Bestselling author Neale Donald Walsch is known to millions of people around the world because of his Conversations with God (CWG) book series, and dozens of others titles he has published over the years.

This spiritual messenger has travelled to most corners of the globe over the years, sharing his ideas about religion, spirituality, and its practical applications. He has found that wherever he goes there is a real hunger amongst people to learn new ways of living and ideas for how to achieve peace, harmony, and understanding.

At Co-Creation Global, we are delighted to have had the opportunity to chat with Neale about his particular path, and what he has witnessed while he has been focusing on shifting spiritual paradigms world-wide. We were also lucky to get some insights into his newest book.

Neale, as someone who has worked and explored around the globe, you’ve been able to see the current state of things more than most people. In your opinion, what’s the biggest problem in the world today?

NDW: The biggest problem in the world today is that most people don’t know what the biggest problem in the world is.

We see the effect of it everywhere—we couldn’t miss it—but we do not seem to be able to figure out the cause. I’ve put the effect of our biggest problem into one word: Alienation.

What issues do you think Alienation is causing?

NDW: Seldom before have we seen so many members and groups within our species so vehemently and vociferously against each other. We are living in an “Us against Them” world created by our own angry assessment that it’s the others who are creating misery for us, and even threatening the survival of our way of life.

This has caused us to attack each other verbally, and in far too many cases, even physically. We are tearing apart the fabric of human cohesion – destructive action which in itself presents the biggest danger to our survival as a species. We are doing ourselves in.

Alienation ultimately produces annihilation, and we can’t seem to stop the process because we keep trying to solve the problem at every level except the level at which the problem exists. Even with all of our technological marvels, all of our genius, all of our tenacity as a species, we seem strikingly unable to see what’s causing our alienation, and thus find ourselves sadly and tragically unable to reverse it. So far. But the next chapter has yet to be written.

Perhaps your next book will help us to understand things better, so we can write OUR next chapter!

The Essential Path, your latest offering, was published in June 2019 by Essentials, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press. Could you please share a bit about it and what it addresses?

NDW: The book addresses and reveals, in clear and unambiguous terms, the cause of humanity’s alienation. It then lays out the path that it is essential for us to take if we wish our species to stop its self-destruction, and if we wish our own individual lives to take on real meaning—a purpose larger than The One With The Most Toys Wins. Larger, even, than simple survival.

Taking the messages of Conversations with God to the next level—the level of functionality—the text announces that we are One Decision Away from the healing of humanity and the changing of our lives and our world.

It describes that decision as the most daring choice any of us could ever make, offers up tools to help us make it, then invites us to step into the total embracing of this choice individually and collectively.

This is a Call-to-Action book that offers an amazingly simple, yet powerful, antidote to the species-decaying infection of humanity’s spreading Alienation.

PART 2: Neale talks about the idea of power and reality. We look at how we can all see our realities more clearly, and better understand what it is that we can and can’t control in our lives.

Neale, what do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions people have around their own power?

NDW: As I observe it, there is a huge misconception about a human being’s power.  First, a great many people—particularly people in what has been labeled the New Thought Community—have an idea that they create their own reality…meaning they manifest the exterior circumstances and conditions in their life.

The truth is that the idea that you create your own reality is a fiction. You choose your own reality, but you do not create it. This is because (if my understanding of Conversations with God is correct), everything that ever was, is now, and ever will be, “is” now. All of Existence is Present Always in the Space/Time Continuum. 

What we are doing is choosing from the already existing outcomes and events, even as we might do in a computer chess game, in which every move has already been made and the computer is merely waiting for you to choose which of the pre-programmed moves you choose.

There is much more to say on this subject, obviously, but for the purposes of this interview I need to keep my answer short. 

Do you think our “power” is affected by other people, and their realities?

NDW: According to my understanding, it is also true that we do not “choose” our own reality unilaterally. That is, the conditions, situations, events, and circumstances of our lives are being collectively chosen by the lot of us. Everything occurring is a circumstance or condition arising out of a collaboration.

Believing that you singularly chose what is now going on in your life, or what has happened in your past, has done more to induce self-recrimination, self-anger, self-frustration, and what I call “New Age Guilt,” than any other single idea I have come across in what has been called New Thought Spirituality. 

In my understanding, what is true is that you are personally and individually choosing your response to what is happening right now in your life. You are the sole author of your reaction to the conditions, situations, events, and circumstances in your life. But you did not unilaterally produce those conditions, situations, events, and circumstances. 

Conversations with God has made it clear to me that we live in an incredibly complex and sophisticated matrix, within which everything that is decided, chosen, undertaken and occurring is part of a collaborative process of collective choice, individually experienced, but not individually generated.

Based on this understanding, how do you suggest people change their perception of reality and their particular experiences? 

NDW: It would be most beneficial if we were taught that our “exterior” experience is being chosen collectively by the lot of us. Nothing—not a single thing in your life—has been, or can be, produced by you and you alone. 

Everything that you’re experiencing has been collaboratively chosen with another. In most cases, with several others. In a few cases, with many others. You would be hard-pressed to come up with a single event, experience, circumstance, or situation in your life in which no other person has played a role. 

If you’d like to wrap your head around this further, or explain it to others, one example of how this occurs is described in the children’s book,The Little Soul and the Sun. The book demonstrates this effect in terms that everyone can relate to, and that children can understand. 

PART 3: Neale provides tips for how to live more purposefully and how to make effective changes in life.

Neale, you’ve often spoken and written about the idea of living with purpose. For those who are struggling to find their own purposeful path at the moment, what suggestions can you offer? 

NDW: My awareness tells me that the first step is understanding that Life Purpose is not something we “find,” it is something we decide before we “find” it. That is, the deciding of it produces it in our experience. Conversations with God tells us that life is not a Process of Discovery, it is a Process of Creation. 

The second step is understanding that our Purpose has very little to do with what we are “doing,” and very much to do with what we are “being” while we are doing whatever we are doing. 

It is “beingness” that we are after, not “doingness.” Are we being kind? Are we being gentle? Are we being compassionate? Are we being generous? Are we being creative and inspiring? Are we being healing? Are we being thoughtful, sensitive, caring, aware, understanding, consoling, accepting, forgiving, etc.? Most of all, are we being loving? 

So many people—perhaps most people—are focused mainly on their career or their primary life activity. This is understandable, because humanity as a species has demanded that each of us find a way to “make a living,” and told us that only then do we have a right to survive. But I’ve learned from my Conversations with God to make a life, rather than a living. 

I suggest that people focus on the energy they are projecting into life and onto others as they move through their day-to-day experience. It is from the expression of this energetic state that their Right and Perfect Career or Life Activity will become apparent to them, and will most likely arise. And they won’t have to even think about it. They’ll just slip into it, as an easy, fluid, and even obvious expression of Who They Are. 

I wrote about this in a booklet titled Bringers of the Light, which many people have found very useful in helping them create and produce a Path to Purpose in their life. 

Many people say they’re too busy to make real change happen in their life. Yet, making changes can lead to having the life they really want. 

What would you say are the top three changes people could make in 2019 to radically change their lives for the better? 

NDW: This might be the most important question I’ve ever been asked. And believe it or not, I have been asked it very few times! 

The three most important changes that people could make to radically change their lives for the better are: 

1. Change their idea of Who They Are.

2. Change their notion about What They Are. (The two are not the same.)

3. Change their reason for living. 

Under #1, I invite people to embrace as their reality the idea that they are not simply physical beings, but that they are spiritual beings having a physical experience. 

In #2, I invite people to notice that the spiritual being they are is not in any way separated from anything—least of all, God. All Things Are One Thing, there is only One Thing, and all things are part of the One Thing There Is. 

In #3, I invite people to decide that their reason for living has nothing to do with their Body or their Mind (which are only tools), and has only to do with the agenda of their Soul, which is the same for everyone and for every sentient being in the cosmos. 

Our agenda is to announce and declare, to demonstrate and to express, to be and to experience Who We Truly Are, by recreating Ourselves anew, in every golden moment of Now, in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are. 

And Who We Truly Are, we are told in the Conversations with God dialogue, is an Individuation of Divinity, a Singularisation of The Singularity, a Specific and Particular Expression of The Pure and Essential Essence that is The Source of All Of Life. 

In the language of some, this Pure and Essential Essence is called God. 

People are often looking for shortcuts in life, particularly when it comes to spirituality and personal change. Is there a faster way to change? 

NDW: Life brings us an opportunity to complete this agenda to be Who We Truly Are in every moment. The conditions, circumstances, and events of each moment offer us a perfect context within which to do this, at the level of spiritual awareness and consciousness within which we then reside, and the abilities we choose to call forth. 

If there is a “faster” way to complete the soul’s agenda, it would be to see every moment in life as offering us an invitation to undertake this mission. I have been thinking of writing an exposition on all of this, entitled: Every Moment a Mission. 

We’d love to read that! 

One final question: what would you say to people who think that after they’ve made a few changes (to their thinking, their perception, their path to spirituality), that they’re done? 

NDW: In my understanding, completion of the Soul’s Agenda is not a One Time Event. It is not like getting your tonsils out. It is not a “once-it’s-done, it’s-done” experience. 

Completion of the Soul’s Agenda is an ongoing process, like breathing. We don’t take one breath and call ourselves “complete” with the experience. Each inhalation and exhalation is a Complete Expression of “breathing,” but we continue that expression to its completion over and over again because we want the experience to go on and on and on. 

The same is true of our experience of Divinity. We want it to go on and on and on, and so we continue the expression to its completion over and over again, from one moment to the next. 

This wraps up the interview series with spiritual messenger Neale Donald Walsch.