Neale Donald Walsch is an author made famous by his Conversations with God book series that have sold millions of copies worldwide. They’ve been translated into 37 languages at last count and have spent seriously long periods of time on the New York Times bestseller list, the first for a staggering 137 weeks.
It was back in February 1992 when a broken, desperate version of Neale dropped to his knees to ask God for answers to his questions, he didn’t expect a voice to come back with information that he couldn’t have dreamed of knowing. It was this revelatory conversation with a higher power, scribbled on a yellow legal pad through multiple late night sessions that became his first published book, a book that sent a seismic wave through the spiritual world.
His series of dialogues with God has turned him into a modern-day spiritual messenger, whose words have affected millions of lives around the globe. Neale thought these communications had come to an end, but to his surprise, ten years after his last conversation the same channel opened up offering some out of this world information about higher beings that he says can be life-changing. We spoke to him recently about his fascinating new book Conversations with God, Book 4: Awaken the Species.
The MALESTROM: Let’s start with your latest book Awaken the Species. Was it a surprise to you when after ten years another communication began with God leading to this new conversation?
Neale Donald Walsch: It was a huge surprise, not a little surprise. I really thought I was done with that particular aspect of my life. Not finished having interactions with the divine, as is true of all of us, they’ll continue throughout my life, but book-length interactions that start with a through line and end with a purpose in the sense of creating a book, I thought that was complete and that I’d not be having that particular kind of conversation with God again.
So yes I was very surprised, and for a while, I must admit I thought maybe I was fooling myself, maybe I was imagining this was what was happening because I wanted to have another conversation.
But I realised after I had very briefly entered the exchange that no, this was the same feeling I’d had before, the same vibrancy, the same vibration, energetic signature and frankly the same quality of information that I’d had before. That is, I was receiving information I’d never even dreamt of before in my life, and that was true with the other Conversations With God books as well, where I was being opened, I would say, to information I’d never even dreamt or heard about and didn’t occur to me in my day-to-day life.
So this book carried all of that same flavour, brand new information, one might almost say revolutionary information because at least in my life I had never been exposed to these kinds of ideas and these kinds of articulations prior to that last exchange.
TM: Was it similar to how you’d heard that voice in previous interactions?
NDW: The answer is yes. It’s what I call a voiceless voice. I’ve often described it as the voice of my own thoughts. We all have moments when we are thinking to ourselves and we listen to our own thoughts, the experience is exactly like that, it’s like listening to one’s own thoughts, except that they’re thoughts I would never have had in a million years (laughs).
So the quality of the thoughts are vastly different but the experience is identical to listening to my own thoughts. It’s a fascinating experience to move through.
TM: For those that may not know can you tell us how the first communication came about in the 90s and the position you were in at the time?
NDW: Well nothing was going right. My relationship with my significant other was falling apart. My health was going rapidly downhill, my career had reached a dead-end and on top of all of that, I had my car stolen on the street from right outside where I was staying and I wound up in an automobile accident before the car was stolen, in which I broke my neck.
So it was a series of events where I really fell to my knees, honestly, and said ok, “what do you want from me?” Obviously, there’s something here I don’t fully understand about God and about life, the understanding of which would change everything, wouldn’t it be nice if you could tell me what I don’t understand? Because I didn’t want to do this anymore, I didn’t want to play anymore.
I woke up with those thoughts one night in particular and it was around 04.23 in the morning and I was walking around my little flat and those thoughts were going through my mind. I sat on the couch and then I heard a voice. This voice was actually outside of myself, in the room. It said, “Neale, do you really want answers to all of these questions? Or are you just venting?” So I looked across the room and there was no one there and I thought terrific, not only is my life falling apart I’m now going absolutely out of my mind, I’m going bonkers, there’s nobody here.
But immediately after that first reaction I felt my entire being overcome with a quiet peace and a very reverent joy as if one might feel if visited by someone known to be a saint, maybe the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dalai Lama, like someone at a very high level had walked into the room.
I just felt like, for the next few moments I’m pretty safe here with this guy, I’m sat here with the Dalai Lama, what can happen? He’s obviously a person of great wisdom and clarity and I revere him as I revere many of our spiritual leaders, the Pope not least among them.
So I had that same feeling that I was being visited by that kind of energetic presence, except of course there was no one in the room so it was just a feeling. And that feeling moved inside of me and I began to almost weep with joy, and then I began to write very slowly on my yellow legal pad, all the questions that I had about life, and I noticed that I was receiving answers. This is not automatic writing to be clear, the pen wasn’t moving on its own. It was like taking dictation, I was receiving thoughts and writing them down as fast as I could.
At one point I even said, “whoa, slow down, slow down.” And the voice did actually slow down. I experienced that the answers were astonishing me and they brought up more questions. Before I knew it, without planning it, I was involved in an on-paper dialogue, which I chose to call after a few mornings of this, Conversations With God, because that’s exactly how I experienced it.
TM: Was it that reverence that made you be able to trust the voice and know in yourself that it wasn’t something malevolent conversing with you?
NDW: Yes, that plus the quality of the information I was receiving. The data coming to me was so astonishing and so astonishingly appealing I was almost a little bit brazen about it, I felt if this was a malevolent being, so be it, I’m being helped here. So I’m willing to listen, I’m going to stay open and just listen to what I’m hearing and see where it takes me.
Did I have a little bit of apprehension at the very beginning, did I think oh my gosh, here I am trafficking with the devil. Yes, I had that thought once or twice, but I kept on looking at the quality of that information and I thought I’m open enough to see just where this is going.
You must understand I was never dreaming of writing a book, this wasn’t the experience I was having, it didn’t occur to me that this private, personal journey would become a book. It wasn’t until about one third into what ultimately became book one, that I was told point blank, this will one day become a book.
I remember thinking when that came through, yeah, of course, you and a hundred other people are going to send your middle of the night mental meanderings to a publisher, who’s going to say “we’ve got to get this out, this guy’s talking to God.” But in fact, that’s exactly what happened.
As a test I sent it to five publishers, I didn’t mass mail it, I picked out five I knew were publishing spiritual, metaphysical books. So I sent the words from the handwritten yellow legal pad that had been keyboarded by a stenographer out to these publishers and by golly if one of them didn’t call me back in about a week and a half and say, “we’re going to publish this book and we’re going to put it on the fast track, this is astonishing stuff.” The rest, as they say, is history as within three months the book had become an international best-seller and it went onto the New York Times best-seller list where it stayed for 137 weeks.
TM: Were you prepared for the kind of reaction from putting that first book out?
NDW: No, not at all. I wasn’t prepared then and I’m not prepared now, all I can do is hope that I bring benefit to as many people as I possibly can and hope that I don’t damage anyone or inadvertently hurt anyone, and just do the best I can with what’s occurred in my life.
TM: Can we all commune with spirit directly? A lot of people may think you were chosen to spread these messages. But do we all have a channel to God or a higher spirit?
NDW: It was a question I asked early on in the first book. ‘Why me’ essentially? And God said Neale, “I talk to everyone all the time, the question is not to whom am I talking, the question is who’s listening?” The question is answered over and over again, the dialogue has made it clear to me everyone has access to, and is, in fact, having conversations with God, they’re simply calling it something else.
They’re calling it intuition, a psychic hit, a moment of inspiration, whatever name they think they can get away with so they won’t be marginalised in a society which does not believe. Half the people don’t believe in God, the other half who do believe, don’t believe God would talk directly to us.
Lily Tomlin who’s a wonderful American comedian put it beautifully when she said, “when I tell people I talk to God every day they say wow, you’re devout. When I tell them that God talks to me every day they say my God, you’re crazy!”
So we’re pretty clear that we’ve set up a cultural story that says we can talk to God, implore and request of God, approach God, but God is not going to respond to us directly and immediately and singularly, it’s not going to happen, unless maybe your the Pope or somebody very spiritually elevated.
TM: You use the word God in your books, what exactly do you mean by ‘God?’ There are so many belief systems and people who believe in notions of divinity but not necessarily the traditional depiction of God…
NDW: When I first used the word God, I meant it the way the largest number of people on the planet means it, to refer to a deity, the divine, the highest entity or being in the cosmos that exists anywhere. That’s how I meant it. Through the years and as a result of my 3000 pages of interactive dialogue with this aspect of life I’ve come to understand that God is neither a male nor a female, that God is not even a person in the classic sense, but is the essential essence, the prime force, the highest consciousness, the pure energy of life itself, it serves itself into life and can in fact be manipulated by life if one knows how to do it, such that outcomes can be produced and created by people collaboratively.
God has said to me, “I will take any form you wish me to take, if you want me to take the form of an old man, sitting on a throne with a long white beard, staff, white robe and sandals I’ll do that. If you want me to look like a beautiful woman from a painting of Venus De Milo, I will take whatever form that will allow you to most readily, easily accept information and acknowledge the presence of something larger than us that exists in the universe.
Scientists are now calling this the seat of consciousness, the place in the cosmos where what we call consciousness originates, emanates and creates.
TM: Would you say consciousness is inside everything that exists?
NDW: Of course. I was told directly in the dialogue,
“All things are one thing, there is only one thing, and all things are part of the one thing that is.”
So there is nothing else except the one thing that is manifesting and expressing in a multitude of forms, shapes, sizes and energetic projections, but it is all simply one thing.
TM: If people believed we were all part of this oneness do you think that would help them live their lives in a more fulfilled or better way?
NDW: Of course it would. It would change everything. It would give people tools that they really need to understand themselves, to understand others, to understand the process of life. To become clear on what we’re really doing here? What is the purpose of humanities’ existence, and the existence of any sentient beings in the cosmos of which there are countless numbers?
The single most damaging idea, the one that holds us back in our evolutionary movement forward on this planet is the idea of separation, the idea that we are separate from that which is and separate from everything else.
So the idea of separation is what creates nation states, different races, different religions, genders, cultures. These differences exist, but they do not have to produce separation any more than the fingers of your hand are separate from your hand, even though they’re different from each other. We have confused difference with division.
Your fingers are not divided from your hands, they are different one from another, but they’re all part of the same body. The secret of the universe is right in the palm of your hand. Look at your own hand, you’ll see the differences we have created, we’ve allowed them to produce divisions where it’s not necessary for them to be the state of things.
If we eliminate the idea of division then we will come together all as one. It’ll happen, of course, if we were visited by a spaceship here in 20 years or 20 months, by beings or entities from another galaxy, we would all get very quickly that we were all in the same boat and we are all one. We wouldn’t question it. No one would say you couldn’t help with this because you’re a Muslim, or you’re a Catholic, or you’re a Jew, you’re black or you’re female, Republican, Democrat, those differences would melt away in about thirty seconds.
TM: Looking at the new book, it talks about letting higher beings guide us. Could you tell us about this new conversation?
NDW: I’m told in book four that there are highly evolved beings in the universe and that these highly evolved beings are offering their assistance to humanity and for that matter to other races and cultures and other civilisations throughout the cosmos. And their mission, if I can put it in human terms, is to assist all the entities in the cosmos in the process of evolution. So the highly evolved beings, I’m told, exist at a multi-dimensional level and they shift from the level of metaphysical experience where they exist, sometimes to a quasi-physical or totally physical expression here on Earth, so some of them actually walk among us.
I was told quite clearly in the book that we’re not talking about every other person in the street now, but every hundred or so years an evolved being will materialise on the Earth to offer us an example, to model what it would be like, to offer us a physical model of what we are capable of should we decide to embrace and accept and then to demonstrate and project our own true identity.
TM: What are some of the behaviours we can adopt from these ‘higher beings’ to help us change things?
NDW: Well the book gives a list of 16 of those behaviours, I won’t go through all of them now, but looking at the first three or four, the most obvious ones. I asked the same question, “what is the difference between an awakened species, a highly evolved being, and humans living on Earth in an unawakened state?”
Firstly an awakened species sees the unity of all of life and lives into it. Humans in an unawakened state often deny it, or ignore it. Number two an awakened species always tells the truth, always. Humans in an unawakened state too often lie, to themselves as well as others.
Number three an awakened species says one thing and will do what they say, humans in an unawakened state often say one thing then do another. Number four an awakened species having seen and acknowledged what is so, will always do what works, humans in an unawakened state often do the opposite, they see clearly what is so and they do what does not work. A simple example might be smoking, or to a bit more sophisticated take the death penalty.
We kill people on this planet, we do it more in the United States than any country, we actually kill people deliberately as a means of showing people that killing people deliberately is not ok. And we fail to see the contradiction. It’s demonstrating the exact behaviour that people are being punished for, ignoring completely Einstein’s wonderful advice, “you cannot solve any problem using the energy that created it.” There are sixteen of these behaviours in the book if people picked up just three or four your life would change overnight.
TM: Most people are aware of the term ‘Awakened’ and what it means, what’s your interpretation of the word?
NDW: For them to become fully aware of their true identity. There are only four fundamental questions in life. Who am I? Where am I? I don’t mean what street I’m in or even what planet I’m on but what is this place that I find myself in, the realm of the physical. Why am I where I am? So, what is the point and the purpose of life? And lastly, what do I intend to do about that?
Most people live their entire lives and never ask themselves those four questions, much less answer them. So to be awakened is to inquire with one’s self, who am I? where am I? Why am I where I am? And what do I intend to do about that? We already are awakened, we simply don’t know it. We are pretending that we’re not. We simply need the courage to claim it and then to demonstrate it.
TM: Why do you believe this shift, this change is happening now? Why is this the moment?
NDW: Because the human race is losing patience with itself. We’re seeing we clearly cannot keep moving forward in the same direction we’ve been going. Something is going to have to change because by and large the majority of people are unhappy with their lives and very few civilisations are happy with their collective lives. So we have finally come to ask ourselves the fundamental question, what is it that I don’t fully understand here? The understanding of which would change everything.
And because the internet has given us the opportunity to engage in that inquiry on a global basis instantly, we are now doing it. This technology didn’t exist even thirty years ago. When I was a younger man in my 40s one couldn’t even dream of such a thing, so why it’s happening now, our technology has caught up with our curiosity (laughs).
TM: Do you worry about the direction your county America is going in?
NDW: What I see is a process that is taking place all around the world, not just in the United States. In Korea, in Syria, Russia, Germany, Great Britain, all over the world. It’s essentially the same process just with different characteristics. And that process is we’re starting to ask ourselves as a civilisation, who are we? What do we truly want to stand for? And what is our intention and the larger purpose of life? And we are answering that question through experimenting, by floating ideas out there that are giving us an opportunity to make an assessment as to whether that feels like our truth.
I’m not here to suggest that what Donald Trump is doing is the truth or not the truth for the majority of Americans, or for that matter the majority of the people of the world, but we are engaged in that process, that’s what’s happening.
TM: Do you think kindness is still a dominant trait in human nature?
NDW: Of course it is, but we are afraid, we are afraid to be kind to each other because we think there’s something to lose. So as soon as we release ourselves from the idea that there’s something to lose, we can step into our true nature of unconditional love and unlimited kindness.
TM: There are some strong messages in this new book. Do you think people are ready to hear this or are you prepared for a backlash? Does that bother you?
NDW: I don’t care if they’re ready or not. If I cared whether people were ready or not I wouldn’t have allowed the first book to be published, much less the books that followed. So it’s not my position or predilection to have a great deal of concern whether people are ready or not. Your George Bernard Shaw put it perfectly a number of years ago, “all great truth begins as blasphemy.”
TM: Do you hope your books are looked upon like the bible in terms of the learning people can get from them?
NDW: I don’t hope that people see it as a bible of any kind. I hope that people allow themselves to get in touch with their innermost truth as a result of what they’re finding in these dialogues, even if their innermost truth is directly contradictory to what they might have thought and gives a benefit.
So if the dialogue does nothing more than bring people in touch with their innermost truth that’s sufficient for me. It’s the purpose of any art… painting, sculpture, literature, music, all art has one ultimate purpose, to place you back in touch with your innermost truth, simple as that. And I don’t need anyone’s innermost truth to be harmonious with mine.
TM: In terms of your hopes for humanity, do you believe things can change and go in a more positive direction than they have been?
NDW: Well they are changing. We couldn’t have even imagined gay marriage fifteen or twenty years ago as a common and social phenomenon. Of course, things are changing, dramatically. The #MeToo movement is the latest example of how things are changing and things will continue to change, we see it every day in front of our eyes.
TM: Finally Neale, although you’ve imparted plenty of knowledge in this interview, is there one other piece of wisdom you can give our readers?
NDW: Your life is not about you, it has nothing to do with you. Your life is about everyone else whose life you touch and the way in which you touch it. When you are clear on that you uncover the key to the universe. Every spiritual master has understood that deeply and intuitively and every spiritual master without exception has demonstrated it.
Get yourself a copy of Neale’s fascinating new book Conversations with God, Book 4: Awaken the Species, A New and Unexpected Dialogue by Watkins Publishing HERE
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