May 8, 2025 • 18 mins
George Noory and author Neale Donald Walsch explore his experiences receiving messages from a higher power he believes is God, how he was comforted during struggles in his life including a divorce and serious injuries from a devastating car accident, and how people misconceive God as a judgmental, punishing being instead of an entity of pure love.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back, George, nor with you Neil Donald Walsh
with us. Author of a number of books in the
Conversations with God dialogue series, which have been read by
millions across the planet and has been translated into thirty
seven languages. Neil is also one of the major authors
in the New Spirituality movement. Several of his books include
God Talking, of course the Conversation with God series. Neil,
(00:28):
welcome back, my friend. Hi you Ben.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
You know I've been doing great, George. Thank you very
much for asking and I hope it's things that have
gone well with you as well.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
So far, so good. How long ago did this episode
with Conversations with God occur for you?
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Interestingly enough, this week watched the thirtieth anniversary The book
was published on May fifth, nineteen ninety five, so this
happens to be by coincidence, the thirtieth anniversary of the
publication of Conversations with God.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
That's amazing. And how down and out were you at
that time?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Deal, oh man, George, completely down and out. I was
out of work, I had lost my relationship, you know,
I had the worst ten days of my life. My
relationship with my beloved wife ended. It was not acrimonious.
We both agreed it just wasn't working. But I didn't
want to end a relationship. But it ended. So I
(01:23):
moved out, got a little apartment in someplace. Five days later, George,
I lost my job the corporation I worked for. Yeah,
the corporation I worked for had to downsize and I
was the last person hired, last person in, the first
person out. So I lost my relationship and lost my
job in the same five day period. But wait, the
(01:43):
universe wasn't done with me yet. As I'm driving to
an interview for another job, I'm certain I'm going to
get it, because I've got all the qualifications and a
great letter of recommendation, even from the corporation that just
let me go. No, I didn't get to the interview.
An older gentleman turned left into my car as I'm
driving down the road. We had an incredible, incredible smash up.
(02:05):
He totaled my car. I wound up with a broken neck,
rushed to the hospital. Rushed to the hospital, and there
I'm lying there and the doctor looks at me and
he says so you should be dead by now. You
didn't get a hairline fracture. Mister Walsh, You've got a
three quarter inch of vulsion fracture of the seventh cervical
vertebrae posteriorly. I remember his words to this day. He said,
(02:30):
most people with that kind of a fracture die instantly,
or at the very least suffer irreparable damage to their
body and paralysis. You have suffered neither. So what do
you intend to do with the rest of your life?
This is the doctor telling me this in the emergency room,
so I'm thinking, Wow, unbelievable. I managed to get through
(02:51):
that incredible accident. The car was a total wreck, of course,
it was total so you know, I got You know,
they put me in what they call a Philadelphia collar,
plastic device that holds your head up, and the doctor says,
you're not to take this off for any reason for
the next year and a half because it's the only
thing that's holding your head up right now. Oh my god,
(03:12):
you know, George, no one would hire me. I was
going to interview after interview after interview, and I was
I had all the qualifications. Finally, in my seventh interview,
The guy looked at me and said, mister wassh, I
gotta be honest with you. We'd hire you in a
minute under normal circumstances, but you're wearing a therapeutic device
around your neck. That means that you have some kind
of a handicap. Off something's going on with you, and
(03:33):
you know, one wrong move on the job. We're paying
your hospital bills, your medical bills for the next ten years.
You come back to us when you're all healed and
a hole, and we hire you in thirty seconds. So Noah,
I couldn't get a job anywhere. I lost my opportunity
to live in that one room apartment that I have
(03:55):
because I couldn't pay the rent. I ran out of
my savings after a few months, and you know, I
couldn't pay the rent there, so the guy evicted me.
I'm now living on the sidewalk, George. I'm living on
the street, going from person to person with my hand
out asking for a few coins so that I could
eat that day. And I lived that way, not for
(04:16):
a couple of bad weeks or a rough month or two,
but for one solid year of my life. That's when
I finally, when I finally got a part time job somewhere.
That was a year after, you know, and I told
the guy, look, I'm taking this collar off in about
three or four months. There's nothing going on here. I'm fine.
So I got a job and I managed to make
(04:39):
enough money. I wasn't making a lot, but at least
I had an income again, and I could afford a
little apartment, just a one room flat. And that's when
I woke up at four twenty three in the morning
one day and I thought to myself, what is it
I don't understand here about life? What have I done
to deserve a life of such continuing struggle? And was
it to make life work? Somebody tell me the rules?
(05:03):
So I sat down. I know this is going to
sound silly, but I sat down. There was a happened
to be a yellow legal pat on the coffee table.
I guess I was making the lists of things I
wanted to do whatever, and I started writing an angry
letter to God. I know it sounds silly, but I just,
you know, I just I don't know what I was thinking.
I was just, I guess, a form of self therapy.
But I'm writing this letter, Dear God, what does it
(05:25):
take to make life work and all the questions I
just asked here, and you know, of course I didn't
expect to get any kind of reply, But George, I
began hearing words in my mind. In my mind, I.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Began at that moment, yeah, yeah, yes.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
As I was continuing to write the letter, I re yeah,
I heard I heard a voice in my head saying, Neil,
do you really want answers to all of these questions?
Or are you just venting? And I'm thinking, to myself,
is what's going on? What is? But I laughed. I thought, okay,
(06:06):
I'm talking to myself here, But I said I am venting.
But if you've got answers, said sure as hell, I'd
like to know what they are. And then this voice
in my mind said, you are sure as hell, Neil,
about a lot of things, but wouldn't you rather be
sure as heaven? And I'm thinking, okay, what's that supposed
to me? And the voice said, take this down. I'm
(06:27):
going to answer your questions. So you know what, I
wrote down what I was hearing in my mind. After
this went on not for a minute or two, but
for the next six hours. And fortunately it was a
Saturday and I wasn't working, So I was going through
the morning time on my weekend day off, writing what
(06:49):
I was hearing in my mind and asking other questions.
And before I knew it, believe it or not, I
was involved in an on paper dialogue with this voice
that I ultimately identified as God because of the kind
of answers that I was being given.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Were you particularly spiritual before that, Neil.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
No, No, you know, I had a belief in God.
I'm not going to say that I was an atheist.
I wasn't an atheist or an agnostic. I had a
belief that there was a higher power, which is, by
the way true for around eighty percent. Surveys worldwide show
that about eighty percent of the people believe in some
form of higher power. And I guess I would say
(07:31):
that that I had a belief in a higher power.
But I wasn't spiritual. I was paying no attention whatsoever
to what I now call my soul and to the
spiritual aspect of my life. I didn't go to church,
I didn't go to synagogue, I didn't go to a mosque.
I had no spiritual practice whatsoever. I was just living
my life.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
What possessed you to decide to put this in a
book form and then get it out.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
I was told I was having this this conversation. I
was writing answers, asking questions, writing answers. The answers were
fascinating me. But at one point the voice in my
mind said, you will make of this one day a
book and it will be accessed by many people. And
I thought to myself, yeah, right, of course, there's no
(08:19):
publisher in the country that's going to publish a book
because a guy claims to be talking to God and
it's not going to happen. But then I thought, wait
a minute, Wait a minute, this is a perfect way
to find out whether there's any value in what I'm
receiving with, there's any truth to what's going on here.
I'm going to send this to a publisher and see
what happens. So I made xerox copies of my handwritten
(08:42):
notes there, pages and pages and pages, and I have
made xerox copies, three copies and sent them off to
three different publishers whose books I found in a local
bookstore in the self help section. I thought, well, we'll
see what happens. By golly. Two weeks later, a call
from one of those publishers. It was not a major
(09:03):
publishing company, was a small independent publishing company. But they
called me and they said, hey, we like what we've
gotten here. We like what you've sent us. We're going
to put this out. I said, you're kidding me. No, no,
they said, no, it's a great work of fiction. People
are going to love it about a guy who has
an argument with God. I said, wait a minute, this
is not a work of fiction. You can't publish it.
(09:26):
And he said, are you trying to tell me you
think this actually happened. We thought you just wrote this
up as a fictional story about a guy who argues
with God. No, I said, excuse me, this is my
actual experience. The publisher said, well, we can publish it
as a nonfiction book, but it's not going to reach
five hundred people because nobody's going to run out and
(09:49):
buy a book because some guy up in Oregon claims
to be talking to God. It's not going to happen.
But we'll put it out because you know the material
that is interesting. Well, you know, we'll give it a
try and see what happens. And they put the book
out and he was right. It didn't reach five hundred people.
It reached five million, exactly, not bragging, just saying, were
(10:14):
you in shock? Oh? Was I ever? You know, I
can remember the day. You know. I wasn't tracking by
the way I should. I got to tell you this
because I sent it to a publisher. I thought, well,
you know what, what will be? It will be. We'll
see what happens. You know. I was shocked that the
book was even published, but I thought, well, you know,
let it go at that. So I went on with
(10:36):
my life. I wasn't calling the publisher every week to
track the sales. I wasn't. I wasn't, you know, going
to look at that. I didn't. I didn't want to
get caught up in that week to week you know activity,
So I didn't know. Then one day my doorbell rang
and there was a florist delivering a huge bouquet of
(10:57):
flowers with a small package. And I opened the package.
I said, thank you very much. I thought, I wonder
who's sending me flowers? I was living, you know, I
wasn't you know. It wasn't my birthday, I wasn't a holiday.
Why would I get flowers? And I opened a small
package and there was a note inside it was from
my publisher, and the package was a plaque, a wooden
(11:21):
plaque with a brass plate attached to the plaque, and
on the brass plate George was an engraving. It said,
commemorating one million sales conversations with God.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
How beautiful?
Speaker 3 (11:37):
I thought, are you what? I had no concept. No,
I wasn't even I couldn't believe it. You could have
knocked me over with a feather. I had no concept
at all what was going on. And then a few
months after that, this small publishing house sold the book
(11:57):
to a major publishing house, a rather large company, international
publisher the Putnam people. And the Putnam people bought the
book from this small East Coast publisher, translated it into
thirty seven languages, and began distributing it globally. Again, not bragging,
(12:19):
just saying, that's what happened, and that led you to
write the other ones as part of the series. Well,
because George, I got a call from that publishing company
in New York. They said, you know, we're getting a
tremendous amount of interest in this work that you put out.
(12:40):
Do you have any more like this at home? I said, well,
you know, I'm still having the experience. The experience is
going on. It hasn't stopped. They said, send us whatever
you've got. There's a real hunger out there for what
you're writing. I said, okay, fair enough, So I sent
them more material and more material, and ultimately, as the
(13:03):
years went by, nine books over three thousand pages of
dialogue had been produced. Good for you.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
What would you say is the biggest message that you've
got from that higher power?
Speaker 3 (13:19):
I can give it to you in five words, God
said to me. God said to me, you've got me
all wrong. What did he mean by it all wrong?
What she meant was, we have ideas about God that
are totally inaccurate. You know, the simplest, the most simplistic idea,
(13:45):
God is a guy in the sky. God is obviously male,
couldn't couldn't have been female, or have any particular characteristic
other than that, you know, and so. But beyond such
a simplistic a piece of information, what we think about
God is that we think that God, or at least
(14:05):
those people who believe in God, most of those people
who believe in God, believe in a God who is judgmental, condemning,
and punishing. Now that's not true of everybody who believes
in God, but it is true of the vast majority
of God believers. They believe in a higher power that judges, condemns,
and punishes us if we don't follow the rules. What rules, Well,
(14:28):
that depends on what faith tradition you have embraced in
your life. If you're Catholic or Christian, or Jewish or Muslim,
or if you don't belong to any religion but you're
a Buddhist, or maybe you know who knows what, but
you know which, you got to follow the rules because
if you don't follow the rules, you're going to Hell.
And I was taught this as a child. I grew
(14:49):
up in a Catholic family, and this is I don't
want to be disparaging to Catholics, but I grew up
believing in a God who would, in fact send me
to everlasting damnation if I did so much as miss
Mass one Sunday in my life without a good excuse.
That's the God I grew up with. So what God said,
(15:10):
what God meant when she said you got me all wrong?
He was telling us, look, you're trying to love. You
want to love this higher power, and you want to
fear the higher power. At the same time, You're mixing
love and fear in the same package, and it's not
going to work. You've got me all wrong.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
I've always questioned part of the Bible, Neil, where they
portray God as being so violent.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Yeah, an eye for an eye and a tooth for
a tooth, you bet. Yeah. God has been portrayed as violent,
and not only in the Bible, but in many other
faith traditions as well. As I mentioned a moment ago,
we have been told about a higher power that is angry, violent, retributive, condemning,
(15:59):
and under shape. And what God said to me was, Neil,
I'm none of that, none of that. And so I've
come to a new definition of God, the two word definition.
You know, people have theologists for centuries have been trying
to figure out a way to define God in a
(16:19):
way that people could grasp and could understand. I was
given a two word definition of God. I said, okay, God,
give me your definition of yourself. And he said to
words pure love, the essence or the energy that you
would call pure love. I said, wow. But everyone says that,
(16:41):
you know, God has loved All religions teach that God
is loved. And the answer I got was that's true.
Religions teach that God is loved, but not that God
is pure love. Okay, I said, what's the difference. The
difference is the pure love needs requires and demands nothing
(17:04):
in return. We can't even love the person. We can't
even love the person on the pillow next to us
that way, much less imagine a God who loves us
that way.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
How much did you learn? How much did you change
from this episode?
Speaker 3 (17:25):
I changed dramatically, George. I don't like to make a great,
big story out of it, but of course changed my
whole life. I changed the reason that I do what
I do, the choices that I make. You know, my
whole purpose in life became entirely different from what it
was prior to this experience. And what did I learn?
(17:48):
I learned an enormous amount about what life is, about
who we really are, what happens to us after we
do the thing that we call die. And I learned
about the purpose of life, at least as I was
given to understand it. And I learned how to become
(18:08):
a real person and not this manufactured personality that I
had created in order to get through life.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
In order to survive, listen to more Coast to Coast
AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and go to
Coast to coastam dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back, George, nor with you Neil Donald Walsh
with us. Author of a number of books in the
Conversations with God dialogue series, which have been read by
millions across the planet and has been translated into thirty
seven languages. Neil is also one of the major authors
in the New Spirituality movement. Several of his books include
God Talking, of course the Conversation with God series. Neil,
(00:28):
welcome back, my friend. Hi you Ben.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
You know I've been doing great, George. Thank you very
much for asking and I hope it's things that have
gone well with you as well.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
So far, so good. How long ago did this episode
with Conversations with God occur for you?
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Interestingly enough, this week watched the thirtieth anniversary The book
was published on May fifth, nineteen ninety five, so this
happens to be by coincidence, the thirtieth anniversary of the
publication of Conversations with God.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
That's amazing. And how down and out were you at
that time?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Deal, oh man, George, completely down and out. I was
out of work, I had lost my relationship, you know,
I had the worst ten days of my life. My
relationship with my beloved wife ended. It was not acrimonious.
We both agreed it just wasn't working. But I didn't
want to end a relationship. But it ended. So I
(01:23):
moved out, got a little apartment in someplace. Five days later, George,
I lost my job the corporation I worked for. Yeah,
the corporation I worked for had to downsize and I
was the last person hired, last person in, the first
person out. So I lost my relationship and lost my
job in the same five day period. But wait, the
(01:43):
universe wasn't done with me yet. As I'm driving to
an interview for another job, I'm certain I'm going to
get it, because I've got all the qualifications and a
great letter of recommendation, even from the corporation that just
let me go. No, I didn't get to the interview.
An older gentleman turned left into my car as I'm
driving down the road. We had an incredible, incredible smash up.
(02:05):
He totaled my car. I wound up with a broken neck,
rushed to the hospital. Rushed to the hospital, and there
I'm lying there and the doctor looks at me and
he says so you should be dead by now. You
didn't get a hairline fracture. Mister Walsh, You've got a
three quarter inch of vulsion fracture of the seventh cervical
vertebrae posteriorly. I remember his words to this day. He said,
(02:30):
most people with that kind of a fracture die instantly,
or at the very least suffer irreparable damage to their
body and paralysis. You have suffered neither. So what do
you intend to do with the rest of your life?
This is the doctor telling me this in the emergency room,
so I'm thinking, Wow, unbelievable. I managed to get through
(02:51):
that incredible accident. The car was a total wreck, of course,
it was total so you know, I got You know,
they put me in what they call a Philadelphia collar,
plastic device that holds your head up, and the doctor says,
you're not to take this off for any reason for
the next year and a half because it's the only
thing that's holding your head up right now. Oh my god,
(03:12):
you know, George, no one would hire me. I was
going to interview after interview after interview, and I was
I had all the qualifications. Finally, in my seventh interview,
The guy looked at me and said, mister wassh, I
gotta be honest with you. We'd hire you in a
minute under normal circumstances, but you're wearing a therapeutic device
around your neck. That means that you have some kind
of a handicap. Off something's going on with you, and
(03:33):
you know, one wrong move on the job. We're paying
your hospital bills, your medical bills for the next ten years.
You come back to us when you're all healed and
a hole, and we hire you in thirty seconds. So Noah,
I couldn't get a job anywhere. I lost my opportunity
to live in that one room apartment that I have
(03:55):
because I couldn't pay the rent. I ran out of
my savings after a few months, and you know, I
couldn't pay the rent there, so the guy evicted me.
I'm now living on the sidewalk, George. I'm living on
the street, going from person to person with my hand
out asking for a few coins so that I could
eat that day. And I lived that way, not for
(04:16):
a couple of bad weeks or a rough month or two,
but for one solid year of my life. That's when
I finally, when I finally got a part time job somewhere.
That was a year after, you know, and I told
the guy, look, I'm taking this collar off in about
three or four months. There's nothing going on here. I'm fine.
So I got a job and I managed to make
(04:39):
enough money. I wasn't making a lot, but at least
I had an income again, and I could afford a
little apartment, just a one room flat. And that's when
I woke up at four twenty three in the morning
one day and I thought to myself, what is it
I don't understand here about life? What have I done
to deserve a life of such continuing struggle? And was
it to make life work? Somebody tell me the rules?
(05:03):
So I sat down. I know this is going to
sound silly, but I sat down. There was a happened
to be a yellow legal pat on the coffee table.
I guess I was making the lists of things I
wanted to do whatever, and I started writing an angry
letter to God. I know it sounds silly, but I just,
you know, I just I don't know what I was thinking.
I was just, I guess, a form of self therapy.
But I'm writing this letter, Dear God, what does it
(05:25):
take to make life work and all the questions I
just asked here, and you know, of course I didn't
expect to get any kind of reply, But George, I
began hearing words in my mind. In my mind, I.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Began at that moment, yeah, yeah, yes.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
As I was continuing to write the letter, I re yeah,
I heard I heard a voice in my head saying, Neil,
do you really want answers to all of these questions?
Or are you just venting? And I'm thinking, to myself,
is what's going on? What is? But I laughed. I thought, okay,
(06:06):
I'm talking to myself here, But I said I am venting.
But if you've got answers, said sure as hell, I'd
like to know what they are. And then this voice
in my mind said, you are sure as hell, Neil,
about a lot of things, but wouldn't you rather be
sure as heaven? And I'm thinking, okay, what's that supposed
to me? And the voice said, take this down. I'm
(06:27):
going to answer your questions. So you know what, I
wrote down what I was hearing in my mind. After
this went on not for a minute or two, but
for the next six hours. And fortunately it was a
Saturday and I wasn't working, So I was going through
the morning time on my weekend day off, writing what
(06:49):
I was hearing in my mind and asking other questions.
And before I knew it, believe it or not, I
was involved in an on paper dialogue with this voice
that I ultimately identified as God because of the kind
of answers that I was being given.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Were you particularly spiritual before that, Neil.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
No, No, you know, I had a belief in God.
I'm not going to say that I was an atheist.
I wasn't an atheist or an agnostic. I had a
belief that there was a higher power, which is, by
the way true for around eighty percent. Surveys worldwide show
that about eighty percent of the people believe in some
form of higher power. And I guess I would say
(07:31):
that that I had a belief in a higher power.
But I wasn't spiritual. I was paying no attention whatsoever
to what I now call my soul and to the
spiritual aspect of my life. I didn't go to church,
I didn't go to synagogue, I didn't go to a mosque.
I had no spiritual practice whatsoever. I was just living
my life.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
What possessed you to decide to put this in a
book form and then get it out.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
I was told I was having this this conversation. I
was writing answers, asking questions, writing answers. The answers were
fascinating me. But at one point the voice in my
mind said, you will make of this one day a
book and it will be accessed by many people. And
I thought to myself, yeah, right, of course, there's no
(08:19):
publisher in the country that's going to publish a book
because a guy claims to be talking to God and
it's not going to happen. But then I thought, wait
a minute, Wait a minute, this is a perfect way
to find out whether there's any value in what I'm
receiving with, there's any truth to what's going on here.
I'm going to send this to a publisher and see
what happens. So I made xerox copies of my handwritten
(08:42):
notes there, pages and pages and pages, and I have
made xerox copies, three copies and sent them off to
three different publishers whose books I found in a local
bookstore in the self help section. I thought, well, we'll
see what happens. By golly. Two weeks later, a call
from one of those publishers. It was not a major
(09:03):
publishing company, was a small independent publishing company. But they
called me and they said, hey, we like what we've
gotten here. We like what you've sent us. We're going
to put this out. I said, you're kidding me. No, no,
they said, no, it's a great work of fiction. People
are going to love it about a guy who has
an argument with God. I said, wait a minute, this
is not a work of fiction. You can't publish it.
(09:26):
And he said, are you trying to tell me you
think this actually happened. We thought you just wrote this
up as a fictional story about a guy who argues
with God. No, I said, excuse me, this is my
actual experience. The publisher said, well, we can publish it
as a nonfiction book, but it's not going to reach
five hundred people because nobody's going to run out and
(09:49):
buy a book because some guy up in Oregon claims
to be talking to God. It's not going to happen.
But we'll put it out because you know the material
that is interesting. Well, you know, we'll give it a
try and see what happens. And they put the book
out and he was right. It didn't reach five hundred people.
It reached five million, exactly, not bragging, just saying, were
(10:14):
you in shock? Oh? Was I ever? You know, I
can remember the day. You know. I wasn't tracking by
the way I should. I got to tell you this
because I sent it to a publisher. I thought, well,
you know what, what will be? It will be. We'll
see what happens. You know. I was shocked that the
book was even published, but I thought, well, you know,
let it go at that. So I went on with
(10:36):
my life. I wasn't calling the publisher every week to
track the sales. I wasn't. I wasn't, you know, going
to look at that. I didn't. I didn't want to
get caught up in that week to week you know activity,
So I didn't know. Then one day my doorbell rang
and there was a florist delivering a huge bouquet of
(10:57):
flowers with a small package. And I opened the package.
I said, thank you very much. I thought, I wonder
who's sending me flowers? I was living, you know, I
wasn't you know. It wasn't my birthday, I wasn't a holiday.
Why would I get flowers? And I opened a small
package and there was a note inside it was from
my publisher, and the package was a plaque, a wooden
(11:21):
plaque with a brass plate attached to the plaque, and
on the brass plate George was an engraving. It said,
commemorating one million sales conversations with God.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
How beautiful?
Speaker 3 (11:37):
I thought, are you what? I had no concept. No,
I wasn't even I couldn't believe it. You could have
knocked me over with a feather. I had no concept
at all what was going on. And then a few
months after that, this small publishing house sold the book
(11:57):
to a major publishing house, a rather large company, international
publisher the Putnam people. And the Putnam people bought the
book from this small East Coast publisher, translated it into
thirty seven languages, and began distributing it globally. Again, not bragging,
(12:19):
just saying, that's what happened, and that led you to
write the other ones as part of the series. Well,
because George, I got a call from that publishing company
in New York. They said, you know, we're getting a
tremendous amount of interest in this work that you put out.
(12:40):
Do you have any more like this at home? I said, well,
you know, I'm still having the experience. The experience is
going on. It hasn't stopped. They said, send us whatever
you've got. There's a real hunger out there for what
you're writing. I said, okay, fair enough, So I sent
them more material and more material, and ultimately, as the
(13:03):
years went by, nine books over three thousand pages of
dialogue had been produced. Good for you.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
What would you say is the biggest message that you've
got from that higher power?
Speaker 3 (13:19):
I can give it to you in five words, God
said to me. God said to me, you've got me
all wrong. What did he mean by it all wrong?
What she meant was, we have ideas about God that
are totally inaccurate. You know, the simplest, the most simplistic idea,
(13:45):
God is a guy in the sky. God is obviously male,
couldn't couldn't have been female, or have any particular characteristic
other than that, you know, and so. But beyond such
a simplistic a piece of information, what we think about
God is that we think that God, or at least
(14:05):
those people who believe in God, most of those people
who believe in God, believe in a God who is judgmental, condemning,
and punishing. Now that's not true of everybody who believes
in God, but it is true of the vast majority
of God believers. They believe in a higher power that judges, condemns,
and punishes us if we don't follow the rules. What rules, Well,
(14:28):
that depends on what faith tradition you have embraced in
your life. If you're Catholic or Christian, or Jewish or Muslim,
or if you don't belong to any religion but you're
a Buddhist, or maybe you know who knows what, but
you know which, you got to follow the rules because
if you don't follow the rules, you're going to Hell.
And I was taught this as a child. I grew
(14:49):
up in a Catholic family, and this is I don't
want to be disparaging to Catholics, but I grew up
believing in a God who would, in fact send me
to everlasting damnation if I did so much as miss
Mass one Sunday in my life without a good excuse.
That's the God I grew up with. So what God said,
(15:10):
what God meant when she said you got me all wrong?
He was telling us, look, you're trying to love. You
want to love this higher power, and you want to
fear the higher power. At the same time, You're mixing
love and fear in the same package, and it's not
going to work. You've got me all wrong.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
I've always questioned part of the Bible, Neil, where they
portray God as being so violent.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Yeah, an eye for an eye and a tooth for
a tooth, you bet. Yeah. God has been portrayed as violent,
and not only in the Bible, but in many other
faith traditions as well. As I mentioned a moment ago,
we have been told about a higher power that is angry, violent, retributive, condemning,
(15:59):
and under shape. And what God said to me was, Neil,
I'm none of that, none of that. And so I've
come to a new definition of God, the two word definition.
You know, people have theologists for centuries have been trying
to figure out a way to define God in a
(16:19):
way that people could grasp and could understand. I was
given a two word definition of God. I said, okay, God,
give me your definition of yourself. And he said to
words pure love, the essence or the energy that you
would call pure love. I said, wow. But everyone says that,
(16:41):
you know, God has loved All religions teach that God
is loved. And the answer I got was that's true.
Religions teach that God is loved, but not that God
is pure love. Okay, I said, what's the difference. The
difference is the pure love needs requires and demands nothing
(17:04):
in return. We can't even love the person. We can't
even love the person on the pillow next to us
that way, much less imagine a God who loves us
that way.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
How much did you learn? How much did you change
from this episode?
Speaker 3 (17:25):
I changed dramatically, George. I don't like to make a great,
big story out of it, but of course changed my
whole life. I changed the reason that I do what
I do, the choices that I make. You know, my
whole purpose in life became entirely different from what it
was prior to this experience. And what did I learn?
(17:48):
I learned an enormous amount about what life is, about
who we really are, what happens to us after we
do the thing that we call die. And I learned
about the purpose of life, at least as I was
given to understand it. And I learned how to become
(18:08):
a real person and not this manufactured personality that I
had created in order to get through life.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
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