The Complete Conversations with God

by Neale Donald Walsch

Did you hear that? Faith in God has been restored. That’s been the purpose and the aim of all of this. Not to create a belief system that confounds religion, and rejects it. Not to put forth ideas that contradict religion, and replace it. But to reopen the discussion about God in a way that refreshes and reinvigorates our relationship with the Divine.

we are all led to the truth for which we are ready.

I know now that everything that has ever come to me in my life has come to me from God, and it was now being drawn together, pulled together, in a magnificent, complete response to every question I ever had.

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.

Mine is always your Highest Thought, your Clearest Word, your Grandest Feeling. Anything less is from another source.

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.

You will not have that for which you ask, nor can you have anything you want. This is because your very request is a statement of lack, and your saying you want a thing only works to produce that precise experience—wanting—in your reality.

The correct prayer is therefore never a prayer of supplication, but a prayer of gratitude.

Thankfulness is thus the most powerful statement to God; an affirmation that even before you ask, I have answered. Therefore never supplicate. Appreciate.

For the first thing you worry about after saying “I love you” is whether you’ll hear it back. And if you hear it back, then you begin immediately to worry that the love you have just found, you will lose. And so all action becomes a reaction—defense against loss—even as you seek to defend yourself against the loss of God.

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.

Life (as you call it) is an opportunity for you to know experientially what you already know conceptually. You need learn nothing to do this. You need merely remember what you already know, and act on it.

In the absolute there is no experience, only knowing. Knowing is a divine state, yet the grandest joy is in being. Being is achieved only after experience.

Nothing is painful in and of itself. Pain is a result of wrong thought. It is an error in thinking.

Pain results from a judgment you have made about a thing. Remove the judgment and the pain disappears.

You are all at root cause for the conditions which exist which create in the robber the desire, or the perceived need, to steal. You have all created the consciousness which makes rape possible. It is when you see in yourself that which caused the crime that you begin, at last, to heal the condition from which it sprang.

There are those who say you must overcome your desires. I say you must simply change them. The first practice feels like a rigorous discipline, the second, a joyful exercise.

Often a person on what you call a spiritual path looks like he has renounced all earthly passion, all human desire. What he has done is understand it, see the illusion, and step aside from the passions that do not serve him—all the while loving the illusion for what it has brought to him: the chance to be wholly free.

This is especially true on important matters. In fact, the more important the matter, the less likely are you to listen to your own experience, and the more ready you seem to be to make someone else’s ideas your own.

In the true order of things one does not do something in order to be happy—one is happy and, hence, does something.

A life lived by choice is a life of conscious action. A life lived by chance is a life of unconscious reaction.

Yet be not quick to judge another. Rather, seek to avoid judgment, for another person’s “wrongs” were your “rights” of yestermorn; another person’s mistakes are your own past actions, now corrected; another person’s choices and decisions are as “hurtful” and “harmful,” as “selfish” and “unforgivable,” as many of your own have been.

Each moment ends the instant it begins. If you do not see this, you will not see what is exquisite in it, and you will call the moment ordinary.

And remember, the silences hold the secrets. And so the sweetest sound is the sound of silence. This is the song of the soul. If you believe the noises of the world rather than the silences of your soul, you will be lost.

Some hear the silence in prayer. Some sing the song in their work. Some seek the secrets in quiet contemplation, others in less contemplative surroundings. When mastery is reached—or even intermittently experienced—the noises of the world can be muffled, the distractions quieted, even in the midst of them. All of life becomes a meditation.

All of your life you have been told that God created you. I come now to tell you this: You are creating God.