Heartspeak

Heartspeak

July 2003

By Neale Donald Walsch

Open yourself to God
How the book Conversations with God came to me
proved that God is always there and willing to
communicate with us and help us if we’ll only
open ourselves to Him.

How Conversations with God first came to me was the most profound experience of my life. It was a dark and dreary morning in February 1992. Everything in my life had fallen apart: my relationship with my significant other had gone downhill, my career had reached a dead-end and even my health was deteriorating rapidly.

I couldn’t understand what was happening or why. I had obeyed all the rules I had been carefully taught by my parents, teachers, ministers and various other life mentors but I simply hadn’t achieved what I thought I ought to have achieved. And so I was in deep depression for many months.

One night I was awakened at 4:15 in the morning. I was deeply troubled, frustrated and very angry with God. I went to the larger part of the house and just started pacing, not knowing what to do or what to say or how to deal with these emotions I was undergoing.

I picked up the yellow legal pad on the coffee table next to me and began writing an angry letter to God. The letter was filled with all the typical questions we ask when we have a lot of anger, like: “What does it take for me to have my life work?” and “What have I done to deserve a life of such continuing struggle?” and “Somebody tell me the rules because I’ll play if you’ll just tell me the rules!”

Then I heard a voice, as clear as any, which said: “Neale, do you really want answers to all these questions or are you just venting?” I couldn’t believe it. I looked around to see if anybody was there. Nobody was, so I said to myself: “Well, I am venting but if you’ve got answers I sure as heck would like to know what they are.”

And with that I began receiving answers to all the questions I had been asking.

I picked up the yellow legal pad again and began writing down what I was hearing in my head. As I was writing, I began asking other questions in my mind; as I did so, I immediately received other answers.

And as I wrote those answers down, I received other questions. Before I knew it, I was involved in an on-paper dialogue with God. I wouldn’t have called it ‘God’ at the time, of course; I didn’t know what was happening. I just knew that I was asking the deepest questions of my life and getting answers right then and there.

It was a moving moment. I was weeping as I wrote, weeping at the beauty and the wonder of it and also at the feeling of great peace and serenity inside. This went on for two-and-a-half hours. Then the house started getting up so I stopped although I could’ve gone on forever. The same thing happened at 4:15 the next morning and every night thereafter for two-and-a-half or three weeks. Then it began to taper off; instead of every night, it began happening two or three times a week, then once a week.

Over the period of the next year, I continued to have these experiences. The result was Conversations with God, Book 1, which became a publishing phenomenon and was translated into 27 languages.

That initial event, of course, changed my life completely. It affected me deeply and returned me to my grandest notion about God, which is that God is always there and willing to communicate with us and help us if we’ll only open ourselves to that experience.

How to Change the World
In his new book, The New Revelations (Simon & Schuster), Neale Donald Walsch says that God has given humanity nine new revelations to help change present beliefs about God and Life. It offers a timely and provocative perspective on the current global crisis and advises how we can not only avoid despair, but also help to repair the world. Excerpts:

Do not seek first to change the world. You will not change the world by trying first to change the world. You will change the world by first changing yourself. You must first decide some important things about yourself, come to some new conclusions within yourself about who you are, about God, and about Life, and then begin to live those decisions.

This inner process can, in fact, produce changes in the world around, for the world you touch is affected by how you touch it.

Who you are, and how you are, affects the world to a much larger degree than you might imagine. Yet remember this. You cannot achieve inner peace by being agitated if you do not achieve outer peace.

So don’t tie your efforts at personal transformation to a result called planetary transformation, or you may achieve neither.

Share with the people of the world, if you wish, but share with them not what you think their experience should be, but what you know your experience has been. Teach others if they ask, but teach them not that you have their answers, but that they have their own.

Do not change your beliefs because you want other people to change theirs. Change your beliefs because your new beliefs announce more accurately who you are.

Yet even as you change, do not be surprised if other people change, and if the world around you changes. For the change in you will act as a catalyst in producing change in others. Not because you have sought to produce change in others, but, more probably, because you have not.

People do not change because they are told to change. People may temporarily alter their behavior because they have been told to do so by those who have power over them, but that is not real change. That is merely a surface shift of outward demeanour. Inner truth has not shifted. As soon as the power over them has been lifted, or can no longer be exerted, people’s behaviour returns to that which is motivated by their inner truth. The parent of every teenager knows this. The tyrant who would rule any country finds it out.

Change is an act of freedom, not an act of compliance. Obedience is not creation, and creation is the only act of evolution. Seek not, therefore, to change the world. Seek to BE the change you wish to SEE in the world.

Group action is what is required now.
You cannot do this alone, nor can one charismatic leader or one spiritual teacher produce a miracle. The time for individual gurus who come along and change the world is over. The time for collective consciousness and collective action to change the collective reality is at hand.

This is as it should be, for your present reality has been collectively created. It is now time for you to collectively recreate it anew. Work, then, in a collective. Do not follow an individual master, but master collective consciousness individually. Then work collectively to awaken the collective called Humanity.

The world is now ready to take such action, for group communication is now possible as it was never possible before. The whole world is now linked. The entire planet is now connected.

It has been said that your rapidly advancing technologies are threatening to destroy humanity. They are also that which can save it.