During a period of deep despair, Neale awoke in the middle of a February night and wrote an anguished letter to God. He angrily scratched across a yellow legal pad, “What does it take to make life work?” Neale says that he heard a “voiceless voice” that gave him an answer. As more questions came, more answers came in the same fashion.
Neale continued this first “conversation” for hours and had many more in the weeks that followed. He always awoke in the middle of the night and was drawn to his legal pad. Neale’s handwritten notes would later become the best-selling Conversations with God books, which have been translated into 27 languages. Conversations with God, Book 1 occupied The New York Times bestseller list for over two and half years.
In order to deal with the enormous response to his writings, Neale created the Conversations with God Foundation. The Foundation is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to inspiring the world to help itself move from violence to peace, confusion to clarity, and anger to love.
• If the whole world followed you, would you be pleased with where you took it?
• Whatever you choose for yourself, give to another. If you choose to be happy, cause another to be happy. If you choose to be prosperous, cause another to prosper. If you choose more love in your life, cause another to have more love in theirs.
• Enlightenment is understanding that there is nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nobody you have to be except exactly who you’re being right now.
• Decisions will be made in the next few years, which will set our course and direction for decades to come. The choices now being placed before the human community are enormous, and tomorrow’s choices will be even more momentous as our options become increasingly limited.
• All of us will play a role in the making of these decisions. They will not be left to someone else. We are the someone else. The decisions I am talking about cannot, or will not, be made by any political power structure, the influential elite, or corporate giants. They will be made in the hearts and in the homes of individuals and families around the world.
There is only one place to start, and that’s with his book Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1. Neale says that he had been in “the habit for years of writing my thoughts down in letters,” and one time, “rather than another letter to another person I imagined to be victimizing me, I thought I'd go straight to the source; straight to the greatest victimizer of them all. I decided to write a letter to God.” His thoughts were primarily a series of questions for God.
Neale adds, “To my surprise, as I scribbled out the last of my bitter, unanswerable questions and prepared to toss my pen aside, my hand remained poised over the paper, as if held there by some invisible force. Abruptly, the pen began moving on its own. I had no idea what I was about to write, but an idea seemed to be coming, so I decided to flow with it.”
The entire book is a dialogue between Neale and God. Neale was able to ask any question to God, with answers that begin to unravel every mystery in the universe. Whether or not you believe that the answers came from an “invisible force,” the book remains fascinating, inspiring and compelling.
These are some of the questions that Neale asked God in the book. This is only a small subset of the questions contained in the book.
• Why is there so much suffering and pain in the world? If God were truly loving, why does God allow it?
• What is the purpose for all of life?
• What does it take to achieve success? When will our lives finally take off? Can the struggle ever end?
• Is there such thing as hell?
• Is there a way to be happy in relationships? Must they be constantly challenging?
• How can we solve the health problems we face?
• Is sex okay? Is sex purely for procreation, as some religions say?
• How can we attract enough money in our lives?
• Is there such thing as reincarnation? Have we had past lives?
• Is there such thing as being psychic? Are people who claim to be psychic “trafficking with the devil”?
• Is it O.K. to take money for doing good? Or are the two mutually exclusive?
• Why can’t I do what I really want to do with my life and still make a living?
A specific example of the “conversation” from the book follows:
How does God talk, and to whom? When I asked this question, here’s the answer I received:
“I talk to everyone. All the time. The question is not to whom do I talk, but who listens.”
Intrigued, I asked God to expand on this subject. Here’s what God said:
“First, let’s exchange the word talk with the word communicate. It's a much better word, a much fuller, more accurate one. When we try to speak to each other—Me to you, you to Me, we are immediately constricted by the unbelievable limitation of words. For this reason, I do not communicate by words alone. In fact, rarely do I do so. My most common form of communication is through feeling.
“Feeling is the language of the soul.
“If you want to know what’s true for you about something, look to how you’re feeling about it.
“Feelings are sometimes difficult to discover—and often even more difficult to acknowledge. Yet hidden in your deepest feelings is your highest truth.”
The dialogue continues and provides one of the most powerful new spiritual books written in a long time. If you finish this first book, Neale provides ample room to continue with Conversations with God, Book 2 and Book 3.
ADDRESS: Conversations with God Foundation
PMB #1150
1257 Siskiyou Blvd.
Ashland, OR 97520
PHONE: 541-482-8806
WEBSITE: www.cwg.org