An Interview with Neale Donald Walsch
Educator, Lecturer & Best-selling author of
Conversations with God
By Dennis Hughes, Share Guide Publisher
Neale Donald Walsch lives with his wife, Nancy, at a retreat site they have founded in the woodlands of southern Oregon. Together they have formed ReCreation, an organization whose goal is to give people back to themselves. Walsch is continually touring the country, answering requests for lectures, and hosting workshops to support and spread the messages contained in the book trilogy entitled Conversations with God.
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Dennis Hughes: I’d like to start off by asking, what do you mean by the new spirituality? And how do you think that it applies to the times in which we live?
Neale Donald Walsch: I think the new spirituality will be a spirituality that’s not based on a particular dogma. And that steps away from the old spiritual paradigm that we have created on this planet, which comes from a thought that there is such a thing as being better. The sad part about our past is that religions, ironically enough, are responsible for creating the most destructive idea that has ever been visited upon the human race: the idea that there is such a thing as "better." I question that the word better has any real value as it’s used by many religions–and then subsequently by other institutions in our society.
Let me explain. The basis of most organized religions is that they have–their founder or founders have–received a direct revelation from God. The most recent of which is Joseph Smith of the Book of Mormon, as recently as 1867. But many religions traditionally claim that their founders’ experience of the word of God is the one true experience. And everyone else’s experience of the word of God is at best a mistake, and at worst a blasphemy. And from this construct has arisen a concept that "We are better than them." The Roman Catholics teach that unless you’re a Roman Catholic you do not go to heaven. There’s an old joke about the man who went to heaven and found three doors and Peter said he could go to any one of three doors to spend eternity: room A, room B or room C. In room A were all the world’s Jews. In room B were all the world’s Protestants and Peter wouldn’t show him room C. And the man said "Why can’t I take a look at room C before I make my final choice?" And Peter said "Because in Room C are all the world’s Catholics. And they think they’re the only ones up here." Beyond the Catholic exclusionary paradigm is a larger one which is the Christian one. Christians claim that if you don’t believe in Christ, you can’t get to heaven. Well that eliminates two thirds of the world’s population!
Dennis: Yes, that’s a sad thing right there.
Neale: And so one either has to believe in a God who’s terribly prejudiced, or disbelieve the teachings of such exclusionary theologies. Religions have taught us that "we are better than they." And because we are, somehow, better than they, we get to go to heaven and they don’t. Christians will tell you outright that they believe that. They may not use the word better. But they certainly believe that they’ll go to heaven and Jews will not.
Dennis:Sort of a team thing.
Neale: Yes. And this thought of betterness has crept into every area of society, where in fact, it becomes insidious. It begins with our children when they are very young. And indeed as you just mentioned they find themselves on teams.
Dennis: It’s divisive for the unity of humanity.
Neale: Yes. It becomes "our neighborhood is better than your neighborhood." It becomes "our family is better than your family." It graduates to "our state is better than your state," and "our nation is better than your nation." And it circles all the way around to where it started: "Our God is better than your God." And because we believe that our ethnic group, our society, our political party, our God, is better than your God, we kill each other. The new spirituality will bring about what I’m calling the "end of better." And that is in fact what is called for in the next of the series of books that I’ve been writing. I’m calling my book series the "with God series." And this next "with God" book is Friendship with God, which comes out in November. This books challenges us to bring about the end of "better" on this planet.
I was told to challenge every minister, every priest, every spiritual teacher, every world leader, every politician, everyone that has a constituency of any kind, to stand before their constituencies and utter the one sentence that no religion, no political party, and no nation on the face of the earth will dare utter: "Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way." That single sentence would change the experience of the world. That is the new spirituality, to answer your question directly. That will be the guiding principle. The new spirituality will step away from dogma, will step away from "We’re right and you’re wrong." And it will step into an inclusionary kind of understanding, that allows us to honor and to celebrate each other’s points of view without finding them mutually exclusive.
Dennis: This reminds me of the "unity in diversity" phrase. We don’t want to be homogenous as a race. We each like our own tribal culture, but it doesn’t have to be competitive teams. It can just be our individual offerings.
Neale:Yes. And so that’ll be the first characteristic of the new spirituality. The second characteristic of the new spirituality is that it will produce an experience in human encounters in which we become a living demonstration of the basic spiritual teaching "We are all one." And everything that violates or mitigates against that teaching will not be part of the new spirituality. The new spirituality will also base itself on a third very large spiritual understanding, which is that life is eternal. Most religious people claim to believe that, but very few people actually live as if that were true. In fact we make most of our decisions and most of our choices as if we’re not all one, and life is not eternal. As told in Friendship with God, if we simply decided to believe and act as if first, we’re all one, and second, life is eternal, it would render virtually everything we’ve done all our lives pointless. Because our choices are largely based on survival. But if life is eternal, life is not a question. And if we’re all one, we need to stop our competition with each other. Most of the decisions we make are about survival and winning. If we win, someone else loses. But if someone else loses, we lose. Which is a point we’re not getting. The new spirituality will make this just painfully obvious. It’ll become obvious that we’ve really been working against ourselves. As the new spirituality begins to become the pervasive spirituality of the planet, we’ll find that we have abandoned our philosophy of contradictions in which we say we’re all one but continue to try to win. And in which we say that life is eternal but continue to struggle to survive.
Dennis: What stage do you think we’re at in the dawning of this new spirituality?
Neale: Well, I think that things happen individually first, and then collectively. It’s not the other way around. And I think that individually we’re moving very rapidly toward these understandings. You’ll find individuals agreeing on this, but when they get into collective societies and larger groups they find it difficult to achieve group agreement.
Dennis: Right. In Barbara Marx Hubbard’s book Conscious Evolution, she mentions the phrase "cultural creatives." The number she quoted was 44 million, which means there’s a very large group of Americans waking up.
Neale: Yes.
Dennis: But there’s not that many who are actively working with changing the system yet.
Neale: That’s right. That’s why Marianne Williamson and I have formed an organization called the Global Renaissance Alliance. Barbara Marx Hubbard is on the Board of Directors, along with Deepak Chopra and Wayne Dyer and James Redfield, and a host of others. All of these folks have joyfully joined with us to provide an arena within which our "cultural creatives" can identify themselves. And unify their energies, focusing them in particular directions to produce particular results.
Dennis: There’s an awful lot of talk about the new millennium. Do you think that the new spirituality will be affected much by the millennium itself? And what do you think about this whole millennium business?
Neale: As we move into the 21st century, there’s what the Bible calls a "quickening of the spirit." And I think in metaphysical terms, I would call that increasing the speed of the vibration of life. And we’re seeing a higher level of consciousness and many more opportunities for people to challenge their present ways of thinking and move into a grander and larger experience of who they really are. And I think that’s a result of just a general increase in speed of the vibration of life itself.
Dennis: Do you think that the new spirituality is something that is developing, as we increase vibration and head toward the year 2000?
Neale: Yes. We’ve seen in the last half century an incredible shift. This is just an extraordinary time to be alive. A great many people experience the movement from one century to the next, but a minuscule number of people experience the movement from one millennium to the next. It’s a very small and select slice of all the people who have ever been born. I believe we’ve come back during this time, those of us who are here now, specifically to experience it. And to cause a "quickening of the spirit."
Above is from www.shareguide.com/Walsch.html
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