Introduction The world is in trouble. Bigger trouble than it has ever been in before. This book provides an explanation of the crisis we are facing in a way that not only clarifies the crisis, but clarifies how to resolve it. Here is an extraordinary insight into what's really happening to us right now on this planet, why we've gone astray, and how we can get back on the path that we say we wish to take. We can look away from what's happening -- the sudden and eruptive disintegration of life as we know it -- for only so long before the fact that we really are in big trouble presents itself to us in ways that we cannot ignore. That is what is occurring right now. We are being confronted by events and conditions that we cannot ignore. This does not mean that now is a time for despair. Despair, in fact, is the last thing this is a time for. Despair is what has created the problem. More despair is certainly not going to solve it. No, now is not the time for despair, but for repair. As we seek to repair the damage that we are doing, we are invited to explore the matter of why we are doing it. What has led us into the depth of despair that would cause us to begin destroying ourselves? That is the key question addressed by this book. It is a question many people do not want to ask. The answers are too threatening to our very way of life -- and many humans would apparently rather destroy their way of life than change it. They would rather see their lives end than see their lives altered. This is a life-altering book. It contains New Revelations. It provides the tools with which to pull ourselves out of despair, lifting the whole human race to a new level of experience, to a new understanding of itself, to a new expression of its grandest vision. This book was given to us, sent to us at just this moment, to help us. It presents its revelations in the form of a conversation with God. You do not have to believe that such a conversation took place to derive benefit from it. You have merely to be willing to follow the conversation, consider its contents, explore the possibility of applying them in your life, and observe the results. The human race has reached a Time of Choosing. Our options are being placed before us by the tide of events -- and by those who are creating them. We can either move forward, building together at last a new world of peace and harmony based on new beliefs about God and Life, or move backward, separately and continuously reconstructing the old world of conflict and discord based on old beliefs about God and Life. How long we can keep ourselves going if we continue to choose the Old Ways is open to speculation. But ultimately our civilization -- assuming no dramatic alteration in our present pattern -- will simply cave in on itself. And everything I see tells me we are just years -- not centuries, not decades, but years -- away from that. For those who are ready to embrace new beliefs (or at least to consider them), the issue becomes, what would they be? And what outcomes could they produce? I believe these new revelations have been given to us to offer some possible and powerful answers to these questions. This conversation with God began as a simple plea from one humble human being to the God of his understanding, in the way that works best for him. I asked God to reveal to us what we now need to know if we want to help change the self-destructive direction in which humanity is moving. Now the God of my understanding may not appear to be the God in which you believe, but It is, I am convinced, the same God nonetheless. And I believe that if any person goes to this same God in purity, sincerity, and with deep desire, God responds. This book is God's response. I believe it can save the world. Author's Note As in all conversations, there are things repeated here that have been said before. I want you to know that I am aware of that. No attempt was made by me to "edit out" material that makes the same point (sometimes in the same words) made in previous books I have produced. I assume these matters wouldn't have come up again if they weren't important within the context of what is being discussed here. I have thus forgiven all redundancies, and invite you to do the same. The list of fallacies about God and Life in this book seems, in particular, to be very similar to the Ten Illusions of Humans given to us in Communion with God. They are plainly based on those illusions, and are recontextualizations of them. Yet not everyone who has come to this current dialogue has read that previous book, and the present material was clearly meant to stand alone. Chapter 1 God, please be here. We need help. I am here. We need help. I know. Right now. I understand. The world is on the brink of disaster. And I'm not talking about natural disaster; I'm talking about man-made calamity. I know. And you're right. I mean, humans have had disagreements before, and serious ones, but now our divisions and disagreements can lead not simply to wars -- which are bad enough -- but to the end of civilization as we know it. That is correct. You have assessed the situation correctly. You understand the severity of the problem; you simply do not understand the nature of the problem. You do not know what is causing it. So you keep trying to solve it at every level except the level at which it exists. Which is? The level of belief. The problem facing the world today is a spiritual problem. Your ideas about spirituality are killing you. You keep trying to solve the world's problem as if it were a political problem, or an economic problem, or even a military problem, and it is none of these. It is a spiritual problem. And that is the one problem human beings don't seem to know how to solve. Then help us. I am. How? In many ways. Name one. This book. This book will help us? It can. What do we have to do? Read it. And then what? Heed it. That's what they all say. "It's all in The Book," they say. "Read it and heed it. That's all you have to do." The problem is, they all hold up a different book. I know. And every book says something else. I know. So now we should "read and heed" this book? It's not a question of what you should do. It's a question of what you may do if you choose to. It is an invitation, not a requirement. Why would I want to read this book when I've already been told by True Believers that all the answers are in the other books -- the books that they are telling me to heed? Because you have not heeded them. Yes, we have. We believe that we have. That's why you now need help. You believe that you have, but you have not. You keep saying that your Holy Book (your cultures have many different ones) is what has given you the authority to treat each other the way you are treating each other, to do what you are doing. You are able to say that only because you have not really listened to the deeper message of these books. You have read them, but you have not really listened to them. But we have. We are doing what they say we should be doing! No. You are doing what YOU say that they say you should be doing. What does that mean? It means that the basic message of all the sacred scriptures is the same. What is different is how human beings have been interpreting them. There is nothing "wrong" with having different interpretations. What may not benefit you, however, is separating yourself over these differences, making each other wrong because of these differences, and killing each other as a result of these differences. This is what you are now doing. It is what you have been doing for quite some time. You cannot agree even within a particular group of you, much less between groups, about what a particular book says and what it means, and you use these disagreements as justifications for slaughter. You argue among yourselves about what the Qur'an says, and about what its words mean. You argue among yourselves about what the Bible says, and about what its words mean. You argue among yourselves about what the Veda says, what the Bhagavad-Gita says, what the Lun-yü says, what the Pali Canon says, what the Tao-te Ching says, what the Talmud says, what the Hadith says, what the Book of Mormon says... And what of the Upanishad, the I Ching, the Adi Granth, the Mahabharata, the Yoga-sutras, the Mathnawi, the Kojiki? Okay, we get the point. No, actually, you don't. And that's the point. The point is, there are many holy writings and sacred scriptures, and you act as if there is only one. It is your sacred scripture that is really sacred. All the rest are poor substitutes at best, and blasphemies at worst. Not only is there only one Sacred Scripture, there is also only one way to interpret that Scripture: your way. This spiritual arrogance is what has caused you your greatest sorrow as a species. You have suffered more -- and caused other people to suffer more -- over your ideas about God than over your ideas about anything else in the human experience. You have turned the source of the greatest joy into the source of your greatest pain. That's crazy. Why is that? Why have we done that? Because there is one thing for which human beings seem willing to give up everything. They will give up love, they will give up peace, they will give up health, harmony, and happiness, they will give up safety, security, and even their sanity, for this one thing. What? Being right. You are willing to give up everything you've ever worked for, everything you've ever wanted, everything you've ever created, in order to be "right." Indeed, for this you are willing to give up Life itself. But isn't that how it should be? I mean, you have to stand up for something in life. And the Word of God IS what's right! Which God? Which God? Yes, which God? Adonai? Allah? Elohim? God? Hari? Jehovah? Krishna? Lord? Rama? Vishnu? Yahwey? The God whose words were brought to us clearly by the Master and the Prophets. Which Master and which Prophets? Which Master? Which Prophets? Yes. Adam? Noah? Abraham? Moses? Confucius? Siddhartha Gautama? Jesus? Patanjali? Muhammad? Baha'u'llah? Jalal al-Din Rumi? Martin Luther? Joseph Smith? Paramahansa Yogananda? You're not equating all of those with each other, are you? Why not? Is one greater than the other? Certainly! Which one? The one in whom I believe! Exactly. Now you get the point. So what do you want me to do, give up my beliefs? I don't "want" you to do anything. The question is, what do you want to do? I want to find a way to get past all of these mixed-up beliefs that humans have. There is a way. Which is? Transcend them. What does that mean? Transcending means to go beyond, to move past. It does not mean to completely reject or totally destroy. You do not have to destroy a thing in order to move past it. You would not want to destroy your old belief system in any event, because there is too much of it that you will wish to retain. "Transcending" does not mean always being "other than," it means always being "larger than." Your new, larger belief system will no doubt retain some of the old -- that part of the old belief system that you experience as still serving you -- and so it will be a combination of the new and the old, not a rejection of the old from top to bottom. Can you see the difference? I think so. Good. Then you can stop your resistance. The reason humans have hung so tenaciously to their old beliefs is that they do not want to dishonor those beliefs by rejecting them completely, out of hand. They think that this is the choice they have: Reject the old or accept the old, totally. Yet that is not the only choice you have. You can review the old and see what parts of the old no longer work. You can expand the old to make some parts of the old work better. You can add to the old to make some parts of your belief system new. Rejecting completely your present beliefs would be to discredit so much of what has been taught, so much of what has been understood, so much of what has been done -- and so much of what has been good. It would make too much of the world feel "wrong." It would make ancestors "wrong," it would make entire scriptures "wrong," it would make present-day lives "wrong." People would have to admit that all of the spiritual aspects of the human experience have been a mistake, a misunderstanding. This is more than most people can acknowledge. It is more than they should acknowledge, because it is not true. In fact, you don't have to declare that you were "wrong" about anything, because you weren't. You simply didn't have a complete understanding. You needed more information. Transcending current beliefs is not an outright rejection of them; it is an "adding to" them. Now that you have more information that you can add to what you presently believe, you can enlarge your beliefs -- not completely reject them, enlarge them -- and move on with your lives in a new way. A way that works. But I don't have more information. Yes, you do. I do? You have this book. Copyright © 2002 by Millennium Legacies, Inc. Chapter 2 Let me see if I understand. You're saying that this book is on a par with the Torah, the whole Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita? I did not say that. But, for the sake of discussion, were not those books written by mortals, guided by Divine revelation? Well, yes, but surely you're not equating the words here with the words of Confucius, the teachings of The Buddha, the revelations of Muhammad... Again I say...these were mere human beings, were they not? I wouldn't call them "mere" human beings. They were very special human beings. Human beings who understood enormous truths. Human beings who were deeply inspired. You, too, can understand enormous truths. You, too, can be deeply inspired. Do you think these experiences are reserved for the very few? I tell you, they are meant for the very many. Divine inspiration is the birthright of every human being. You are all very special. You simply do not know that. You do not believe it. Why not? Because your religions have told you that you are not. They have told you that you are sinners, that you are unworthy, that only a very few among you have achieved a level of worthiness to be inspired directly by God -- and that all of those people are dead. They have convinced you that no one living today could possibly achieve that level of worthiness, and, hence, no book written today could possibly contain sacred truths or the Word of God. Why have they done so? Why have they told us this? Because to tell you otherwise would be to leave open the possibility that another master, another prophet, another messenger of God could come along, bringing new revelations and opening you to new understandings -- and that is something that already established organized religions could not abide. And so, while your world's religions may not be able to agree on which book contains the highest truth and the deepest wisdom and the True Word of God, there is one thing on which they are able to agree. What's that? Whatever book it is, it's an old one. Definitely. It's an old book. It could not be a new book. It could not be a book written today. God's direct revelations ended long ago, your religions agree. Only old sacred books can contain divine revelation. Most people can accept that God's great truths have come to humans through humans. They simply cannot accept that this could be true of humans living today. This is how you think. This is how you have it constructed. If it's old, it's worthy; if it's new, it's unworthy. If it's old, it's true; if it's new, it's false. If it's old, it's right; if it's new, it's wrong. If it's old, it's good; if it's new, it's bad. This peculiar mindset is what makes progress on your planet so difficult, and evolution so time-consuming. What complicates all this is that, as you have constructed it, this mindset applies only to things -- that is, inanimate objects -- and to ideas. Ironically, when it comes to people you have it constructed the other way around. If it's new, it's worthy; if it's old, it's unworthy. Thus, your society dismisses out of hand some of the brightest new ideas and some of the wisest older people. Ask Hermann Kümmell. Hermann Kümmell? A medical doctor in Hamburg in the late 1800s who had a terrible time convincing other physicians that it was a good idea to wash their hands before surgery. The idea of "scrubbing up" was summarily dismissed by "those who knew better," with Kümmell turned into a laughing-stock and practically driven out of his beloved medical profession for even suggesting that such a practice could save lives. This stubborn tendency of human beings to cling to their past, to refuse innovation or new thinking until they are forced to do so by an ultimately embarrassing weight of evidence, has been slowing your evolutionary process for millennia. Yet now it does not seem as if we can afford to have that process drag on. It feels as though, now, time is of the essence. We have reached a crossroad here. Yes. You are facing now a new and startling danger -- a danger posed to your entire species. A threat to your very survival posed by the combination of a split in ideology and an advance in technology, which makes it possible for you to seek to resolve your differences with tools of human destruction unlike anything you may have heretofore dreamed of in your worst nightmare. My God, what can we do? There are five things you can choose now if changing your world, and the self-destructive direction in which it is moving, is what you wish to achieve. 1. You can choose to acknowledge that some of your old beliefs about God and about Life are no longer working. 2. You can choose to acknowledge that there is something you do not understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which will change everything. 3. You can choose to be willing for a new understanding of God and Life to now be brought forth, an understanding that could produce a new way of life on your planet. 4. You can choose to be courageous enough to explore and examine this new understanding, and, if it aligns with your inner truth and knowing, to enlarge your belief system to include it. 5. You can choose to live your lives as demonstrations of your highest and grandest beliefs, rather than as denials of them. These are the Five Steps to Peace, and if you take them, you can shift everything on your planet. Why all this emphasis on God and our beliefs? Why are you not telling us to change our worldwide political or economic systems? Why are you not telling us to change our laws and stop our violence and share our resources and discontinue our discrimination and halt our oppression and redistribute our abundance and end our wars and live in peace? Because those are all changes in behavior. Aren't our behaviors exactly what we need to change right now? Yes. If what you decide you now desire is a world living in peace and harmony, the answer is yes. Okay, you've got me. I don't understand. Why are you talking about beliefs when what we need to do is change behaviors? Because beliefs create behaviors. Copyright © 2002 by Millennium Legacies, Inc. Excerpted from The New Revelations: A Conversation with God by Neale Donald Walsch All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
