Don’t ask for anything from God. Ever. Don’t ever do it. Asking God for anything is the surest way to make certain you never receive it.
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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: The third in a series of excerpts from an interview with Neale Donald Walsch first appearing in Spiritual Growth Monthly
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Matt: One of the things you say in your book is that the process of actually asking for something implies that you don’t already have it, and that this approach – the very act of requesting – in effect pushes the thing you want away…
Neale: Well, of course, that’s true. You don’t ask for something you already have. You don’t wish for something you already own.
You don’t ask for glasses to be on your face if you are already wearing glasses. People who wear glasses (there’s not a person I know who wears glasses who has not done this) have laughed at themselves when they catch themselves looking for their glasses while they have their glasses on.
You don’t ask for things you already have. So the very act of asking for something actually moves us away from manifesting it, because you are announcing to the universe, which listens very carefully to your thought about something, that you do not now have it. This becomes your reality, because the universe doesn’t know from “time.” What you say Now is what is true for you Now, and it will continue to be true for you until you say something else.
Do you see now how powerful you are? God says, quite literally, “Your word in My command.”
But there are many things we have that we don’t know that we have; that is, it’s not in our present experience. We’ve lost our keys, we can’t find our gloves, we have the love of another but we’re not sure of it. So we don’t know we have these things. We have them, but we don’t know. We go to that person and say, “Do you love me?” and they say, “Of course I love you. You know I love you, I’ve told you that a thousand times. Why don’t you know that?” And we say, “I don’t know why I don’t know it, I just keep wanting to ask you.” What’s true here is that we can’t believe what someone else is telling us. We can’t believe, inside of us, that we are lovable, so how could someone else love us?
So there are many things we have that we don’t know we have. That’s called the Cloud of Unknowing. It’s when our vision is clouded. We want the plane to take off, but visibility is limited. We want our lives to really take off, but visibility is limited.
Masters, on the other hand, are those who already know that they have everything they could ever hope for or wish to experience, right here, right now. They can see that, because they have infinite visibility. They know that it is merely a question of choosing what they desire and then calling it forth from the sea of infinite possibility. And that’s the process by which Masters make manifest, in physical reality, whatever it is they wish to experience.
Matt: You say that God told you that the “sponsoring thought” is more important than the secondary thought that’s issuing the request.
Neale: That’s what I’m saying here. If we have a sponsoring thought — a deep-seated initial idea — that we already have what it is that we are not now experiencing, then we can experience it much more rapidly.
For instance, in matters of love, if your sponsoring thought is: “Love is mine.
Not only do I have love, I am love,” you will have the experience of that very rapidly. You will have the experience as soon as you choose to notice that you already are that and have that.
So it’s a matter of creating a sponsoring thought that produces the outcomes we wish to experience in our relative reality, relatively soon. Sponsoring thoughts – that is, deep-seated ideas about something – are usually your first thoughts about anything…but they do not have to be the last word on the subject. You can’t change a sponsoring thought, but you can add a new one. That’s where it becomes useful to say, “On second thought…”
When your first thought comes up for you and it is a sponsoring thought that you are not lovable, or that you are not abundant, or – and here’s a typical one – you are “never that lucky”, just say to your Self, “On second thought…”, and then have a new thought about it. You’ll find that you can get out of that stagnant place and really move some energy around if you’ll let yourself seriously entertain that new thought. That’s why this is called the New Thought Movement.
So if you think that you can’t have something that you really want, or that the world will never change, or that life is just what it is and isn’t going to get much better…well, think again. Create a new sponsoring thought. Thoughts sponsor reality, so create a new sponsoring thought.
Matt: And you say that there are two kinds of sponsoring thoughts – fear and love – is that correct?
Neale: Yes. Basically all thought reduces itself to fear or love, and all reality arises from one of those two very basic and fundamental vibrations. There are only two basic vibrations, and those are the two. Everything else is a variation on the theme.
Matt: Well, if God is love, then there’s the question of why did He create something bad, like fear?
Neale: God created a relative experience, a relative world. He created the realm of relativity, in which all things exist in relationship to themselves, across a grand scale.
It’s like saying if God created warm, then why did he create cold? He didn’t create cold. In a sense, he didn’t create warm either. He just created the thing called Temperature. That’s what God created. God created a reality in which everything exists in varying degrees. It is we who have called those things ‘good’ or ‘bad.’
If we can agree that God did not create warm, but rather, temperature, which is the first level of creation, then we simple look at: What temperature is it? Is it 90 degrees outside? Is it 30 degrees Celsius? What temperature is it? Or is it very cold? And is that ‘good’ or ‘bad’? And those are judgments that we will make.
I am using a simple example here, to make a point. ‘Temperature’ is the elementary essence, to use this simple example, of the things that are. And so, too, it is on the Scale of Good and Evil. God did not create ‘good’ and God did not create ‘evil’. Those are human inventions and human definitions. God simply created That Which Is, and it is we who have created ‘good’ and ‘evil’ by calling it that.
By the way, we change that creation from time to time. That is, we call things evil that were not evil years ago. We call things good that we did not call good years ago. So even our scale changes and shifts from time to time. We are, in fact, the creators of our own reality, and we are calling things exactly what we choose for them to be.
Shakespeare put it perfectly: “Nothing is evil lest thinking make it so.”