Conscious Life Journal: What do you think about people who say it’s no accident that we chose to incarnate at this time in the world?
Neale Donald Walsch: There are no accidents in the universe as I understand it. All things occur not by accident, but by design. Design in the sense that it fits into the perfect out-picturing of the best possible result, the next and grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about who we are. That is precisely what is happening on the earth right now. Souls have come here, incarnated on the earth during this particular time, not by coincidence, not by chance, but, in fact, by choice. We’ve made the choice precisely because we understood that this would be a period of time to make our most critical early advancement in the evolution of our species. We’re a very young species in terms of the cosmic clock and there comes a time in the life of every young species when it moves from infancy into a level of maturity. This is the beginning stage of the final phase of evolution for all sentient beings in the cosmos. I think that’s what’s happening right now. We have chosen to enroll ourselves to be on earth during this time because we see ourselves as sentient beings playing a critical role in the advancement of the awakening of the species as a whole.
That might sound like a grandiose self-assessment. But I believe that it is true for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people who are living on the planet right now. I think that they know they have some role to play and that they also know there are no small roles. It’s not possible to play a small role. If we were to change the life of one human being, the effect of changing one life is exponential.
This isn’t just a random moment in history, but a specific moment. We’ve come to a crossroad. This isn’t going to happen in three weeks or five months, but over the next several years we will be making that journey, a bridge across forever, where we will find ourselves in an entirely different means of expression. Everything in our experience will be altered, even as it was during the Renaissance. Everything changed in that roughly 300-year period. We’re going to see the same thing happening here and we see it happening right now. Our ideas about who we are and how we want life to be economically, socially, spiritually, medically, scientifically, philosophically—everything we can think of will be affected. Not in the next 300 years but in the next thirty years. We’re inside of that thirty-year process right now. This shift will take place in 1/10 the time of the original Renaissance because of our ability to communicate instantaneously with each other with the flick of a finger or the move of a mouse. I call that instantaneosity. Simultaneously instantaneous. There’s very little lag time between the occurrence of an event and our knowing about it. It’s true for probably 70 percent of the world’s people. And in another ten years there will be no one who isn’t instantaneously interconnected.
Humanity, when it experiences instantaneosity, has an equally important experience of its creative power. We begin to see the results of what we were thinking, saying, doing, in the instant moment. Individually as well as collectively.
CLJ: What percentage of the world is experiencing and being conscious of that instantaneosity?
NDW: Probably 3-5 percent of us are experiencing what I’ve just described at a high enough level to be able to describe it and know what is happening in the way that I know. But that number is increasing exponentially. The increase in our global collective consciousness and awareness is folding over and doubling itself in very short intervals. So while we may be at a 3-5 percent level now, ten years from today we could be at a 70 or 80 percent level, and thirty years from today we could be at 90 or 100 percent. I think that’s what happens when a species fully awakens.
CLJ: There was a time, especially ten to fifteen years ago, where this kind of conversation could have only existed with someone who was in the metaphysical new age world. I think that’s changing. Are you finding that to be the case?
NDW: More and more people are open to more and more portions of ultimate truth and ultimate reality. We’re seeing it seep into even the doctrines and dogmas of our most ancient religious communities. All one has to do is listen to the words of Pope Francis over the past five years. What comes out of his mouth turns everything upside down in Roman Catholic doctrine. More and more people are finding a place of comfort in the larger reality that is being revealed to us and through us. I couldn’t have written a book called Conversations with God fifteen years ago. I would have been called a blasphemer and apostate. It would have been unacceptable to publish then.
CLJ: In Conversations with God, Book 4 you mention the term Highly Evolved Beings (HEBs). Can you tell us more about that?
NDW: In Conversations with God, I was told that over the course of many centuries we have been assisted by Highly Evolved Beings living and existing in a different dimension. They have been assisting us in a wide variety of ways, largely without physical intervention, but with metaphysical intervention — a placement of ideas and thoughts, concepts and notions, into the common culture of humanity to a wide variety of methods, one of which is inspiration. For example, a person may be inspired to write a poem from which arises ideas and thoughts that he/she may not have had in that particular way or at that level of clarity before.
God said to me in Conversations with God, Book 4, “All of you have awakened, you simply don’t know it.” The human race has awakened. You can hardly not have awakened given what has happened in the past thirty years, forget about the past 300 or 3,000. We are walking around as a species of awakened beings that simply are not fully aware that we are awakened.
These days, more and more people are aware that they’re awake, and even as they speak they notice the impact of their words. In the middle of a sentence they might say, “Let me rephrase that, that didn’t come out the way I wanted, what I meant to say was …” and they make the correction before, not after, they notice the energetic signature they place in the room. That’s the simplest example of beginning to demonstrate that in their daily lives. They also catch themselves more rapidly when they aren’t doing it and say things like, “I’m sorry, I’m not being myself today.”
When we see those behaviors within ourselves, we begin to notice we’re moving more and more toward that place where we are demonstrating our awakened state more consistently and profoundly much more of the time. People who have done that in the past have been called Masters (like Lao Tzu or Buddha or Mother Teresa).
CLJ: You talk about invitations being the core of your Conversations with God books. Can you tell us more about those?
NDW: There are two invitations that Conversations with God extended to humanity: change the world’s mind about God and give people back to themselves. That is, allow yourself to be an instrument through which others — everyone’s life you touch — are returned to who they really are, and to an awareness of that.
CLJ: And the third invitation in the new book?
NDW: Awaken the species. Allow yourself to use your life in such a way that you move your evolutionary process forward by modeling behaviors that tend to awaken others to who they are (as an extension of Invitation 2). And the only way we can believe these behaviors is if another human being moves through our lives actually living it, actually doing it, thinking, saying, and being what an awakened person would think, say, and do. And finding it possible to do that. Part of the growth of our species has been to accept the fact that the way the Masters have behaved is the way we can all behave.
I was born and raised in a Roman Catholic family and I can promise you that my challenge as a young man was to try to live as Christ lived. I thought this was impossible. Nobody can live that way. You can do it for an hour or two. Maybe if you’re lucky you can get away with it for a weekend. But to move through your whole life the way this man moved through his whole life and be a person of this kind of unconditional love and caring and compassion and wisdom and understanding and patience every single minute of your life would be virtually impossible.
What happens when the species matures spiritually is that people realize it’s not impossible at all. The Masters, such as Jesus, have told us it’s not impossible. Jesus actually said, “Why are you so amazed? These things and more shall you do also.” So I have learned in my life to keep those two statements of Jesus in the forefront of my mind at all times. One: “Why are you so amazed? These things and more shall you do also.” Two: “I have come that you may have life, that you may have it more abundantly.” I say those words to myself whenever I approach another person — I have come that you may have life, that you may have it more abundantly.
Why do you suppose I’m on this interview with you? Why do you suppose I agreed to do a second one? Every choice I make in my life emerges from that decision. I have come that you may have life, that you may have it more abundantly. When I think to myself, what arrogance, who do you think you are, why would you even say it to yourself, I go back to the first statement, “Why are you so amazed? These things and more shall you do also.” Those two statements repeated to yourself a hundred times a day can change your life in a week.
We all have a role to play in each of us getting there. There’s only one of us. It’s not about I know what you don’t know, isn’t it wonderful that I’m awake and you’re not. It’s not that at all. My thumb can feel great but if my pinky finger still hurts, my hand is not healed. Therefore, I am not whole and complete and perfect until the whole of me is clear and aware, alive, and awake. All things are one thing. And all things are part of the one thing that is. So when I walk down the street and go to the post office or the flower shop, I see only one thing. Another me.
I was walking down the street with this spiritual master about twenty years ago and I happened to pass a wino. He smelled bad. He was shouting and saying things, talking to himself, sitting on the side of the street, leaning up against a building, tippling from a bottle that was clearly not orange juice in a brown paper bag. He had a long beard. He hadn’t changed clothes in a month. I looked at him as I walked with this wonderful lady and said, “There but for the grace of God go I.” She looked at me and said, “You don’t understand anything, do you?” “Sorry, what do you mean?” She said, “There but for the grace of God go you? No. There because of the grace of God you go. You think you’re separate or other than that person? There you go being a wino again. There you go being a street person again. There you go being a saint or a savior again. There you go being all of it again.” That lady changed my life that day.
There you go again. Being all of it. Therefore, judge not and neither condemn. But be a light unto the world that you might know who you really are, and let all those whose light you touch know who they are as well.