Conversations With God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Vol. 1

by Neale Donald Walsch

Words may help you understand something. Experience allows you to know. Yet there are some things you cannot experience. So I have given you other tools of knowing. And these are called feelings. And so too, thoughts.

The Highest Thought is always that thought which contains joy. The Clearest Words are those words which contain truth. The Grandest Feeling is that feeling which you call love. Joy, truth, love. These three are interchangeable, and one always leads to the other. It matters not in which order they are placed.

The correct prayer is therefore never a prayer of supplication, but a prayer of gratitude. When you thank God in advance for that which you choose to experience in your reality, you, in effect, acknowledge that it is there… in effect. Thankfulness is thus the most powerful statement to God; an affirmation that even before you ask, I have answered. Therefore never supplicate. Appreciate.

Gratitude cannot be used as a tool with which to manipulate God; a device with which to fool the universe. You cannot lie to yourself. Your mind knows the truth of your thoughts. If you are saying “Thank you, God, for such and such,” all the while being very clear that it isn’t there in your present reality, you can’t expect God to be less clear than you, and so produce it for you. God knows what you know, and what you know is what appears as your reality.

All human actions are motivated at their deepest level by one of two emotions—fear or love.

You have projected the role of “parent” onto God, and have thus come up with a God Who judges and rewards or punishes, based on how good He feels about what you’ve been up to. But this is a simplistic view of God, based on your mythology. It has nothing to do with Who I Am.

Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms. Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals.

Yet there are no victims in the world, and no villains. And neither are you a victim of the choices of others. At some level you have all created that which you say you detest—and, having created it, you have chosen it.

The First Law is that you can be, do, and have whatever you can imagine. The Second Law is that you attract what you fear.

Correction. Most of the New Testament writers never met or saw Jesus in their lives. They lived many years after Jesus left the Earth. They wouldn’t have known Jesus of Nazareth if they walked into him on the street.

The Bible writers were great believers and great historians. They took the stories which had been passed down to them and to their friends by others—elders—from elder to elder, until finally a written record was made. And not everything of the Bible authors was included in the final document. Already “churches” had sprung up around the teachings of Jesus—and, as happens whenever and wherever people gather in groups around a powerful idea, there were certain individuals within these churches, or enclaves, who determined what parts of the Jesus Story were going to be told—and how. This process of selecting and editing continued throughout the gathering, writing, and publishing of the gospels, and the Bible. Even several centuries after the original scriptures were committed to writing, a High Council of the Church determined yet one more time which doctrines and truths were to be included in the then-official Bible—and which would be “unhealthy” or “premature” to reveal to the masses. And there have been other holy scriptures as well—each placed in writing in moments of inspiration by otherwise ordinary men, none of whom were any more crazy than you.