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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 III
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This is an
Internet Radio Interview with Neale Donald Walsch
by SpiritualGrowthMonthly.com
Part III
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.”
Matt: How do you see the messages of Conversations with God applying to life “on the ground” in the world today?
Neale: The message of God is very simple, direct and clear: We are all one. There’s only one of us, and the idea of separation and what God calls “separation theology” is what is creating the largest number of our problems in the world, and nearly all of our conflicts as well. This is because separation theology produces separation sociology, which ultimately produces separation pathology; that is, a pathological behavior that causes us to treat each other different from how we would treat ourselves.
If we make that one, single shift in consciousness and we’ll heal the world virtually overnight. And that’s something that most people are aware of, at some level, but don’t seem to be able to know how to apply as a functioning, practical truth in their day-to-day lives.
What is needed, therefore, is a new kind of spirituality, and the message of Conversations
with God is that such a new spirituality could now be very beneficial on the earth. I am talking about a new understanding of God and of what God wants; a new understanding of life and what life really is; a new awareness of ourselves, who we really are, and what our right relationship is to each other, to God and to all of life…
Those new understandings, generated by a new spirituality, could change the world. It would be impossible, to put it another way, for the people in the world to treat each other the way they’re treating each other, if they thought that they were treating themselves in that way. But they don’t. They see the so-called “enemy” as “other” than themselves. In fact, in some cases, they see their enemy even as sub-human, or as not human, as the infidel, as the apostate, as the person who deserves to be killed or eliminated
because they’re not even human in some ways.
So a fundamental shift must take place, this the Conversations with God books make very clear. We must shift our consciousness and create a new cultural story that redefines ourselves and who we are in relationship to each other, to life and to the thing that we call God, Allah or Brahman or Yahweh, or whatever it is that we choose to give as a name for All That Is.
Matt: Yes, it seems to be happening. A lot of people talk about a huge shift in consciousness that’s going on.
Neale: Well, it better happen much faster and on a much broader scale. I know that it seems to be happening, but I think that what has to occur now is a speed-up in that process, an exponential increase in this whole process. If we don’t see that, if we don’t create it, then life as we know it on this planet could well be eliminated before we can put the solution into place.
There is a great force now in the universe that is a working—it is the extremist force, on the extreme left and the extreme right of all the political, social, economic and
spiritual questions of our time.
These are extremists whose views are not merely unusual or revolutionary, but in fact, extreme, and these are people who believe that violence is an appropriate means to resolve the differences that exist across the spectrum of human thought.
It is these extremists that have created much of the terror that we find in the day-to-day lives of our world.
Matt: When you face that kind of extremism, it’s difficult to know what to do. How do you face that when you come across it?
Neale: We have to get uncomfortable again. The comfortable are the damned, in a sense. That’s an old saying and I think it’s true…the comfortable are the damned.
That is, they are condemned to lives of mediocrity. It is a sad truth that most people live
unexceptional lives because they’re so comfortable; that is, most people, at least in
certain parts of the world. It’s not true of the largest number of people on the planet, but it is the uncomfortable who agitate, and always will. And it is the extremists among the uncomfortable who will take that agitation to extreme lengths in order to make the comfortable uncomfortable.
So what we have to do is get uncomfortable without being made uncomfortable.
That is to say, we need to be uncomfortable right now without having to have violence forced upon us in order to become uncomfortable. It’s a sad observation that not enough people are uncomfortable with the fact that 400 children die an hour of starvation on this planet. Not enough people are uncomfortable with the fact that 500,000 people have been killed in Darfur, and over two million have been forced out of their homes. It’s a sad fact that not enough people are uncomfortable with the oppression of the masses, with the prejudice that occurs in all parts of the world.
With the way things are, we are just too comfortable and we do not look at the suffering
in the world, and we have become wildly self-indulgent and self-congratulatory and comfortable.
So the solution is going to have to be, for those who are comfortable, to find a level of
discomfort sufficient to motivate them to get up, walk across the room and actually do something, rather than simply think or talk about it with regard to the people in the world who are not comfortable. Otherwise, the uncomfortable will become extreme in their reaction, and will change the world very quickly into a kind of place where none of us are
comfortable any more, ever again. That’s the place where we are right now in our world.
All that will change that is a new outlook, and then a determination to do something about it, not just “om” ourselves to death or sit in front of a candle, breathe deeply and
play nice, soft music and talk about how nice the world really is, but actually to get out on the street where the rubber meets the road, and start making on-the-ground alterations and changes in our day-to-day life.
That’s where it’s going to have to happen, because that’s where the terror is happening.
Matt: Isn’t the feeling uncomfortable, though, part of the problem, because if we’re focusing on negative aspects of experience, are we not just creating more of that? Is it not the solution to focus more on the positive changes that we want?
Neale: Yes, but the positive changes in what? You can’t change nothing, you can only change something, therefore you have to be thinking about what you want to change. That means you’ve got to be aware of what you want to change.
Focusing on the uncomfortable is not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about noticing the uncomfortable truths and then focusing on the way we want things to be. But if you want to focus on the positive, if you want to focus on the changes you wish to make, you have to know what you’re trying to change. What are you trying to change? In order to know what you’re trying to change, you’ve got to think about that. You’ve got to think about the bad things in the world that are going on because those are the things you want to change. You just can’t say, “I want to change…I can’t mention what I want to
change, because that would be focusing on the negative. But I want to change something, I know that. I want to change something.” No, you have to actually say, “I want to change prejudice. I want to change the oppression of people. I want to change the conditions that create starving children.”
You’ve got to look at that and say, “That’s what I want to change.” Part of the problem in the new-age community is that we get into this idea that we’ve got to focus only on the positive, only on the positive – be the change you wish to see – only on the positive. But changing what? Even positive thinkers have got to say, “Okay, there is a train coming down the tracks.” That’s just what’s so. Now, do we want to get off the tracks or do we want to throw more people on the tracks? What do we want to do?
Matt: So we first need to appreciate and really understand where we are now before we can help to change something.
Neale: We have to be aware of what we already have created. The process is really quite simple. We are all creating our own reality, that is true, but in order to change the reality we have created and make it different in the future, we have to acknowledge, at the very
least, what we have created in our most recent past.
To observe that the train is coming is not to put it there. If I observe that a train is coming, I’m not actually creating it. People say, “Don’t say that, don’t say that. Are you trying to create that?” Whoa, wait a minute, I’m not creating anything, I’m just observing it. If I observe that a train is coming, I haven’t crated it, I’ve simply observed that it was
created already, it’s already on the way. In a past moment, that was created. Yes, it was me who created it, but that was Then and this is Now.
In the Now I have a whole different decision. Given that the train coming down the tracks has already been created, what do I now wish to create? What is the best way to do it? Id I want to create a new future, is the best way to create that to ignore the train that’s coming, or to get out of its way?
Matt: Get out of its way.
Neale: Of course, obviously. So we have to first observe what we have created in our past, including in our most recent past. We can’t ignore it and we can’t put our heads in the sand like an ostrich and pretend it’s not there. We have to notice what’s there and then say, “Now, what do I choose?” So I have a bit of impatience with people who say, “Don’t talk about that, don’t say anything negative!”
Matt: Really? Impatience?
Neale: Yes, of course. Just like Jesus in the temple, when he took out a rope and tied knots in it and drove the money changers out of the temple. ‘You vipers!’ he said,
‘You hypocrites!’ I would call that a little impatient. And he was called the greatest Master of all time by some people. So if it’s good enough for Christ, it’s good enough for me.
Matt: Was that not righteous anger?
Neale: What’s the difference between righteous anger and impatience? How many angels fit on the end of a pin? Let’s split words in half.
Matt: Okay, I’m just throwing it out there for further discussion.
Neale: Sure, and I’m willing to discuss it with you. Let’s talk about it. What’s the difference between impatience and righteous indignation or righteous anger? It’s the same thing. In fact, the motto of my group of 1,000 is “be impatient.” I think that righteous anger leads to impatience, or impatience leads to righteous anger – it’s all a circle, getting to the same place. But there’s nothing wrong with impatience. All great masters have become impatient. There’s nothing wrong with anger. Anger is one of the five natural emotions. It’s what you do with your anger that matters. If you use anger to fuel your earnest desire for change, and to work hard to make change happen, then anger is good, anger is powerful. If you use anger to hurt other people, to lash out, to attack, to destroy, rather than to rebuild in a new way, then anger may not be so good.
Gandhi’s impatience with British rule over India created an entirely new nation-state. Martin Luther King Jr.’s impatience with prejudice in the United States created the civil rights movement. I’m all for impatience.
Matt: I suppose it depends upon the spirit in which that impatience is expressed.
Neale: Of course; everything does. That is true of every single thought one has. That is correct.
Matt: All of these things we’re talking about apply to our personal lives as much as they do to the entire planet.
Neale: Indeed, because we are all one, and that is what is true.
Matt: A lot of the beliefs we’ve grown up with teach us that God has a plan for our lives already, before we were born. Some people say that we came here, we chose who are parents were going to be, et cetera…
Neale: We did do that. That doesn’t mean we had a plan. Choosing the colors of your palette doesn’t mean you know what picture you want to paint. So we do choose the colors of our palette, very definitely. We choose the colors of our palette with each
entry into life. We still have the paintbrush and the canvas is blank. We have no idea of the picture we’re going to paint; we simply know the colors we’re going to use. And even then, we create new colors along the way by mixing some of the colors on our palette.
“Don’t mix yellow and blue—you’re going to get green!” I intend to get green, thank you very much; please step aside. So in fact, we do choose the colors of our palette, we do choose our parents, we do choose things, I’m told, like our place of birth or our racial composition or our nationality and those kinds of things, from life to life and from moment to moment, in the eternity of now. But that does not mean we have a plan in mind, nor does it mean that God has a plan in mind. God just says, “Here are the tools for your next lifetime,” and the palette is empty and the space is clear. What do you now choose to create? Interesting analogy, isn’t it?
Matt: So there is no plan, there is no map for us to follow. It’s all our choice in what we’re supposed to do?
Neale: Not even what we’re supposed to do, because supposing to do something would indicate that there’s some kind of plan. It is what we choose to do, what we wish to do.
Matt: Is it possible, do you think, to choose to do something which is wrong?
Neale: Right and wrong don’t exist. Right and wrong are relative terms. Relative to what? “Wrong” relative to what, in relationship to what? Is killing wrong? It all depends on why we’re doing it, doesn’t it? If you’re killing someone to rob a bank or because you’re jealous of your lover, that would be considered, by some people, wrong. If you’re
killing someone to save your two-month-old baby from being stabbed in the chest by a maniac who has come into your house in the middle of the night, some people would call that right.
So right and wrong don’t exist. Those are relative terms – relative to what we’re trying to do. So of course it’s possible to do something wrong by someone’s definition. It’s also possible to do something right by someone’s definition, by doing the exact same thing.
Isn’t that interesting? What a conundrum. What an adventure this thing called life is.
Matt: It certainly is. It’s difficult to know, sometimes, what the best thing to do, or what…
Neale: It’s not difficult to know what the best thing to do is when you know what you’re trying to accomplish. So what we have to be clear on is: What are we trying to accomplish?
For instance, to use a simple example, are we trying to accomplish a thing called peace in the world? If we say we are, then perhaps we might want to reconsider whether we can do that by dropping bombs. That is, is it possible to solve a problem by using the same energy that created the problem? Einstein said no, and I think Einstein was right.
You don’t solve the problem of violence with violence. You don’t solve the problem of hatred with more hatred. It’s pretty simple when you think about it.
Matt: I suppose it’s difficult if people have been locked into a certain way of being, or there’s been a circle of violence or we’ve lived a certain way for so long that that’s all we’ve known, or it seems that’s all we’ve known.
Neale: Yes, that’s exactly right. It is difficult. I agree with you completely. It is difficult when that’s all we’ve known, which is why what is needed now in the world is to know something new. That is, to change our minds about God, about life, about each other, about why we’re here and about how life could best function.
We need a new cultural story. We need to write a brand-new cultural story, and that is what is needed now on the planet. So what is needed is really a whole system of education that could provide such a cultural story, such a brand-new thought about the world and how it is, and could give us a different basis from which to proceed as we choose to create our lives in the future.
You’re right; if we have had no other experiences except the experiences that you mentioned, if we’re stuck in our story from yesterday, then it is going to be very difficult to create a new tomorrow. Yet, a new tomorrow can be created if we are willing to create a new story.
I would say that the future is very bright, but it is not going to be changed by going back to our yesterdays. The bright future of our tomorrow will not be found over our shoulder, but over the horizon.
Matt: Hopefully people like you and I can do something and help to change the consciousness of everything and bring about an improvement.
Neale: That is the great invitation that life sends to life itself, for regular people just like you and me to do exactly that, and we are able to do exactly that. It has only been people like you and me who have, in fact, done exactly that.
People who live exceptional lives are not necessarily exceptional people. They’re just
ordinary people like you and me. Martin Luther King Jr. was a regular person. Gandhi was just a regular person. He wasn’t born on another planet, he wasn’t anointed personally by God. He didn’t receive some sort of special gift from the universe. He was a regular person like you and me. Mother Teresa was a regular lady, like a whole bunch of other people on this planet, but ordinary people doing extraordinary things – that’s
what now will change the world.
Matt: Neale Donald Walsch, thank you very much for getting on the phone with me today. It’s been interesting and enlightening. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.
Neale: You’re very welcome.