The Next Golden Moment of Now

By Neale Donald Walsch

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There are a thousand paths to God, and every one gets you there.

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Recently Infinity Foundation asked Neale Donald Walsch, author of the Conversations with God series, for some comments on the topics to be covered in the day long seminar he will present at the Foundation on Sunday, May 4th.

You cannot not “maintain your holiness.” Holiness is not something that comes and goes, or that is given to you and taken from you. It is not a phase that you go through, or a condition-of-soul that you sometimes are in and sometimes are not in. Holiness is your natural state of being. You cannot not be “holy,” you can only act like it. You act like you are not holy when you forget who you are; when you step away from what is true about you, when you do this in your thoughts, in your words, and in your actions. Therefore, do not step away from what is true about you. Rather, make every thought, word, and action a representation of your true self. Stay awake. Pay attention. And judge not by appearances. The world will contrive to tear you away from your highest version of your self. Stay awake. Pay attention. This may seem like work at first, but after a while it will become second nature. It will be how you “are.” You will walk in awareness. You will come from intention. You will not react, but rather, create. In every moment.

In Friendship with God, a remarkable dialogue takes place. At the outset of that dialogue I asked, “Can everyone have a friendship with God?” God, of course, answered, “Yes.” Regardless of their beliefs, regardless of their religion. Or lack of religion. In fact, we all do have a friendship with God. Some of us just don’t know it. The main message of Conversations with God is that there is no “right way” to God. There are a thousand paths to God, and every one gets you there. So we can, at last, bring “an end to better” about God. We can stop saying that “ours is the better God.” But will we? That is the question. It will require some of us to give up our ideas of superiority, and that is the most seductive idea human beings ever entertained. It has seduced the entire human race. It has justified the wholesale slaughter of members of our own species, and many other species on our planet. This one single thought, this one idea that some of us have that we are somehow better than someone else, has caused all the heartache, all the suffering, all the cruelty, all the inhumanity that we have inflicted upon each other.

First and foremost, the God of unity provides peace. Because once we are clear that there is no separation, we can end the struggle, we can stop the wars, we can eliminate the conflicts, both internal and external, that have marked human civilization and characterized the human experience. For the struggle is merely an effort to experience our true nature. We hear in every moment the calling of the self to the self, and we think that we have to struggle to answer that call. The call is the call to oneness. It is the yearning to reunite, to know ourselves as who we really are: one giant being, one essential essence, one pure energy, now in physical form, but in no way separated from itself and in no way less than itself. This call, this yearning, is what brings all of us the desire to gather together, to hold each other close, to embrace in physical union, to ultimately lose our individual identity completely and give ourselves over to the whole. We declare this yearning to be love. 

     The antithesis of this is fear. All fear is ultimately caused by loneliness, or the threat of it. Everything we are afraid of, ultimately, leads back to our being alone—or our thought that we will be. Loneliness is the heaviest feeling in the universe. It is the pain of separation from our selves. In truth we can never be alone, because of who we are. Yet we can feel alone, we can feel separated, we can feel a sense of disunity if we allow ourselves to imagine that we are other than who we are. The temptation to imagine this will be very strong in the physical world, for the physical world is made up of individual manifestations of the singular essence, and it will be easy for the unawakened mind to confuse individualization with separation. The fingers of a hand are individual expressions of the body human, yet are in no way separated from the hand itself, much less from the body of which the hand is a part. You are a part of God, and can therefore in no way be apart from God. This is the truth held within our greatest remembering. How can the God of unity be embraced? Through the simple act of embracing each other. It is as easy as that, and it is a wonder that we don’t all just do it. Just do it. But we let our differences separate us. Yet differences do not have to produce divisions, and contrasts do not have to create conflicts. There is another way. Conversations with God announces that way, and provides it.

The purpose of life is to recreate ourselves anew in the next, grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about who we are in the next golden moment of now. We are God, in the process of godding. Life is God made physical, and we are that. Life seeks more life through the expression of life itself. God seeks more God through the expression of God Itself. Our purpose, as part of God, is to serve that agenda. We do so by living our life to the fullest, and by extending and stretching ourselves beyond our imagined limits to ever increasing levels of awareness and experience.

     Our purpose, in a word, is growth. I am talking here about soul growth. I am speaking about expanded consciousness, and the expression in the physical world of that, so that we might know ourselves in our own experience. Everything that occurs in our lives leads to our growth. This is true without exception. We may change, but our purpose never changes. Indeed, the process of life is change itself. When we understand that the words “God” and “life” are synonymous, we stumble upon a great truth. Somewhere in the Conversations with God dialogues, this truth is specifically spoken. Conversations with God says: “God is a process, and that process is called change.” This is an enormously important piece of information.

Life was meant to be happy. It is not being experienced in that way by many people. And there is no need for that. Yet the problem in the world today is not a political problem, nor is it an economic problem, and certainly it is not a military problem. The problem in the world today is a spiritual problem, and it can only be solved by spiritual means. Our collective life is simply a case of mistaken identity. Our task in the years just ahead is to remember who we really are ... and then to remind every other person whose life we touch who they are. This can change the world. 

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Infinity Foundation’s Eleventh Annual Benefit and Spirit Award Dinner honoring Neale Donald Walsch will be held on Saturday, May 3rd, at Highland Park Country Club in Highland Park. For more information, please see Infinity Foundation’s ad in this issue.

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