation. The amount of time that passes is a matter of the degree of our knowing this around an outcome.
For instance, when we go into our bedroom and flick on a light switch, we don’t have to wait for 15 minutes or 15 years for the lights to go on because we know the light will go on, and we have ultimate and complete faith in that.
In fact, we go past faith; we go to a place of knowing. We are deeply aware, at a knowingness level, that the light switch is going to turn the lights on. Unless there’s a burnt-out bulb or some problem in the electrical system, the lights are going to go on.
So too, is it with certain other things as well in our lives, including our own reactions to
things and our own behaviors. However, to the degree that we wonder whether something is going to happen, to the degree that we are at question about it, to the degree that we doubt it for a second, to that degree we have created the experience of time passing. We cause ourselves to have to wait for the outcomes that we seek to manifest.
Spiritual Masters and Avatars, however, are said to have eliminated the experience of waiting. They seek a particular experience and call it forth at once, because they know that there’s no reason why that which they have chosen cannot be made manifest in the Instant Moment of Now.