Neale Donald Walsch on CNN's "Larry King Live" (April 7th, 2000)KING: Welcome back to LARRY KING LIVE.
We welcome now Neale Donald Walsch. His latest book is "Friendship with
God." There you see its cover. He's the author of "Conversations with
God," three different books. Those conversations on the "New York Times"
best-sellers list for more than 130 weeks. He kind of burst on the
scene.
Are you a minister?
NEALE DONALD WALSCH, AUTHOR, "FRIENDSHIP WITH GOD": No, I am not, except
to the degree we're all ministers.
KING: Where did all of this start?
WALSCH: It started in the darkest moment of my life, Larry, when
everything was going wrong in my life. My career was reaching a dead
end.
KING: What career was it?
WALSCH: I was radio talk show host actually.
KING: Many have ridden that role.
WALSCH: And reached the same dead end.
KING: So it wasn't going anywhere?
WALSCH: Not at all.
KING: This was how long ago?
WALSCH: About four years ago.
KING: All right. What happened?
WALSCH: In addition to that, I was watching my relationship fall apart,
my relationship with my significant other. It wasn't the first time that
I'd seen that happen in my life, nor was it the second, nor frankly, was
it the third. So I realized that there was something I didn't know here
about relationship, the knowing of which would change everything, and my
health too was falling apart as well. I had a lot of chronic problems
very early on in my life, from lung problems, to heart problems, to
arthritis and you name it. So I got to the age of 49, 50 years old and I
said, OK, what are the rules? Somebody tell me the rules , because I
don't understand how this is supposed to go. I've done what I was
supposed to do, or most of what I thought I was supposed to do, but
nothing is working out for me the way I thought it would work out.
KING: So?
WALSCH: So I called out in the middle of the night -- one night I woke
up in the middle of the night, and I was searching for answers, 4:00 in
the morning, and I went into a darkened house and I really began
screaming out silently inside myself, what does it take to make life
work? Somebody tell me. What are these rules? And what have I done to
deserve a life of such continuing struggle? And then I sat in the couch
in my living room, stewing in my own juice, as it were, and I asked God,
I literally called out his name.
KING: Were you a believer?
WALSCH: I don't know if I was or I wasn't. I really don't know.
KING: Were you religious? Did you go to church?
WALSCH: As a child, yes, but not at that point any life. But I knew
there was this thing called God that was supposed to be real and
supposed to be there.
KING: And loving and caring.
WALSCH: And loving and caring. So what I did, I threatened God at that
point. I said, God, either come to me now and give me some answers or I
am out of here.
KING: Meaning suicide.
WALSCH: Absolutely.
KING: You were that low?
WALSCH: I was that low, a nadir in my existence. And, Larry, I heard a
voice clearly as I am hearing now, right over my right shoulder, so
clearly, I turned around and thought someone had come into the room. It
was 4:30 in the morning, and the voice said, Neale, do you really want
answers to all of these questions or are you just venting, and I can
recall my response after I got over the shock of not finding anyone
there, I thought, well, I am venting, but if you've got answers, I'd
like know what they are. And with that, I received the answers to most
of the most astonishing questions and the most extraordinary answers,
and as they began coming to me and literally filling my mind, I thought
I've got to write this down, and I found, fortunately, a yellow legal
pad and a pen that had been left there on the coffee table from the day
before.
KING: How do you know you weren't, one, hallucinating, people do that?
WALSCH: Yes.
KING: Imagining this voice?
WALSCH: Yes.
KING: Two, your own subconscious, in a sense, talking to you, you have
put it into words.
WALSCH: I don't know, Larry.
KING: You don't know that.
WALSCH: I don't know.
KING: So maybe it wasn't God.
WALSCH: Maybe it wasn't. And the day...
KING: But you wrote a book called "Conversations with God."
WALSCH: Because I think that it was. I sincerely think that I was
inspired by the divine.
KING: Why you?
WALSCH: But from the day I lose my doubt about that, the day I just step
away from doubt altogether is the day I become dangerous, and I have no
intention of becoming dangerous.
KING: Why you? Why didn't God talk to you and not to him and her?
WALSCH: Actually God does talk to him and her, and to you and to all of
us. The question isn't why me? But why have I chosen to listen? I think
people listen to the God that speaks to all of us when people get to the
point in their lives when they are forced to or inspired to, one or the
other.
KING: What's the first thing you asked?
WALSCH: What does it take to make life work? What am I doing wrong here?
KING: What were you doing wrong?
WALSCH: Well, I was, as God said, I was misunderstanding the whole
relationship of God to us, and I was misunderstanding my whole
relationship of myself to everyone else. Basically, what God said, what
you're doing wrong is very simple. You think you're all alone. You think
you're separate from everyone else, and I'll give you a simple solution
in three sentences that'll change your life. I said great, what is it?
He said, you're one with everyone. There's no one who is separate from
you. What you do for another, you do for yourself. What you fail to do
for another, you fail to do for yourself. It's as simple as that. I hate
to be simplistic, but it's the truth. It will change your life if you
choose not to just hear and conceptualize it, and I chose to live it
from that day on.
KING: And did you therefore start reading scriptures?
WALSCH: No.
KING: No. this is not, then, a bible lesson?
WALSCH: No, it's certainly not.
KING: This is not the Old or New Testament?
WALSCH: No, it's not.
KING: This is not Luke chapter six?
WALSCH: No.
KING: This is you and God.
WALSCH: Yes.
KING: Do you ask questions about things people think about -- did he
have a son, those kinds of questions?
WALSCH: No, I don't. I only asked the kinds of questions that my soul
yearned to know the answers to, that dealt with my own life.
KING: Living questions.
WALSCH: Living questions. What is the right livelihood. What is the
proper expression of human sexuality? What brings good health to people?
But most important of all, what is stopping us from leading the kinds of
lives we all know are capable?
KING: When you first approached the publisher and said I have got a book
here, I always had all of this trouble and God was talking to me, and
here's what he said, were you thrown out of some places?
WALSCH: I got rejection letters. They simply sent letters to me.
KING: Yes. Who finally took it on?
WALSCH: Hampton Rose, a publishing company.
KING: Small?
WALSCH: Small publisher. Now a medium-sized publisher.
KING: You made them medium sized.
WALSCH: I think to some degree I might have. In Charlottesville,
Virginia. They had the courage. They picked up the book, and said this
is important, and people are going to relate to this.
KING: More with Neale Donald Walsch and later your phone calls. The
latest book is "Friendship with God."
We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KING: In a sense, Neale, even if you were delusional, if it's helped,
it's worked, right?
WALSCH: Yes, that's exactly right.
KING: But your convinced it's not delusional?
WALSCH: Yes, I am convinced.
KING: Do you hear him now?
WALSCH: Not in the sense you're referring to, no.
KING: Well, how do you tune into him?
WALSCH: Well, see, God speaks to us in many, many ways, Larry, not
just...
KING: You said you heard a voice, though.
WALSCH: Yes, I did. But that isn't the way God communicates with us. For
instance, let me give you an example, when I say that God communicates
to all the people all the time, I was on airplane on my way down here,
and I thought my gosh, this is about LARRY KING, this is about a
worldwide audience, what can I say, what can I say possibly put into a
few words in the few moments I have with Larry, and I was looking for
some inspiration, and my wife sitting next to me on the plane said,
"Look on your lunch tray." I said, "What's on my lunch tray?" She said,
"Look on the lunch tray." Because you look right past God's
communications. I look and I say, salt and pepper shaker, what do you
want from me? She said, no, next to the salt and pepper shaker. I said,
I've got to take this out. A little piece of paper on the lunch tray
that was left there by the airline, it says, I will be glad and rejoice
in you, I will sing praise to your name, oh most high. Psalm nine, verse
two. What was that doing on my lunch tray this afternoon?
KING: Because Alaska Airlines puts it on all the lunch trays.
WALSCH: God bless them. But is that coincidence? Is that serendipity, or
is it possible that God said, you know what, I am shameless, I will use
any device to get through to you. Look on your next lunch tray next to
the salt-and-pepper shaker, it's right in front of your nose.
KING: Can we say that it all boils down to the Golden Rule?
WALSCH: Absolutely.
KING: Do unto others -- if you live that way, everything else will fall
into place.
(CROSSTALK)
WALSCH: Everything is solved, if governments would do that, if people
would do that with each other, all the disasters, all the pain of life.
KING: What's been the response from people? I mean, the books have been
extraordinary, almost two years on the best-seller list.
WALSCH: Well, we're getting 300 letters a week, Larry, from people all
over the world.
KING: Who want to know what?
WALSCH: They want to know -- first, they're saying thank you. The
demographic is 10-year-old to teenagers and 90-year-olds, and they're
saying thank you for at last introducing me to a God I can fall in love
with, a God I no longer have to be afraid of, a God of my highest
thoughts about who God would be.
KING: Does this God explain to you, or the God, illness? You said you
had illness.
WALSCH: Yes.
KING: Did he explain illness? Did he explain death?
WALSCH: Yes, he did. Of course there is no death.
KING: There is no death?
WALSCH: Death is a great illusion. The soul simply changes form, and
life is eternal. Life goes on forever. In fact there are two lesson that
he taught me. He said, if you take these two lessons, everything else in
your life will make sense suddenly and you'll have no more worries.
These two are quite simple -- life is eternal, and we're all one.
There's nobody in the room but you in various forms. You treat that
person across the table exactly as you would choose to treat yourself,
and then don't fear about death because you can't possibly die, because
you'd change into another form.
KING: How about illness and pain?
WALSCH: Illness and pain is the result of processes that have gone on
all during our lives having to do with our beliefs, our thoughts, the
way we take care of ourselves, or fail to take care of ourselves, our
environment and so forth. But God says about illness and about every
so-called negative experience -- I hate to be almost predictable about
this -- but in the seeds of every human experience is an enormous
lesson, an enormous gift, a wonderful treasure, and if you look inside
there for the treasure, you'll discover you've been gifted all of your
life.
KING: How do you learn that from the illness of a child?
WALSCH: It's difficult.
KING: A 3-year-old. What lesson would 3-year-old with cancer learn?
WALSCH: I'm not sure that the lesson is for the 3-year-old. It may be
for the 3-year-old's parents.
KING: The 3-year-old is the one that's going to die.
WALSCH: The 3-year-old won't die, but the 3-year-old may in fact change
form, and when that 3-year-old changes form, all the people around that
3-year-old will have come to understand that their lives have been
touched by angel.
KING: You had interaction with Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross.
WALSCH: I know her quite well and I worked on her staff, yes.
KING: Interviewed her many times.
WALSCH: Yes.
KING: You knew her. You knew her then before you believed?
WALSCH: Yes.
KING: What did you think of her work with death and near dying?
WALSCH: Well, I think Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross is one of the most
extraordinary human beings on face of the Earth, and her contribution to
the human race is unspeakable.
KING: But you were not a believer at that time, right?
WALSCH: Not in the sense of having thought about God as a workable part
of my life or having a friendship with God, no. I had a broad
understanding that there was an experience of the universe called God,
and it was repeatedly clear it was real.
KING: This God that communicates with you and with all us, you say, is
he a punishing god? Is he angry?
WALSCH: No God is angry about nothing. What can God be angry about? God
has everything. God is everything. There's no way you can hurt or damage
God. That's virtually impossible. God has no ego, so you can't even hurt
God's ego. So God has no reason to be angry, and therefore no reason to
punish us.
KING: How about judgmental? WALSCH: There's no judgment.
KING: So if you're gay, there's no sin, there's no non-sin. What does
God do with the murderer?
WALSCH: God does to the murderer what we should do with the murderer,
simply love the murderer and then do what is appropriate within our
human constructions, because on Earth, our human construction require us
to interact with each other in a way that makes sense in society.
KING: But he doesn't say if you're gay or you're supposedly -- bisexual
or anything like that, that we've come to deal with as sin and you're
going to repent? Is there Hell?
WALSCH: No, there's no such place as Hell. What happens after death is
not eternal reward or eternal condemnation, but simply the continued
evolution of the human soul. Even the pope just said on the 20th of
July, there's no such place as hell. And God is not a punishing god. The
pope said this.
KING: How about guilt?
WALSCH: Guilt is -- I like "regret" as better word. I think that fear
and guilt are the only enemies of man. I think Elizabeth used to say a
lot, one of my favorite quotes.
KING: What do you mean by "Friendship with God" as opposed to your
previous books?
WALSCH: Our relationship with God is like our relationship with each
other. It begins with a conversation. If the conversation goes well, it
moves into an experience of friendship. If the friendship goes well, it
turns into an experience of oneness with God, or what I want to call
communion with God, and so unfortunately, not many people ever have a
conversation with God, because they've been culturally stigmatized into
thinking that they cannot have conversation with God, that in fact God
would not talk the any of us, that in fact God stopped talking to us
thousands and thousands of years ago, and so to announce that you have
actually had a conversation with God or even inspired by God at that
level is very risky.
KING: We'll be back with Neale Donald Walsch. We'll take your phone
calls. And we'll ask him what he does when he has a bad day.
Don't go away.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KING: We're back. We're going to go to your phone calls in a moment.
Neale Donald Walsch, what do you do when you have a bad day, bad mood?
WALSCH: I try to help someone else from not having a bad day, because I
learned a long time ago what I choose for myself to give to another...
KING: You don't get angry?
WALSCH: Oh, of course I do.
KING: What do you do with anger?
WALSCH: I try to forgive myself first of all, and then I ask the other
person with whom I'm angry to forgive me as well. Then I look to see
what was the cause of that anger. Of course, I take a look inside, and I
try to go to gratitude. I try to go as quickly as I can to think of all
the things that are going right other than all the things that are going
wrong.
KING: With does God say and what do you think about Judaism, Mormonism,
Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism.
WALSCH: Wonderful teachings, wonderful, wonderful teachings.
KING: They disagree.
WALSCH: One and all. They don't disagree on the basics, they disagree on
the fine print. On the basics, love, do unto others, we are all one, be
kind, be gentle -- there's no disagreement. And the fine print we can
talk about and discuss.
KING: You ever ask about Christ?
WALSCH: No, not specifically.
KING: Why not?
WALSCH: Because I didn't have -- see, because the conversation I had was
about my own life. It was about my own experience. It wasn't about the
grandest theological questions of all time, it was about how do I get
through Monday morning.
KING: Do you get any comfort when you watch Sunday morning evangelicals?
WALSCH: It's not comfort I would look for if I would choose to watch for
it. I look for authenticity and truth. And what I see are people who
deeply believe in what they're saying and what they're feeling. And I
honor that. And I say, that's marvelous. Isn't that great?
KING: You don't criticize them or knock them?
WALSCH: I would never criticize anyone for saying what's true in their
heart.
KING: Canal Fulton, Ohio for Neale Donald Walsch. The newest is
"Friendship with God" -- hello.
CALLER: Hi, Neale, thanks for your inspirational books. My question is,
is there a specific age or a good age when you can start teaching your
children about these books?
WALSCH: How soon do you start teaching your children about love?
CALLER: From birth.
WALSCH: Thank you very much.
KING: Do you -- do you teach your children about God early?
WALSCH: Yes, from the very moment that you can communicate intelligently
with them. And we talk about God in ways that are allowing the child to
know that God is love, that God is the wonderful energy of life, that
there's a spark of divinity in every single human being, and that if we
look for that spark of divinity they'll have a whole different kind of
life.
KING: How do you explain calamity, the flood, the hurricane, the wipeout
of homes, the death of hundreds and hundreds of people in one swoop,
painfully dying? How do you explain that? Why would a good, loving,
honest, wonderful God do that?
WALSCH: Well, God doesn't cause those things.
KING: He could stop it.
WALSCH: Yes, I suppose one would imagine that God could stop it. But,
you see, every life experience is placed into our reality for a
particular reason to provide us an opportunity to be and to declare, to
know and understand, to announce and fulfill who we really are. When we
-- God said to me, I have brought you nothing but angels and placed
before you nothing but miracles, and when you see your life as nothing
more than a constant series of events that have placed perfection right
before you, opportunity for you to decide who you are and to experience
it, then you will bless the day and bless, bless, bless all the thing
that have ever happened to you, whether you have labeled them good or
labeled them bad. And, Larry, I wouldn't be the first person to be able
to say retrospectively that some of what I thought were the worst
moments of my life turned out to provide the grandest gifts, the
greatest teachings and the most marvelous miracles. That's a rather
common human experience.
KING: How about the rich person is happier than the poor and this quest
for money and the mercenary aspect?
WALSCH: I'm not sure that the rich person is happier than the poor. In
the past five or six years, I have come to know some rich people because
I tend to travel now in circles that include people who are very
wealthy. And I'm not seeing a higher happiness there than when I lived
in the park on the street -- and I spent a year living on the street
because I didn't have a dime. In fact, I found great happiness among
street people -- and great happiness among wealthy people, too, but I
didn't find any disproportion of one to the other.
KING: What was it like living on the street?
WALSCH: Well, at first it was horrible because I wasn't prepared for it.
KING: Where were you? Cold-weather climate or...
WALSCH: I was -- well, I was in a rainy climate in Oregon. And it was
raining every single night. And I was...
KING: Where did you sleep?
WALSCH: On the ground. I had a sleeping bag, thank goodness, and I had a
tent for some of the time. And I can recall just asking God, just give
me a dry night.
KING: How many years ago?
WALSCH: This was about six or seven, maybe eight years ago now -- time
flies.
KING: If someone were to come over to you and say you're going to be on
a worldwide television show talking about your fourth successful
best-selling book, that would have been a laugh to you?
WALSCH: Yes, it would. But my experience at the moment was a laugh to me
as well. It's only when I started laughing about what was happening to
me while it was happening to me that I managed to move away from it.
KING: But you wanted to kill yourself?
WALSCH: Yes, I did.
KING: So you had hit the lowest...
WALSCH: The nadir of my existence, absolutely, without question. But
that was because I didn't understand what was going on. I didn't --
couldn't see the gift.
KING: Did you change that night?
WALSCH: Yes, I cried, Larry. I cried like a child. As I was writing, I
cried so much that the tears were creating blotches on the legal pad,
and I couldn't read what I had written because the ink was all smeared.
KING: You going to have a kind of spiritual peace corps?
WALSCH: We're looking now at ways to apply the extraordinary messages of
these books and of really all the great esoteric spiritual literature in
the practical matter of day-to-day life. So we're putting together the
New Millennium Peace Foundation with Grand Master Son Who Lee (ph),
who's a spiritual figure in South Korea. And we're going to start in
South Korea, in Seoul next year, and begin there a series of worldwide
conferences where we're going to call together all the great spiritual
leaders of the planet and ask them to use their influence in a very
public way and to say to the people, what can we do, if anything, to
bring us together again? What can we do to unite North and South Korea?
Fifty years, Larry, they've been apart. And I -- I want to know, where
is the spiritual leadership? You know, the pope made an extraordinarily
courageous trip to Israel recently, and that was an important overture.
But why did it take so many hundreds of years to do it is the real
question.
KING: Back with more of Neale Donald Walsch. His new one is "Friendship
With God." He's the author of the famed "Conversations With God." All
three books on the "New York Times" best-seller list more than 130
weeks. More phone calls after this.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KING: We're back.
We'll take another call for Neale Donald Walcsh. Rockmart, Georgia --
hello.
CALLER: Hello, how are you?
KING: Hi.
CALLER: I would like to ask him, does he acknowledge other belief
systems that acknowledge other gods in different names, and does he
mention that in his book?
WALSCH: I'm not sure I know how you mean -- or what you mean by do I
acknowledge them? If you mean do I recognize that they're there and do I
look...
CALLER: Right, that people...
WALSCH: Of course.
CALLER: ... call them by different names.
WALSCH: Oh, sure.
CALLER: ... do you acknowledge that?
WALSCH: Sure, a rose by any other name is still a rose.
KING: What does God say he or she is?
WALSCH: Why, God says -- first of all, what I am is -- the real question
is what am I not? There is nothing that I am not. So God says what I am
is all that is, all that was and all there ever will be.
KING: So he's evil, too?
WALSCH: Well, indeed, if, in fact, you assume that God is the all of it.
But evil only is as evil does, and nothing's evil unless thinking makes
it so. So you get into a real intellectual discussion of, in fact, what
is evil? And you and I can agree on what evil is, and then two years
later we might both decide...
KING: I mean, we'd all agree that Hitler was evil.
WALSCH: Yes, we might all agree on that.
KING: Might?
WALSCH: Yes -- well, indeed. Indeed, I think within the context of our
human experience we would, of course, agree that Hitler was evil. But
supposing -- just supposing -- God said, I'm going to send a soul to the
earth to show humanity to itself for the purpose of lifting humanity
above what it had become and what it had sunk to. Supposing I gave an
assignment to a soul. You're going to go down there and you're going to
be the worst of it. And the end result will be that the human race will
lift itself at least one notch above that and never again go there.
KING: But a lot of people are going to pay a price for it.
WALSCH: Indeed, if you consider death a price, they have paid a price
for it. But supposing that there was a larger tapestry that we can't
see. Just supposing we're so close to the tapestry that all we see are
the threads, and we can't see the tapestry itself. So I think that we
have to stand back and take a look at the whole picture.
KING: Do you think God loves one nation more than another?
WALSCH: No.
KING: No?
WALSCH: No, there's no one nation under God, there are no chosen people,
and there's no one who's any more special than any other. The idea of
superiority is the most seductive notion ever visited upon the human
life. And in "Friendship of God," God said if you will somehow eliminate
the idea that you're somehow better than someone else, bring an end to
better, every pain on your planet that's inflicted by humans, the one
upon the other, will go away overnight.
Say this to your congregations -- God said, I dare you to challenge
every rabbi, every minister, every priest, every national leader to say
to their congregations the one interesting sentence, ours is not a
better way, ours is merely another way.
KING: Nobody running for office would say that.
WALSCH: Of course. How could they, because we have to demonize the other
person. What the American public would do if George and Al would stand
up on a platform and say, you know what? Mine is just my idea. It may
not even be the best idea. If you agree with me, fine. If you don't,
that's fine, too.
KING: And I'll listen to your idea. Maybe your idea might work.
WALSCH: Exactly. See, then what would happen? But that's too
intelligent. Except I think the human race is beginning to go there now.
We're beginning to have...
KING: Wackos would go crazy.
WALSCH: ... less and less patience with these.
KING: Why you? Why you, Neale? Why is he talking to you?
WALSCH: He's talking to all of us, every minute of every day.
KING: You're writing it down, though.
WALSCH: Yes. Now why did I write it down? Because I was desperate. And I
didn't write it down to write a book -- I never intended to write a
book. I wrote it down to keep a record to these inspiring thoughts that
were coming to me and gradually changing my life. So I kept a record of
them. But in the middle of the dialogue, it was said to me, this will
one day become a book. And I said to myself, oh, yes, this I've got to
see. But, you know, when God has his mind made up, watch out.
KING: We'll take a break and be back with our remaining moments with
Neale Donald Walsch, the author of "Conversations With God." The new one
is "Friendship With God."
Don't go away.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KING: Neale wanted to add something on -- on -- about Hitler, elaborate
a little bit.
WALSCH: Well, you know, Larry, I want to be real sensitive to this. This
is a very sensitive question, of course, and I don't want to be
perceived as having made light of what happened during the Hitler
experience. But what God said to me in the dialogue among many comments
about Hitler -- because he talked about Hitler in the book a lot,
actually -- but one of the most important things he said about Hitler
was, Neale, he said, the horror of the Hitler experience was not only
that a Hitler came along, but that so many people went along. Not only
that Hitler killed millions of Jews but that millions of Jews had to be
killed for Hitler to be stopped.
There's a lesson here. And the lesson is that there's a little bit of
Hitler in all of us. And wiping out a people is a wiping out of people,
whether at Auschwitz or at Wounded Knee.
KING: There are degrees, though.
WALSCH: Indeed. Indeed, there are. And I think that Hitler was sent to
us as an example of the lowest degree, the lowest to which we can go so
we will never forget and never go there again.
KING: Do you think there's more of a spiritual hunger now than ever
before? And if so, why?
WALSCH: I think because the human race has lost patience with itself.
We've looked at how we've created life, we've looked at how our
institutions are working or not working -- politics, education,
spirituality, religion, economics -- and we said, you know, we're going
into the 21st century and we still haven't got the most basic problems
of human experience solved. What could we do -- what don't we know, the
knowing of which would change everything?
KING: How do you account for that since technologically our advancements
are incredible? The advancement of the human mind, I think someone said,
is up 50 years.
WALSCH: That's correct, and I account for it because I think we're too
focused on everything but human consciousness and spirituality and
matters, even for that matter, of the mind.
KING: And one of the reasons might be we don't think we go on forever,
right?
WALSCH: I think so. I think -- and the other reason...
KING: Most people think dying is it.
WALSCH: Is the end of it. My father did. He looked at me at 83, God
bless him, a couple of months before his death, and he said, Neale,
what's the answer? What's this all about? And I looked at him -- of
course, I didn't have anything to say to him at that point. I didn't
want to. but when I walked out of the room, I thought to myself, God
bless him and help me not get there at 83 and be asking a question like
that. But, you see, I don't think that my father really did a lot of
reading. He didn't do a lot of soul-searching. He was involved in that
physical here-and-now world.
KING: What do you make of all of these people now communicating with
people like your father?
WALSCH: I'm not quite sure I understand the question.
KING: Communicating with the dead?
WALSCH: Well, I think it's possible to communicate with the souls who
have left this particular plain of experience, and I think we should not
write that off.
KING: Have you tried?
WALSCH: No, I have no need to. I'm communicating with the big voice.
KING: You're going to the top, right?
WALSCH: Straight to the top.
KING: there's no political involved here, right? You could be in trouble
if you're talking to the top. What's next after "Friendship"?
WALSCH: There's a book called "Communion With God," which is coming out
in October from the Putnam publishing people in New York City. And that
talks about the experience that I discussed earlier where a conversation
leads to a friendship which ultimately produce such a high-quality
friendship that you feel one with the other. And we can have exactly
this kind of relationship with God. Mystics have written about it and
talked about it from time immemorial, and that is the experience of
oneness with all that is, which I've chosen to call "Communion With
God."
KING: What worries you the most?
WALSCH: Nothing. Well, I -- that's probably a lie. It was a snap answer
that I felt good to say. The truth? That I might be one day
disingenuous, inauthentic, think too much of myself, imagine that I know
something more than somebody else knows and get run away -- let this
thing run away with me.
KING: Ergo ego.
WALSCH: Ego.
KING: Thanks, Donald. Neale Donald Walsch. His latest book is
"Friendship With God." He's the author of the "Conversations with God",
a series of books.
© 2000 Cable News Network. All Rights Reserved.
Source:
Klaus'
"Conversations with God" Site
